Is anything in chemistry obsolete? Is it merely added to? Is an assumption/fact that was held as true suddenly obsolete? Or is there something to be learned from something that was proven false? Even if something is proven false, isn't there something to be learned from both how the new facts came to light and the erroneous process that took us to the wrong conclusion originally?
I can imagine obsolete technologies, programming languages. But what do those pithy quotes and statistics mean? What are they based on?
Hello there Hi me,
ReplyDelete"So many times people trot out statistics (in the vein of) "x% of what we know now will be obsolete in x years."
YEAH! I've been hearing that since back in the dark ages when I did my first masters. It's one of those statistics people love to throw around but acutally have no idea what it means, probably because it is meaningless. I think maybe what I can see as obsolete knowledge would deal directly with obsolete hardware or software, as in how to use it. I guess you could carry that out, too, to include a set of thinking skills. My dad, the chemical engineer, learned everything using a slide ruler. Who knows how to use one anymore? And why would they other than for the novelty of it. So that's a skill set that is obolete, as in HOW to use the thing, but WHAT the thing is used for, eg building chemical reactors, that's not obsolete (yet).