I was reading the book The Half Life Of Facts which makes the point that the facts we "know" might not be right, or if they are right today, they may be wrong tomorrow. When I was very young I couldn't wait to get my library card. As soon as I turned 10 years old I got access to the Adult section of the library and went straight for all the science books. One book I read told me how Admiral Byrd discovered that the Earth is hollow during his polar expeditions. According to this book, Byrd flew inside the Earth and there was an internal Sun with advanced humans living inside with dinosaurs, mammoths, and other creatures that had gone extinct on the outside of the Earth. The people living inside the Earth had flying saucers and they occasionally came out to explore the outer surface of the Earth, which explained why people saw UFOs. Even at 10 years old I realized this was insane, but it was in a book, so I learned a valuable lesson. Not everything in books is correct. The author might be insane, the facts might be out of date, or it could be just a simple error.
In the book The Half Life Of Facts there was a misstatement made that neither the author nor the proofreaders picked up on. When recounting the story of the re-discovery of the Coelacanth, a fish that was thought to be extinct for millions of years, the author made a fatal error.
"At the time, Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, a young woman in South Africa, was the curator of a small museum in the town of East London, not far from Cape Town. She had befriended a fisherman in the area, and he would periodically show his catch to her, allowing her to add any possible finds to the museum's collection. One winter day at the end of 1938, when Courtney-Latimer went to the dock to check out the fisherman's haul..."
Do you see the error? The fact that you can find a statement like this in a book about what a tenuous thing facts are is ironic to say the least!
If you didn't see the error in the above statement, perhaps you should do some research on South Africa's climate.
In the book The Half Life Of Facts there was a misstatement made that neither the author nor the proofreaders picked up on. When recounting the story of the re-discovery of the Coelacanth, a fish that was thought to be extinct for millions of years, the author made a fatal error.
"At the time, Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, a young woman in South Africa, was the curator of a small museum in the town of East London, not far from Cape Town. She had befriended a fisherman in the area, and he would periodically show his catch to her, allowing her to add any possible finds to the museum's collection. One winter day at the end of 1938, when Courtney-Latimer went to the dock to check out the fisherman's haul..."
Do you see the error? The fact that you can find a statement like this in a book about what a tenuous thing facts are is ironic to say the least!
If you didn't see the error in the above statement, perhaps you should do some research on South Africa's climate.
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