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sachin_meshram
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Understanding the concept of a half-life will change what you read and how you invest your time. It will explain why our careers are increasingly specialized and offer a look into how we can compete more effectively in a very crowded world. A half-life is the time taken for something to halve its quantity. The term is most often used in the context of radioactive decay. Information also has a half-life, as do drugs, marketing campaigns, and all sorts of other things. We see the concept in any area where the quantity or strength of something decreases over time.
According to Samuel Arbesman, information has a predictable half-life: the time taken for half of it to be replaced or disproved. Over time, one group of facts replaces another. As our tools and knowledge become more advanced, we can discover more - new things that contradict what we thought we knew, nuances about old things, or a whole area that we didn't know about. The rate of these discoveries varies. Our body of engineering knowledge changes more slowly, for example, than does our body of psychological knowledge. Scientometrics shows us that facts are always changing, and much of what we know is (or soon will be) incorrect. Many people assume that whatever they learned in school remains true years or decades later. Medical students who learned in university that cells have 48 chromosomes would not learn later in life that this is wrong unless they made an effort to do so.