Words matter. These are the best Charles Francis Richter Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In every area of the world where there is earthquake risk, there are still many buildings of this type; it is very frustrating to try to get rid of them.
As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.
I’m glad to see the press now referring to the open-ended Richter scale.
Logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.
I suggested that we might compare earthquakes in terms of the measured amplitudes recorded at these stations, with an appropriate correction for distance.
I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.
My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term ‘magnitude’, which is used for the brightness of a star.
Emphasis was usually put on the horizontal acceleration factor, for the simple reason that ordinary structures have a built-in safety factor for the vertical component; that is, gravity.
If the assumptions used in calculating energy are changed, then this seriously affects the final result, even though the same body of data might be used.
By moving them vertically, a representative mean curve could be formed, and individual events were then characterized by individual logarithmic differences from the standard curve.
Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.
Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.
What emerged, of course, was that the magnitude scale presupposed that all earthquakes were alike except for a constant scaling factor. And this proved to be closer to the truth than we expected.
Intensity like signal strength will generally fall off with distance from the source, although it also depends on the local conditions and the pathway from the source to the point.
From here, it becomes an engineering problem; the engineer considers the ground motion that will occur and evaluates the requirements of the proposed structure in the light of the local foundation conditions.
