Essentially, information can be likened to a radioactive material. Medical knowledge about cirrhosis or hepatitis takes about 45 years for half of it to become out of date or disproved.
The half-life metaphor does not match up exactly to its radioactive namesake. For one thing, the time frames being examined make it difficult to see if the decay is truly exponential. Similarly, depending on the maturity of the field, the half-life need not be constant…
Nonetheless, half-lives can be a useful way of thinking about the decay of knowledge. We can’t predict which individual papers will be overturned, of course, just like we can’t tell when individual radioactive atoms will decay, but we can observe the aggregate and see that there are rules for how a field changes over time.
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