Does Human Knowledge Double Every 5 Years?

Hopeful Signs From Personal Experience

I have learned a lot in the past 5 years. I'm not sure if it's doubled my personal knowledge, and I'm not sure that even if that has taken place, it proves that human knowledge has doubled...

I've read about 125 books in the past 5 years, and some of them have been important. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (click here if you're shopping from the UK) may have been the most important of them.

This is partly because of the theses the author explores, well enough detailed elsewhere that I don't feel the need to regurgitate it here. But it is primarily because at the end of the book Diamond redefines what a historian needs to look at to write good history. And this is evidence of a doubling of knowledge.

My 30 seconds or so at university was spent studying anthropology, and the best part of anthropology was the freedom of the subject matter. Just about everything touched on anthropology (or is that vice-versa?), from biology to zoology. Advances in any one of the sciences extended the frontiers of anthropology. More recently, that seems to have been true of economics as well. But when Diamond told historians that good history required the same wide-ranging view of geology, geography, biology et al, he doubled the field--and maybe that doubled the knowledge of history in one blow. How liberating. Maybe those folks will start having more fun now.

Top 10 Discoveries of 2001

Okay, here's the benchmark: We're supposed to have doubled human knowledge since this was published. Quick summary:

• A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, led by S. George Djorgovski, may have glimpsed the dawn of our universe. In Aug. 2001, this team reported that it had spotted the “cosmic renaissance,” the era when the first starlight shone through the cosmos.
• The skeleton of a new species of titanosaur, a common type of plant-eating sauropod, was found in Madagascar in July 2001 by American scientists Catherine Forster and Kristina Curry Rogers. The titanosaur is one of the least understood dinosaurs, though its fossils have been found on nearly every continent.
• Paleontologists from the “DinoNose Project” have confounded a couple of centuries' worth of thinking about the location of dinosaurs' noses. Since the 19th century, artists' renderings—based on paleontologists' conceptions—have shown the nostrils drawn on the top of some dinosaurs' heads. This position was thought to be accurate for semi-aquatic dinosaurs such as Diplodocus, but recent findings maintain that the nostrils for both aquatic and land-locked lizards are in fact right above the mouth
• In June 2001, Intel Corporation researchers, led by Dr. Robert Chau, announced that they had created the technology needed to produce the world's smallest and fastest silicon transistor on a mass scale. With these diminutive gatekeepers of electronic current, switching on and off 1.5 trillion times a second, microprocessors could complete a billion calculations in the time it takes a person to blink. And these transistors run at speeds of nearly 20 gigahertz—just a year ago the top speed of a transistor was one gigahertz, which was considered absolutely breathtaking.
• Plant biologists Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California at Davis and Hong-Xia Zhang of the University of Toronto have developed a tomato plant with a salt-tolerant gene. This new plant is important because it can grow successfully in soil irrigated, and often ruined, by salty water.
• Results published in the Aug. 2001 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance show that doing several tasks at once—multitasking—may diminish the productivity with which any of the tasks is performed.
• In March 2001, fertility doctors Severino Antinori of Italy and Panayiotis Zavos of the U.S. announced to a symposium of international fertility experts in Rome that they planned to begin reproducing human beings through cloning in Oct. 2001.
• On July 2, 2001, fifty-nine-year-old Robert Tools became the first person to be equipped with a self-contained artificial heart.
• Following lightning-fast FDA approval in May 2001, a new form of targeted cancer therapy known as Gleevec (formerly ST1-571) may become available by the end of 2001. During a three-year study, Gleevec was used successfully to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), an adult cancer of the white blood cells. Gleevec, which is taken in pill form, targets an abnormal cancer-causing protein called BCR-ABL.

If we have doubled human knowledge since then, sing hallelujah!

When President Clinton Said It

Address to the 150th Anniversary AAAS Meeting (1998)

President William J. Clinton
"We've come a long way in the last half of the 20th century. Fifty years ago, when President Truman addressed AAAS's 100th anniversary meeting, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had just created the first transistor; Mauchly and Eckert had recently powered up the seminal ENIAC computer. Pauling and Franklin were developing techniques that would help unravel the mystery of our DNA.

Things are moving much more quickly now. Today, the store of human knowledge doubles every five years. Soon, every child will be able to stretch a hand across a computer keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed. We'll be able to carry all the phone calls on Mother's Day on a single strand of fiber the width of a human hair."

Update: I just found out that President Clinto repeated this statement in the State of the Union Address of 1998. Still trying to find out what the basis is...

How true is this? I can easily believe that the amount of data we collect and store doubles every five years. But knowledge? If human knowledge has doubled since April 7, 2002, should we, like, be seeing larger effects of this?

I want to find out. I want to find out if there has been a huge or small increase in knowledge. I want to find out if knowledge is becoming more widely available. I want to find out if any increases in knowledge are confined to certain sectors or spread widely across the range of human experience. I want to find out if the amount of false information is decreasing, thereby making more resources available for more useful enquiries.

But that's just me-- I want, I want, I want.