Earthquake Lights Lecture Online
Thursday February 5, 2009
I've written about the positive-hole theory of earthquake lights propounded by Friedemann Freund. Yesterday Freund made a presentation at the U.S. Geological Survey offices in Menlo Park, California, that is a good summary of his work—and a good example of the great conversation of science. The video and the author's slides are both online now. The talk was not about earthquake lights but about other, more measurable effects related to the hypothesis. The slides are very handy for skipping past the first 55 minutes of the video to the question-and-answer session afterward.
There I see the natural and legitimate skepticism of a community faced with a novel hypothesis. I also see the age-old scenario of the physicist versus the geologist, the lab versus the Earth, the blackboard versus the field. That repeated contest has yielded shared victories (Wegener vs the establishment yields plate tectonics) and lopsided routs (geologists vs Lord Kelvin on the age of the Earth). But in this case, everyone in the room has masses of stubborn experimental and observational fact and a bit of funding to take more steps forward.
The p-hole hypothesis
Earthquake lights and brain activity
The strange attraction of UFOs
The Sichuan "earthquake lights" that aren't
Were you there? I'd love to see your comments.
Comments
Dr. Freund wrote me to say, among other things, “From my perspective the presentation went very well. There was a good turn-out. There were people in the audience whose presence really counted. . . . From the USGS side there was a near-complete line-up of “big names” in the earthquake field. . . . What I hope to have achieved with this talk today is to pull the USGS earthquake guys into the picture and prepare them for the hard fact that, in the future, they will have to trade the purchase and installation of yet another dozen or hundred or thousand seismometers for more openness toward non-seismic earthquake and pre-earthquake work to be done by non-seismologists.”