The Half-Life of Facts (8 page)

But while prefixes are entertaining, and can possibly allow you to win the odd bar bet, the creation of new ones is not just for fun. They are created only when there is a need for them. As technology and science increase exponentially rapidly, so too do the prefix sizes. If you plot prefix sizes against the years they were introduced, you get a roughly exponential progression.

We only measure quantities when we can wrap our scientific minds around them, whether it’s measuring energy usage, examining tiny atoms, or thinking about astronomical distances. It would make little sense to have prefixes that referred to numbers in the sextillions, or larger, if we had no use for them. However, as we expand what we know, from the number of galaxies in our universe to the sizes of subatomic particles, we expand our need for prefixes. For example, the cost of genome sequencing is dropping rapidly, even, recently, far faster than exponentially. All of the technological developments facilitate the quick advances of science, and with them the need for new metric prefixes.

These technological doublings in the realm of science are actually the rule rather than the exception. For example, there is a Moore’s Law of proteomics, the field that deals with large-scale data and analysis related to proteins and their interactions within the cell. Here too there is a yearly doubling in technological capability when it comes to understanding the interactions of proteins.

Even the field of neuroscience is able to move forward at a pace similar to Moore’s Law: The technological advances related to recording individual neurons have been growing at an exponential pace. Specifically, the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years.

Due to the intermingling of science and technology, how do we disentangle scientific knowledge and technological innovation? Well, sometimes, as we’ll see, we can’t. This is not to say that there aren’t differences, though. As Jonathan Cole, a sociologist of science, argues:

Henry Petroski, a professor of engineering and history at Duke University, puts it even more succinctly: “Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.” Science modifies the facts of what we
know
about the world, while technology modifies the facts of what we can
do
in the world.

Sometimes, though, instead of basic scientific insight leading to new technologies, there are instances where engineering can actually precede science. For example, the steam engine was invented over a hundred years before a clear understanding of thermodynamics—the physics of energy—was developed.

But not only isn’t it always clear which one occurs first, it is just as often the case that it’s difficult to distinguish between scientific and technological knowledge. Iron’s magnetic properties demonstrate this well.

Iron is magnetic, as anyone who has spent any amount of time playing with paper clips and magnets knows. And iron is much more magnetic than aluminum, which you can quickly ascertain by holding up foil to a magnet. These differences in magnetism can be measured, and the amount that a material is magnetic (or not) is known as its
magnetic permeability
.

It turns out that the magnetic permeability of iron has changed over time. Specifically, iron has gotten twice as magnetic every five years. This sounds wrong. Shouldn’t the magnetic property of iron be unchanging? Iron is a chemical element, so any amount of this material should be the same, and pure as snow. Why should it instead increase over time?

In truth, the iron that people have used throughout history has actually been far from pure. It has had numerous impurities of all sorts; what could be obtained years ago was far from a perfectly pristine elemental substance. In 1928, the engineer Trygve Dewey Yensen set out to determine the magnetic properties of iron over the previous several decades. By scouring records as far back as 1870, Yensen discovered that iron had steadily, and in a rather exponential fashion, increased its magnetic permeability. And this was entirely due to technology.

As our technological methods for making pure iron have improved, so have the magnetic properties of iron. Something that seems to be safely in the category of scientific fact is actually intimately intertwined with our technological abilities. We have seen a steady and regular shift in these scientific facts as we improved these technologies. But just as technological advances change the scientific facts we already have, new technologies also allow for new discoveries, reflecting the tightly coupled nature of scientific and technological knowledge.

Take the periodic table. The number of known chemical elements has steadily increased over time. However, while in the aggregate the number has grown relatively smoothly, if you zoom in to the data closely, a different picture emerges. As Derek de Solla Price found, the periodic table has grown by a series of logistic curves. He argued that each of these was due to a successive technological advance or approach. For example, from the beginnings of the scientific revolution in the late seventeenth century until the late nineteenth century, more than sixty elements were discovered, using various chemical techniques, including electrical shocks, to separate compounds into their constituent parts. In fact, many of these
techniques were pioneered by a single man, Sir Humphry Davy, who himself discovered calcium, sodium, and boron, among many other elements.

However, soon the limits of these approaches became evident, and the discoveries slowed. But, following a Moore’s Law–like trajectory, a new technology arose. The particle accelerator was created, and its atom-smashing ability enabled further discoveries. As particle accelerators of increasing energies have been developed, we have discovered heavier and larger chemical elements. In a very real way, these advances have allowed for new facts.

Technological growth facilitates changes in facts, sometimes rapidly, in many areas: sequencing new genomes (nearly two hundred distinct species were sequenced as of late 2011); finding new asteroids (often done using sophisticated computer algorithms that can detect objects moving in space); even proving new mathematical theorems through increasing computer power.

There are even new facts that combine technology with human performance. Athletes break records as their tools—for example, swimsuits, sneakers, and training facilities—become more sophisticated due to technological advances. Even the world of board games has been revolutionized. As noted earlier, over the past several decades, game after game has become a domain where computers dominate, changing the facts around us. Checkers was one of the first ones in which computers were able to beat humans consistently—the computer had its first victory in 1990. Chess and Othello were the next ones people lost to computers, both in 1997, and since 2011 even
Jeopardy!
has become the domain of computer mastery.

Computers can now checkmate better than people, and phrase a correct answer in the form of a question, provinces long thought to be exclusively those of the human mind.

Technology has had a large impact on many other realms of knowledge as well. One that jumps immediately to mind is medicine. Just as our medical knowledge undergoes wholesale changes, so do our medical advances in terms of what is possible. For
example, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of the seventeenth century, observed firsthand the pain of outdated medical knowledge.

Pepys suffered from a massive bladder stone, a mineral formation similar to a kidney stone. At the time, one of the main medical options for such a urinary tract stone too large to be passed was a terrible surgery that involved cutting through the area near the anus (in the vicinity of the scrotum) up into the bladder while the patient was conscious. Performed without anesthesia, the surgery often killed those who chose it, though Pepys survived to chronicle the procedure. But medical advances since the Scientific Revolution have progressed such that these urinary tract stones now can be broken up by sound waves, dissolved, surgically removed under anesthesia, or treated otherwise—with high survival rates.

Similarly, medical advances have progressed so rapidly that travelers from previous centuries, if not decades, would scarcely recognize what we have available to us. Not only does a vaccine exist for smallpox, but the disease has been entirely eradicated from the planet. Childbirth has gone from life threatening to a routine procedure. Bubonic plague, far from capable of generating a modern wave of the Black Death, is easily treatable with antibiotics. In fact, when I spent a summer in Santa Fe, we were told that bubonic plague exists in that region not because we should be scared, but just to make our doctors aware of this possibility when we went back to our homes, so they could administer the readily available drugs to treat this scourge of the Middle Ages.

Polio has gone from a menace of childhood summers to a distant memory. A few years ago I was fortunate to attend an exhibit on polio at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The disease was presented as something from the history books, and was certainly nothing I had ever experienced, and yet I had a great uncle who walked with a limp due to the disease, and my wife’s aunt had it as a child. Reading of people’s experiences with the disease, the fear, and the iron lungs was astounding. But through medical advances, polio is now generally regarded in the developed world as a curious artifact of the past.

Technology can even affect economic facts. Computer chips, in addition to becoming more powerful, have gone from prohibitively expensive to disposable. Similarly, while aluminum used to be the most valuable metal on Earth, it plummeted in price due to technological advances that allowed it to be extracted cheaply. We now wrap our leftovers in it.

But occasionally, changes in medical or technological advances don’t just alter our lifestyles dramatically, such as in the case of the advent of the Internet. Sometimes they have the potential for fundamentally changing the very nature of humanity. We can see the true extremes of the possibilities of change in the facts of technology by focusing on our life spans.

There has been a rapid increase in the average life span of an individual in the developed world over the past hundred years. This has occurred through a combination of lowered infant mortality and better hygiene, among other beneficial medical and public health practices. These advances have added about 0.4 years to Americans’ total expected life spans in each year since 1960. But this increase in life span is itself increasing; it is accelerating.

If this acceleration continues, something curious will happen at a certain point. When we begin adding more than one year to the expected life span—a simple shift from less than one to greater than one—we get what is called
actuarial escape velocity
. What this means is that when we are adding more than one year per year, we can effectively live forever. Let me stress this again: A slight change of the underlying state of affairs in our technological and medical abilities—facts about the world around us—can allow people to be essentially immortal. The phrase
actuarial escape velocity
was popularized by Aubrey de Grey, a magnificently bearded scientist obsessed with immortality. Aubrey de Grey has made the realization of this actuarial escape velocity his life’s work.

We’re at least several decades from this, according to even the most optimistic and starry-eyed of estimates. And it might very well never happen. But this sort of simple back-of-the-envelope calculation can teach us something: Not only can knowledge change
rapidly based on technology, but it can happen so rapidly that it can produce other drastically rapid changes in knowledge. In this case, life spans go from short to long to very long to effectively infinite. Discontinuous jumps in knowledge, and how they occur, are discussed in more detail in
chapter 7
. But the message is clear: Technological change can affect many other facts, sometimes with the potential for profound change around us.

But what about the opposite direction? Rather than being overly optimistic and assuming massive positive changes in the world based on technology, what about a quantified pessimism? Will we ever reach the end of technology? And are there mathematical regularities here, too?

Just as with science, where naysayers have prognosticated the end of scientific progress, others have done the same with innovation more generally. There is the well-known story of the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office who said there was nothing more to invent, and a similar story about a patent clerk who even resigned because he felt this to be true.

But there is actually no truth to these stories. In the first case, U.S. Patent Office commissioner Henry Ellsworth, in a report to Congress in 1943, wrote the following: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” But Ellsworth wrote this to contrast it with the fact of continuous growth. Essentially, he was arguing that the fact that things continue to grow exponentially, despite the constant feeling that we have reached some sort of plateau, is something startling and worth marveling at. In the other case, the statement by the head of the U.S. Patent Office—that new inventions were things of the past—simply never happened.