Thursday, December 29, 2011
Nice to know....
The best defense for Big Science has always been its ability to predict things in advance. In some important cases this has turned out to be true. Kepler's laws of planetary motion enable us to predict lunar eclipses with perfect accuracy; the equations of electricity and magnetism enable us to design new components and circuits that work.
In most recent cases, though, relying on theories and expensive instruments only blinds you to reality.
If you're willing to observe all aspects of reality, as biologists generally do, you won't go far wrong. If you totally refuse to acknowledge the existence of facts, as "climatologists", quantum physicists and cosmologists do, then you're committing a crime against science.
Seismology falls between those two extremes. Willing to read what seismographs actually record, willing to listen to real observations from non-scientists, but slow and reluctant to learn from the sensory systems of animals, which are already able to predict earthquakes.
Example of that middle-ness: A huge undersea volcano has popped up in the Red Sea near Yemen, reaching the surface to form a new island. Seismologists had no predictions of the event, and no idea it was happening. They learned about it through reports from Yemeni fishermen, and then spotted the plume on satellite photos after they heard the direct news. It's bad that their expensive computers and instruments didn't detect it, but it's good that they actually listened to people without college degrees. ¶ 5:17 PM
In most recent cases, though, relying on theories and expensive instruments only blinds you to reality.
If you're willing to observe all aspects of reality, as biologists generally do, you won't go far wrong. If you totally refuse to acknowledge the existence of facts, as "climatologists", quantum physicists and cosmologists do, then you're committing a crime against science.
Seismology falls between those two extremes. Willing to read what seismographs actually record, willing to listen to real observations from non-scientists, but slow and reluctant to learn from the sensory systems of animals, which are already able to predict earthquakes.
Example of that middle-ness: A huge undersea volcano has popped up in the Red Sea near Yemen, reaching the surface to form a new island. Seismologists had no predictions of the event, and no idea it was happening. They learned about it through reports from Yemeni fishermen, and then spotted the plume on satellite photos after they heard the direct news. It's bad that their expensive computers and instruments didn't detect it, but it's good that they actually listened to people without college degrees. ¶ 5:17 PM
