Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man

Couverture
Princeton University Press, 2007 - 335 pages
2 Avis

By developing the scale that bears his name, Charles Richter not only invented the concept of magnitude as a measure of earthquake size, he turned himself into nothing less than a household word. He remains the only seismologist whose name anyone outside of narrow scientific circles would likely recognize. Yet few understand the Richter scale itself, and even fewer have ever understood the man.


Drawing on the wealth of papers Richter left behind, as well as dozens of interviews with his family and colleagues, Susan Hough takes the reader deep into Richter's complex life story, setting it in the context of his family and interpersonal attachments, his academic career, and the history of seismology.


Among his colleagues Richter was known as intensely private, passionately interested in earthquakes, and iconoclastic. He was an avid nudist, seismologists tell each other with a grin; he dabbled in poetry. He was a publicity hound, some suggest, and more famous than he deserved to be. But even his closest associates were unaware that he struggled to reconcile an intense and abiding need for artistic expression with his scientific interests, or that his apparently strained relationship with his wife was more unconventional but also stronger than they knew. Moreover, they never realized that his well-known foibles might even have been the consequence of a profound neurological disorder.


In this biography, Susan Hough artfully interweaves the stories of Richter's life with the history of earthquake exploration and seismology. In doing so, she illuminates the world of earth science for the lay reader, much as Sylvia Nasar brought the world of mathematics alive in A Beautiful Mind.


 

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LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - setnahkt - LibraryThing

In A Crack in the Edge of the World, Simon Winchester describes Charles Richter (p391) as a “…nudist, vegetarian, womanizing, Asperger’s syndrome-afflicted seismologist from CalTech…”. InRichter’s ... Consulter l'avis complet

LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - bemislibrary - LibraryThing

Even people who never have heard of Charles Richter associated his last name with earthquakes. Author Hough tries to bring to life the man behind the name. Well researched, the book dwells deeply into ... Consulter l'avis complet

Table des matières

Aspergers Syndrome
212
Here It Comes Again
241
Predicting the Unpredictable
253
Sizing Up Earthquake Hazard
269
Hazard in a Nuclear Age
276
Supernova
286
A Belated Farewell
309
Bibliography
313

Richter Scale
112
Charlie
132
Lillian
153
Richters Women
181
Autumn
192
Acknowledgments
325
Index
331
Earthquakes by Date
337
Droits d'auteur

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Expressions et termes fréquents

Fréquemment cités

Page 310 - For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations...
Page 231 - Johnson having argued for some time with a pertinacious gentleman ; his opponent, who had talked in a very puzzling manner, happened to say, " I don't understand you, Sir ;" upon which Johnson observed, " Sir, I have found you an argument ; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Page 310 - From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunderstorm; Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Page 117 - ... the log. of 10 is 1, the log. of 100 is 2, the log. of 1000 is 3, «Sic.
Page 53 - The report was carefully prepared but Mr. Gordon declared that it would ruin the commercial prospects of San Francisco to admit the large amount of damage and the cost thereof.
Page 149 - ... is proper information. Earthquakes are terrifying, and the risk is real and serious. Past earthquakes have cost California hundreds of lives and many millions of dollars in damage. Yet the long-term risk to the citizen is much less than his daily risk of death or injury on our streets and highways. Just as some persons have a fixed neurotic fear of cats, others have an excessive and unreasonable fear of earthquakes. They should not try to live in California. More generally, people who are not...
Page 136 - April is the crudest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Page 126 - He added that in terms of energy released the countless "smaller shocks do not appreciably mitigate the strains which are released in the larger earthquakes, but must be regarded as minor incidents in and symptoms of the accumulation of such strains.

À propos de l'auteur (2007)

Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist with the Southern California Earthquake Center and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Her books include Predicting the Unpredictable and Earthshaking Science (both Princeton).

Informations bibliographiques