The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did).”
First, the “damned if you could (but you can’t)”. On April 4 at 3:40 p.m., a magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocked Baja, Mexico, and was felt well north. The event elicited the following post on Twitter 16 minutes later from New Age lifemeister Deepak Chopra: “Had a powerful meditation just now—caused an earthquake in Southern California.” (Lawrence Krauss, too, lays into Deepak on page 36 for his lack of understanding of quantum physics. There’s plenty to bust Chopra about.)
Three minutes later Chopra added, “Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that”. Sadly, at least one person died in the quake. Fortunately for Chopra, although ignorance of the law is famously no excuse in court, ignorance of the laws of nature is, and would almost certainly trump his public confession.
Some tweets later, on April 7, Chopra denied responsibility for the temblor, saying of his previous claim, “Was bad joke”. If only Chopra’s mentor, luxury car aficionado Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, were still alive, we could have asked if the shake rattled his Rolls. (I’ll do the bad jokes around here, thank you.)
Meanwhile Italian scientists are in the unfortunate “damned if you couldn’t (but you kind of did)” camp. These legitimate seismologists, volcanologists, physicists and engineers are being threatened with charges of manslaughter for failing to definitively predict an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 in the city of L’Aquila on April 6, 2009, which took more than 300 lives and injured an additional 1,600 area residents. The scientists find themselves in legal peril even though anything other than a loosely probabilistic assessment of earthquake risk is currently impossible, even with state-of-the-art meditation techniques.
The threatened researchers belong to the Major Risks Committee, an advisory group to the Civil Protection Agency. Major risk number one: membership in the Major Risks Committee.
After a series of tremors in late March, the committee met, after which a government official informed the press that “the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy,” apparently referring to the aforementioned tremors. Unfortunately, that was like concluding, while taking down your house’s Christmas lights, that each little slip down the sloped roof somehow protects you from sliding off completely. (See a wide variety of slapstick movies that illustrate the physics of numerous small changes in roof-based potential energy followed by one major ground-state transition.) The official then prognosticated that “the situation looks favorable,” a remark that perhaps reveals his previous experience with the Magic 8-Ball.
According to reporting in Scientific American’s sister publication Nature, minutes of the meeting show that the researchers were in fact much more circumspect, saying things such as “a major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out” and “because L’Aquila is in a high-risk zone it is impossible to say with certainty that there will be no large earthquake.” They also noted that buildings should be examined to gauge their structural integrity, thus correctly focusing on the most dangerous aspect of quakes—dwellings that any large, malevolent wolf with decent lung capacity could easily demolish to acquire pork.
Nearly 4,000 scientists from around the world have signed a letter to the president of Italy urging an end to the witch hunt. They want resources to be expended on “earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation rather than on prosecuting scientists for failing to do something they cannot do yet—predict earthquakes.” (Let alone cause them.) As one of the signatories, University of Oxford earth scientist Barry Parsons, says in the Nature piece: “Scientists are often asked the wrong question, which is ‘when will the next earthquake hit?’ The right question is ‘how do we make sure it won’t kill so many people when it hits?’” Prosecutors should query the researchers on this issue before ascertaining guilt or innocence using the tried-and-true method of determining their buoyancy.
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13 Comments
Add CommentPlease help a non-native English speaker: when Mr. Chopra said "Was bad joke", shouldn't he have said instead "Am bad joke"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bad joke is that anyone still takes Chopra seriously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes let's make it even less desireable for people to enter jobs intended to help. We'll make them liable for damages caused by acts of God and Nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI whole heartedly concur we should sue everyone who didn't predict trouble ahead.
I understand BUT government agencies have a responsibility to report their findings with the appropriate modifiers. Knowingly not presenting information to the public should be a civil offense (not criminal unless their was criminal intent) and subject these people to dismissal. This is particularly applicable to health related agencies such as the CDC or FDA in the US.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToo bad we didn't have blogging when the earth was still flat. The arrogance of those who think they have all the answers is truly entertaining. Maybe we should make it a crime to blog unless you're absolutely, positively right -- but, come to think of it, that would probably increase the traffic rather than reduce it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently had some abdominal surgery, and laughed so hard at this article that I may have popped a stitch. I will be suing... grin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey, how come nobody is suing the psychics for not predicting calamities?
Hey - how come nobody is suing psychics for not predicting this calamity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbtw - SA may get sued over this article. I laughed so hard I may have busted a gut.
Yea!!! The American way!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSue somebody. Now for the Vulcanologists. Then we can sue Spock. See, the logic of it.
I will testify that nobody here predicted the earthquake, but I want immunity from prosecution...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCharged: yes, absolutely, convicted: not a chance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit definately sounds like a witch hunt, since depending on which news article you read on the event, it was the officials that said there was no danger, and there are the scientists that said there was little reason to think a major even will occur based on the recent seismic activity. one group said soemthing could still happen, but we don't know for sure, the other group is saying you told us everythign was ok, so that's what we told the public int he press conference.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnow it looks as though there was a break down in communication, and the officials are trying to save face by passing the buck. there isn't even a clear consensus int he news reporting from what I've read.
Reminds me of the one about the strip club that opens near a church. The pastor of the church urges his parishioners to pray for the demise of the strip club. Shortly afterwards, it burns down. The owner promptly sues the church, claiming that they are responsible for his loss of property. The church files a brief disclaiming any responsibility. At the preliminary hearing, the judge observes, "What we have here is a strip club owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church full of people who don't."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's tempting to caste the earthquake lawsuit in the same terms: a bunch of lay plaintiffs who believe in the predictive power of science, and a bunch of scientists who don't. Sorry, no paradox here. Most people just believe in money, and adjust all their other beliefs accordingly as circumstances dictate.
I would argue that, for scientists, the real story here is not a question of legal liability for making scientific predictions. The real story is the systematic misrepresentation of science by politicians and the news media, sometimes deliberately but more often simply because the scientific process is inscrutable to them.
First we have the Apian way ( a pizza brand ), now we have the Apian code. Too unreal for words. Visiting Italy would be putting oneself at risk.
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