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Is that a fact?

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Author:	Keith Devlin (Devlin's Angle)
Description:	I'll bet that, like me, you have known for years that, as far as the brain is concerned, it's all down hill from the moment we get our driver's license. Every day, another ten thousand cells die. Or is it a hundred thousand? A million? No matter, it's a bunch, right?... Unfortunately, scientists have just discovered that this old stalwart piece of scientific knowledge isn't true after all. In an article just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University and her colleagues present evidence showing that our brains continue to generate new cells throughout our lives... what does it tell us about the nature of scientific knowledge when something that has been regarded as a scientific fact for decades, by expert and layperson alike, suddenly turns out to have been false all along?... Despite what you sometimes read, a scientific theory can never be proven... Of course, mathematics is quite different, isn't it?

Levels:	High School (9-12), College, Research
Languages:	English
Resource Types:	Articles
Math Topics:	History and Biography, Logic/Foundations

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