Hacker News Reader

Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

The idea is loopy because the energy that reaches the earth from even a massive solar flare is orders of magnitude less than the energy released by a major earthquake, and that is orders of magnitudes less than the energies that drive the dynamo in the Earth's core.

It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelling story about why this sensitive arrangement came about. Similarly, you'd need to explain how gigatons of molten iron sloshing around deep underground might feel the kiss of the Sun in just such a way that it levels San Francisco (for example).

View on HN

In fact i hypothesise they've inverted cause and effect.

Tectonic movements absolutely have the energy to move the earths magnetic field and the magnetic field blocks cosmic radiation. Something that moves the magnetic field would allow more cosmic radiation

There's only a handful of detectors outside of earths magnetic field. Orbiting satellites are even within its field of influence. Comparing this data to the measure of cosmic radiation from a deep space probe would be interesting to rule out that it's the earth movement increasing detected radiation and not the reverse

They may have simply discovered that tectonic movement changes how much cosmic radiation reaches our detectors.

From the article, that is in fact their explanation. There's just possibly some other data that could point the other way, but it's not heavily emphasized.

There have been other studies that showed weird correlations to ionospheric activity and earthquakes, but only ever in retrospect.

What you wrote, is a good place to start future observations. There is a lot of unexplored dynamics to investigate, in the earth. Roiling hot fluid and gaseous systems in flux, which are magnetic - due to iron (and other minerals), is a fluid dynamics dream subject. But, how to finance? In today's research systems driven by funding to support specific answers, instead of expanding knowledge just to see what we learn.

Ps. An attempt at modeling the inner Earth's systems and flows might be more useful for earthquake prediction.

I hypothesize you didn't read the paper, which you've instead derived from first principles.

Tectonic plates are nearly permanently in a "sensitive arrangement", as you say. Compressive, shear, and tensional stress is the normal. Plates accumulate more and more stress over time, until a small trigger causes the plates to slip and release all that energy at once (earthquake).

In other words, tectonic plates are nearly permanently in a state similar to a boulder delicately balanced on top of a mountain.

Right, the potential energy due to stress in the crust could be released to kinetic energy by a falling feather or some cosmic rays, would be the idea. There doesn't need to be the same energy in cosmic rays as released by the earthquake.

A 4oz pull that moves a trigger a small faction of an inch can release a thousand foot pounds of energy.

Yes, but we're talking about a system in which thousands of 4oz pulls are happening in different directions at any given moment. You model doesn't only have to explain why a particular pull triggered it, but also why the other thousand didn't.

Throwing a cocked handgun into the dryer is different than a leaf falling on it.

This guy put a cocked handgun into the dryer and it didn't go off: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7es3zYRYLTs

I think you can relate this to the dynamics of a Prince Rupert's drop.

Consider how an atomic bomb requires relatively little energy input compared to what is released. Combined with how very little practical observation we have of what's really going on in the Earth's core. It is certainly possible some phenomena is in play with Earthquakes.

Atomic bombs don't simply assemble themselves naturally though.

Not exactly atomic bombs, but we do have evidence of naturally occurring, self sustaining nuclear reactors having operated for potentially hundreds of thousands of years in Earth's past (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor)

Yes, and there is a nuclear fusion reactor above our heads right now, but that is similarly irrelevant when talking about bomb self-assembly.

That's a fair point, I just thought the natural fission reactors were cool while completely forgetting the one in the sky responsible for my ability to think that haha

I know. Are you suggesting we have already discovered everything there is to know about our planet / this universe?

I'm suggesting we know enough to rule out the spontaneous self assembly of nuclear bombs. And there's probably a few other things we can rule out by the same logic.

when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?

(i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)

I usually interpret it as "scales geometrically and not arithmetically".

That seems confusing. If I say my new service is orders of magnitude more efficient than previous services, I don’t mean any thing about scaling but current performance, and I wouldn’t say orders of magnitude if it was just twice as many calls/second/core, but more than ten, or really more than 30, halfway between ten and a hundred, logarithmically.

Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.

i think of "orders of magnitude" to mean "powers of ten", but I asked since i'm not sure i'm reading what folks think they are saying.

The wikipedia article was actually pretty interesting on this point. They suggest that 10 is commonly used, but other bases may be contextually relevant.

> An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10

I guess you could think of it like a _really_ low precision float or something.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

I suspect the phrase is a cliche often used to sound scientific and sometimes by folks unaware, like how description of growth as “exponential” is a cliche used by non-mathematical discussion.

I agree with this. As a layman, I've always understood "orders of magnitude larger" to just mean "way too big" and "exponential" growth to imply "out of control".

x^2 and 2^x manifestly both involve exponents, so I think it's valid - outside math class - to call anything involving accelerating growth "exponential".

I interpret it as saying: exponentially different, where the range in my uncertainty is comparable tonthe effect of the choice of base.

For instance if the range is '3-13' in base 2 it's similar to '1-4' in base 10, but either way I'm making up numbers so who cares what the base is.

Base 10 is certainly the default. Decibels are base 10; more specifically a Bel is 1 factor of 10, and a decibel is 1 tenth of that, ie 10^0.1.

fractional exponents don't work like that, for example x^½ is the square root of x. You probably meant 10^-1 !

No, 1 decibel is 10^1/10. Bels are multiplicative, not additive. You multiply 10^.1 by itself 10 times and you get 10^1. Similarly if you multiply x^1/2 by x^1/2 you get x.

> when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?

Yes, and that has always bothered me just a little bit, given that there is nothing intrinsically special about base 10 and yet the phrase seems to suggest something fundamental.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com