The Quaker

Now that the earthquake prediction by the learned professor at Peradeniya Girl's High School has come to nothing, I decided that it needs some careful scientific evaluation.

The matter, though looking quite complex, is not beyond the reasoning powers of nitwits like myself it seems. Well, what actually causes earthquakes? Its simply plate tectonics – that is the entire surface of the earth is covered be several massive rigid plates or rock. Underneath these plates, rocks move, giving the plates a somewhat “fluidity” nature making them free to move around a bit. When these plates rub together, or move away apart or whatever, rocks break, and you get an earthquake. Well its a pretty simplified version of the story, but I suppose you get the idea.

So this tells us that primary cause of quakes is right under our feet. But there are other factors involved too, such as the weight of oceans acting on the plates (newish theory fitting global warming), rocks being weakened by underground nuclear bomb tests (again a newish one), etc. what I am trying to say here is that its not just these plates acting independently – outside (well, of course very much within world) factors have a bit of a say too. Now our good tutor had introduced a novel factor, gravitation of planetary arrangements.

Now this is not a new theory as it sounds – moon's gravity has been observed to play a part in high and low tides. So why not on earthquakes? Scientifically, the idea warrants some good investigation. But how you go about it is a different matter. Good professor would have done himself some good had he applied Newton into equation, balanced the gravitational forces acting on earth at the given time, find a significant correlation, and then tallied that with planetary arrangements. Except he chose to start from last step and then proceeded directly onto the conclusion.

Science is done by taking various factors into consideration, then eliminating non contributory factors, finding a correlation, producing a mechanism of causation (if possible), and then making predictions: Which will be tested harshly. Even schoolgirls know that there is something called “Control” in an experiment, where you cant have one, you have to make compensations. Surely we cant make another earth without Jupiter anywhere near it to act as the control. But we could look if more severe gravitational pulls (or pushes for that matter) have caused even minor quakes, let alone ones causing village sweeping tsunamis. Cant go much off course there as there are about 5000 quakes out there per any given year, most are of course minor affairs, but they can help us to study correlations if there are any.

Going for the big fish at the first go might not be such a clever idea, as the sad case of the professor suggests. Heaven help those who are tutored by him, for they will be the policy-makers around here when I take my retirement package out. Time to get myself a visa to a saner place.

Ironically, the government & media who gave the coverage to misfired prediction have now turned on the poor academic, accusing him of scaremongering. Hero to zero in less than a week. Nice career path kiddies. This move is surely more insane than Doc's. Firstly, they ought to have asked some other experts on this matter before making it look like something emailed directly by God himself. Looking for a sensational story, they went for the bigger fish too. Of course they were eating their words later on, and having no other recourse, turned on poor feller who probably was a mere spectator watching helplessly how things got out of hand. I mean he was not in the process of making a big ho ho over this, just a short description of some putative causation he had observed, most likely mouthed after some strong spirits at the college bar, but when media took over, there was no escape for the poor feller. I think he finally did wish a tsunami or a meteorite or even a dinosaur to pop out of nowhere and put him out of his misery. Alas, the good Lord has not granted his wishes, showing you how cruel things could get down here.....

I am ranting because I have a minor question to ask here: What exactly is scaremongering?

How would science progress if we silence our scientists in this manner? To be honest, the feller was convinced he saw a connection and he simply stated what he saw. Salt pillaring him will only serve to silence others who may not be so sloppy in their methods and come up with a real causation factor. Besides he did not ask people to pack up and leave something like that. For all, I suppose we'd be better off if we had the media hacks on trial for irresponsible reporting and real scaremongering, not a person who is surely at liberty to proclaim something that would have benefited us all had he been right after all – even for all the wrong reasoning.

John F. Kennedy once said: Let us never fear to negotiate, but let us never negotiate without fear.

I think two bit reporters here ought to substitute negotiate with report(ing) – and stick it on their desks, lest they forget.