thoroughly conscious ignorance.
So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today,
but of course the first thing we have to clear up
is what are we going to do with all those facts?
So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate.
We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts,
this accumulation model of science, as many have called it,
and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible.
How can you ever know all of this?
And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate.
In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published.
There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate,
and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published.
Divide that by the number of minutes in a year,
and you wind up with three new papers per minute.
So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes,
I've already lost three papers.
I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read.
So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is
that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will.
We just don't worry about it, in a way.