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

de Susan Elizabeth Hough

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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.… (més)
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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 Scale, Susan Elizabeth Hough focuses on investigating Winchester’s description. In a paradoxical misfortune for a biographer, Hough has too much information. Charles Richter apparently kept huge masses of personal papers and donated them all to the CalTech library; Hough has waded through all this to end up with a detailed and sometimes quite interesting picture of Richter as a person, unfortunately at the expense of explaining Richter’s accomplishments as a scientist.


So, did Richter have Asperger’s syndrome? Well, he certainly comes across as socially awkward. He loved science fiction – his papers included crates of science fiction magazines, he once submitted a science fiction manuscript to John Campbell (“Outlaws on Zem” – Campbell returned it as “too complex” – Hough apparently doesn’t realize Campbell status in science fiction, merely describing him as an “editor”), and he was a devoted Trekkie; he kept a journal listing every Star Trek episode and when he had viewed them. Of course, just being a science fiction fan is not enough to make you an Aspie. Richter does seem to have had a few Aspie traits – he didn’t like to look at people when talking to them, for example – but he also seems to have had a much broader range of interests than the classic Aspie does. He spent a year in a mental institution in his 20s, and he once asked his dissertation advisor to psychoanalyze him; and odd choice, since his advisor was Boris Podolsy, a physicist.


Was he a womanizer? Well, he wrote masses of poetry and letters to various women but there’s no evidence that any of these resulted in consummation. Hough finds evidence in Richter’s poetry that his wife Lillian was a lesbian, and also that Richter had an incestuous affair with his sister Marguerite. I wouldn’t say these suggestions are far-fetched, but there’s nothing that jumps out and smacks you in the face, either. Hough did find a nude photograph of an attractive blonde woman in Richter’s papers, but there’s nothing to associate is with any of his correspondents. Richter and Lillian usually vacationed separately – Richter liked hiking in the mountains but Lillian preferred more social activities – but after Lillian’s death Richter wrote moving poetry about his loss.


The nudist part is true; the Richters joined a nudist colony that was later busted for – well, nudity. California law at the time allowed only two nude people of opposite sexes to associate together, so apparently you could have nude tennis but not volleyball. The Richters were not involved in the case. Hough comments that it was interesting going to the Library of Congress and requesting nudist magazines for her research.


Surprisingly, Hough doesn’t say much about Richter’s scientific career. He started out as a nuclear physicist with a BS from Stanford and a PhD from CalTech; with the high demand for physicists in the 1920s his prestigious education allowed him to land a job as clerk in a hardware store. However, CalTech was creating a seismology lab in association with the Carnegie Foundation; they needed a physicist and Richter was hired. Hough notes that Richter’s encyclopedic knowledge of earthquakes led to the Richter scale, but she doesn’t explain exactly how; in fact, there isn’t really a good explanation of how the Richter scale was developed or how it works. A couple of diagrams and an illustration of how a seismogram is used to find an earthquake’s location and magnitude would be immensely helpful, but apparently book publishers wouldn’t go for that in a biography. Hough also goes off on a couple of politically correct tangents not directly related to Richter; in her discussion of Asperger’s syndrome she buys into the vaccine-mercury-autism link, and she discusses the details of the nuclear fuel cycle at length when commenting on Richter’s appearance as an expert witness at the hearings for the Indian Point reactor (Richter didn’t believe the Ramapo Fault was active and capable of an earthquake large enough to damage the reactor; Hough seems like she wants to apologize for him, and he did apparently make some enemies in the seismological community).


All of this is fascinating in a creepy sort of way; Richter comes across as a complicated man with an interesting personal life, and I felt like a voyeur reading about it. However, for the scientific part of seismology you’re better off elsewhere. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 17, 2017 |
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 the diaries and documents left behind by Richter to try to set the background for such a groundbreaking event in seismology. As with most creative and extremely intelligent people, his life was a series of triumphs and severe setbacks, through which his closest relationships suffered. What is missing is the scientific aspect of his work and actual descriptions of the Richter scale. There are no example of how it works, and what it means in seismology or even and a measurement of earthquakes. ( )
  bemislibrary | Jul 5, 2016 |
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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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