The Half-Life of Facts (33 page)

112    
can generate new and interesting:
Darden, Lindley. “Recent Work in Computational Scientific Discovery.” In
Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
(1997) 161–66.

113    
names a novel, computationally created:
See TheoryMine: http://theorymine.co.uk.

116    
A Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences:
Cisne, John L. “How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts’ ‘Demography’ and Classic Texts’ Extinction.”
Science
307, no. 5713 (February 25, 2005): 1305–7.

119    
“This can create almost lyrical connections”:
Johnson, Steven Berlin. “Tool for Thought.”
New York Times
, January 30, 2005.

CHAPTER 7: FACT PHASE TRANSITIONS

121    
Thomas Wright, a British astronomer:
Sagan, Carl.
The Varieties of Scientific Experience
. New York: Penguin, 2006.

127    
In 1953:
Kelly, Kevin.
What Technology Wants
. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 157.

128    
Figuring out the right underlying change to measure:
In physics, this is related to finding what is known as the
order parameter
, the quantity that is zero in one phase and nonzero in another phase. Determining this requires a certain amount of creative effort for each system.

129    
a stunningly discontinuous jump in our knowledge:
Arbesman, Samuel, and Gregory Laughlin. “A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth.”
PLoS ONE
5, no. 10 (October 2010): e13061.

130    
a simple metric of habitability:
Others have since developed other habitability metrics. See for example, the Earth Similarity Index: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/earth-similarity-index-esi

131    
Kepler 22b:
Kepler 22b is likely quite a bit more massive than Earth. However, there are certain planetary candidates discovered by the Kepler mission that are even more Earth-like but have not been confirmed as of mid-2012.

132    
whole new pieces of math were involved:
Singh, Simon.
Fermat’s Enigma
. New York: Walker & Company, 1997.

134    
There are some problems:
This was shown by Kurt Gödel in his Incompleteness Theorem. For further reading, see for example,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books. 1979.

135    
it turns out we will have to wait until 2024:
Arbesman, Samuel, and Rachel Courtland. “2011 preview: Million-Dollar Mathematics Problem.”
New Scientist
, December 2010. More recently, Ryohei Hisano and Didier Sornette have conducted a more sophisticated statistical analysis; they estimate that there’s a 41 percent chance by 2024, similar to our prediction of 50 percent. Hisano, Ryohei, and Didier Sornette. “On the Distribution of Time-to-Proof of Mathematical Conjectures.” (2012); http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3936.

135    
Luís Bettencourt and his colleagues:
Bettencourt, Luis M. A., et al. “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104, no. 17 (2007): 7301–6.

136    
the way it does for living things:
West, G. B, J. H. Brown, and B. J. Enquist. “A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology.”
Science
276 (5309): 126.

137    
there would be little difference:
Personal communication with Sarah Gilbert and Rena Lauer, both medieval historians.

137    
even fashion during the Middle Ages:
Loschek, Ingrid.
When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems
. London: Berg Publishers, 2009.

CHAPTER 8: MOUNT EVEREST AND THE DISCOVERY OF ERROR

141    
we now know for certain:
See Everest@National Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/99/everest/roof_content.xhtml (accessed December 20, 2011).

142    
the world record for the tallest tree:
Preston, Richard. “Tall for Its Age.”
The New Yorker
(October 9, 2006): 32–36.

143    
“Revolutions in science have often been preceded”:
Cukier, Kenneth. “A Special Report on Managing Information: Data, Data Everywhere.”
The Economist
(February 25, 2010).

144    
Wilkins went on to define a regular system of lengths:
Wilkins, John.
An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language.
1668. Available online: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/WilkinsTranslationShort.pdf

146    
the speed of light and the length of the meter:
For more on measurements, see the Web site of the National Institute of Standards and Technology: http://www.nist.gov/.

146    
The world of measurement involves much more:
Cardarelli, François.
Encyclopaedia of Scientific Units, Weights, and Measures: Their SI Equivalences and Origins.
New York: Springer Publishing, 2004.

148    
have been bandying about alternative definitions:
Crease, Robert P. “Measurement and Its Discontents.”
New York Times
. October 23, 2011.

148    
published a tongue-in-cheek paper:
Dessler, A. J., and C. T. Russell. “From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: The Pending Disappearance of Pluto.”
Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union
61, no. 44 (1980): 690.

153    
there is about a one in six chance:
The Fisher’s exact test was used here. An online calculator is available here: http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/contingency1.cfm

153    
illustrated some of the failings of this threshold:
Munroe, Randall. “Significant.”
xkcd
. http://xkcd.com/882/.

154    
“Statistics is the science”:
Penman, Bridget, et al. “Genome-wide Association Studies in Plasmodium Species.”
BMC Biology
8, no. 1 (2010): 90; Statisticians have developed techniques to account for this problem, such as the use of something known as the Bonferroni correction. This simply states that if you are testing lots and lots of variables to see if they are related to something in a significant way, what you deem a significant p-value must be much more strict, and much smaller.

155    
Planet X was a slippery thing:
Quinlan, Gerald D. “Planet X: A Myth Exposed.”
Nature
363, no. 6424 (May 6, 1993): 18–19. Grosser, Morton. “The Search for a Planet beyond Neptune.”
Isis
55, no. 2 (June 1, 1964): 163–83. The History of Science Society.

157    
He has found that for highly cited clinical trials:
Ioannidis, John P. A. “Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research.”
JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
294, no. 2 (2005): 218–28.

158    
Ioannidis conducted the same test for various biomarkers:
Ioannidis, John P. A., and Orestis A. Panagiotou. “Comparison of Effect Sizes Associated With Biomarkers Reported in Highly Cited Individual Articles and in Subsequent Meta-analyses.”
JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
305, no. 21 (June 1, 2011): 2200–10.

158    
what is perhaps Ioannidis’s most well-known paper:
Ioannidis, John P. A. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
PLoS Med
2, no. 8 (2005): e124.

161    
bacteria that can incorporate arsenic:
Happily, however, scientists have attempted to replicate this finding and have been unsuccessful. See, for example, this paper: Reaves, Marshall Louis, et al. “Absence of Detectable Arsenate in DNA from Arsenate-Grown GFAJ-1 Cells.”
Science
337, no. 6093 (July 27, 2012): 470–473.

161    
Regarding a kerfuffle:
Zimmer, Carl. “It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right.”
New York Times
, June 26, 2011.

162    
“If it confirmed the first researcher’s findings”:
Quoted in Cole, Stephen.
Making Science: Between Nature and Society
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

162    
researchers calculated that a small amount of replication:
Moonesinghe, Ramal, Muin J. Khoury, A. Cecile, and J. W. Janssens. “Most Published Research Findings Are False—But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way.”
PLoS Medicine
4, no. 2 (February 27, 2007): e28.

163    
As Lord Florey, a president of the Royal Society, stated:
Cole, Jonathan, and Stephen Cole.
Social Stratification in Science
. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973. p. 217.

163    
Science is not always cumulative:
Cole, Stephen.
Making Science: Between Nature and Society
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

164    
“The scientific literature is strewn”:
Ziman, John M.
Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

165    
A stark example is that of war:
Mueller, John. “War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment.”
Political Science Quarterly
, 124, no. 2 (2009).

166    
When born in 1822, Francis Galton:
Galton, Francis.
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
, 1883. Available online: http://galton.org/books/human-faculty/text/human-faculty.pdf

166    
He wrote a paper:
Galton, Francis. “On Head Growth in Students at the University of Cambridge.”
The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
18 (January 1, 1889): 155–56.

166    
how people visualize numbers in their mind:
Galton, Francis. “Visualized Numerals.”
Nature
(March 25, 1880): 494–5.

166    
how many pretty women he encountered:
Gorraiz, Juan, Christian Gumpenberger, and Martin Wieland. “Galton 2011 Revisited: A Bibliometric Journey in the Footprints of a Universal Genius.”
Scientometrics
88, no. 2 (2011): 627–52.

166    
Galton was the man who ushered in the Statistical Enlightenment:
Stigler, S. M. “Darwin, Galton and the Statistical Enlightenment.”
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society)
173 (2010):469–82.

166    
wrote the following of Galton:
Price, Derek J. de Solla.
Little Science, Big Science—and Beyond
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

167    
the elderly are capable of crossing the street:
Hoxie, R. E., and L. Z. Rubenstein. “Are Older Pedestrians Allowed Enough Time to Cross Intersections Safely?”
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
42, no. 3 (March 1994): 241–4.

168    
are the subject of the vast majority of scientific papers:
May, Robert M. “How Many Species Are There on Earth?”
Science
241, no. 4872 (September 16, 1988): 1441–49; Clark, J. Alan, and Robert M. May. “Taxonomic Bias in Conservation Research.”
Science
297, no. 5579 (July 12, 2002): 191–92.

168    
some scientists even call it
taxonomic chauvinism:
Bonnet, Xavier, Richard Shine, and Olivier Lourdais. “Taxonomic Chauvinism.”
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, (January 1, 2002).

169    
one of the main reasons that the brontosaurus:
Gould, Stephen Jay.
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

CHAPTER 9: THE HUMAN SIDE OF FACTS

171    
Frogs have a curious type of vision:
Lettvin J. Y., et al. “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,”
Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers
47 (1959): 1940–51, reprinted in Warren S. McCulloch,
Embodiments of Mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.

173    
the abundance of cod:
Helfman, Gene S.
Fish Conservation: A Guide to Understanding and Restoring Global Aquatic Biodiversity and Fishery Resources
. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007.

173    
“anything that was invented after you were born”:
Kelly, Kevin.
What Technology Wants
. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 235.

174    
they recanted their editorial:
“A Correction.”
New York Times
, July 17, 1969.

174    
Why do we believe in wrong, outdated facts?:
Schulz, Kathryn.
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
. New York: Ecco, 2010. One of the main reasons, Schulz notes, that it is so easy to be wrong is very simple: Being wrong feels a lot like being right.

175    
Bradley Wray was preparing his high school students:
Wray, Bradley. “Cognitive Bias Song”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc.

176    Nuland, Sherwin B.
The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Please note that the initial edition of my book was prey to some outdated information regarding the myth of Semmelweis.

177    
akin to Daniel Kahneman’s idea of
theory-induced blindness
:
Shirky, Clay.
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010. p. 99.