Half-Life Begins at 30

Although atoms had alarmed most folk, few foresaw that men would start comparing themselves to such wee things. Everyone knows that every second some hot atoms decay. Each species has a half-life, which is whatever period of time it takes for half a batch of that kind of stuff to cool down. Early in the 1960s a few engineers noted that a man’s knowledge, similarly, could turn to ashes and suggested that people, too, might have half-lives.

Experienced engineers were being benched, yet high salaries were being offered to youngsters fresh from college. Employers said the reason was that the older men’s knowledge was obsolete. Science and technology were racing forward, and half the things a fellow learned in school were liable to be useless to his boss a decade later. Mathematical oracles said, therefore, that the half-life of an engineer’s special know-how was only about ten years.

Some people laughed, but the idea that brains were like hot atoms spread from engineering to other professions. It became fashionable to regard wisdom as radioactivity. Bankers, morticians, lawyers, doctors, and even clowns consulted social statisticians about the half-lives of their special skills. It was a way of saving face and keeping clients from beating fees down.

The bankers and morticians both found that they had much longer half-lives than the engineers. The state of their arts didn’t change much, and they felt pretty smug about this at first. But the lawyers were surprised to find that they were even worse off than the physicians. An old lawyer’s ideas of crime, punishment, and justice were liable to make people regard him as an old fogy, whereas an old doctor who let his patients eat, drink, and smoke as usual was often saluted as a sage. The professional comedians, however, had even longer half-lives than the bankers and morticians.

The revelations of such research embarrassed the public relations men for many professions. Instead of boasting about the durability of their employers’ wisdom, they therefore had to crow about how quickly that knowledge decayed.

The remedy for a short half-life was clearly to get a man’s mental gas tank refilled periodically. The more often he could do this, the less risk he ran of status slippage. A race began, consequently, to see which profession’s practitioners could stand the most frequent replenishment of thenknow-how.

A few corporation executives, labor leaders, and newspaper reporters had discovered earlier that going back to Harvard, Dartmouth, or Stanford was less work than working. They, however, had not understood half-lives. The engineers began not only to go back to college every tenth year, but also to collect beginners’ wages again when they returned to their office suites. The salesmen then got into higher income brackets sooner than the engineers by resuming their schooling every fifth year.

This race for prestige between occupations became even more of a drain on the economy than the race to the moon. Only a few big spenders could have spaceships; this was a contest between classes, in which everyone could participate.

In many fields, naturally, more knowledge was desperately needed so that something or other could be taught to the practitioners scrambling for it.

Fantastic though this crusade for new know-how became, the consequences of it were even more implausible. Everyone knew that when enough of some kinds of radioactive atoms were brought together, they became a critical mass and exploded. But few appreciated, until too late, how truly similar human beings’ knowledge might be to the natural radioactivity of atoms.

Whenever and wherever a large mass of seekers for fresh facts was assembled, each man inspired the others. Some hot groups were soon producing new data faster than they could retain them. Some lost more than they could pass on to others. Finally, some of these fertile fellows began simply dumping their discoveries into computers and leaving them there, like so much surplus wheat.

By the 1980s the countryside was peppered with places in which experts were huddling in laboratories and seminars in order to extend their half-lives. These plastic palaces full of specialists and computers were called complexes, and became as hard to get into as college had been for high school graduates a couple of decades earlier. So still more complexes had to be built.

Factories were closed to make way for them. More than half of the nation’s trained manpower was always in school, studying or searching for something to study, and the other half was so busy designing and building new complexes that no new factories were built. Never before had so many men known so much and done so little with what they knew.

Production plummeted, and the gross national income shrank. And another group of creative thinkers had to be assembled in a supercomplex, to see if its members’ knowledge could be updated soon enough to save the marvelous new culture that everyone said was evolving. By then, fortunately, the census bureau’s big computers knew what everybody was doing every second of every day and night. So the solution was simple. The superbrains disposed of the production problem by arming those computers in the 1990s to curb the population.

As soon as men became scarcer, they stopped thinking of themselves as hot atoms; wages went up, and people began going back to work and dying happily the old-fashioned way. But by then, alas, what had begun as the century of the common man had decayed into the century of the uncommon man.