7 Reasons Everything You Know Is Probably Wrong

7. The Half Life Of Knowledge

Before we get into the muddy and surprisingly controversial world of statistical analysis (although it is thrilling), and moving into the even muddier world of "facts", we come up against a little concept called the "half life of knowledge".

In nuclear physics, the half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a radioactive material to decay. In "knowledge" it is the length of time it takes before half of the facts in a particular subject are shown to be untrue. This means that there's a reasonable chance that a fact you have learnt, I have learnt, or a scientists has taken for granted when designing a study, has since been proven false.

To put an exact number on things, it is thought that, because scientific knowledge is growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, this means that half of what scientists may have known about a particular subject will be wrong or obsolete in 45 years. Of course, as this is a fact too, there's a chance that it will also be proven wrong soon.