[LINK] Fwd: The Rise and Fall of Scientists

Gordon Keith gordonkeith at acslink.net.au
Thu Dec 23 09:11:03 AEDT 2010


>From digitizing all those books Google has made available a large database of 
words, from which time and use frequency plots words can be made .  For 
instance, here is the rise and fall of the word "scientist".  (X-axis is year, 
and y-axis is a normalized measure of frequency of use.)  We peaked in the 
written corpus of English around 1965 and have fallen by around 1/3 since.  At 
least our decline in the public share of mind seems to have leveled off.  
"Science", "physicist", and "physics", "chemist", and "chemistry" etc. also 
produce interesting graphs.


http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=scientist&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=4

Regards 
Gordon

The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.
-- Albert Einstein




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