Charles Francis Richter Quotes

American - Scientist | April 26, 1900 - September 30, 1985

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.

Charles Francis Richter

TruthAlikeCloserCourseExpected

Don't wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.

Charles Francis Richter

GoodWaitTryExtraordinaryOrdinary

Incidentally, the usual designation of the magnitude scale to my name does less than justice to the great part that Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale to apply to earthquakes in all parts of the world.

Charles Francis Richter

GreatJusticeWorldNameThanApply

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.

Charles Francis Richter

ExperienceProblemMoreSinglePeak

For example, some stars put out large amounts of energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, so that this can produce a different relative magnitude rating than using light energy from the middle of the spectrum.

Charles Francis Richter

StarsLightEnergyOutMiddleThan

We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

Charles Francis Richter

HappySmallThreePersonalOutBeen

Logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

Charles Francis Richter

DevilDevicePlots

I'm glad to see the press now referring to the open-ended Richter scale.

Charles Francis Richter

NowSeePressGladScaleOpen-Ended

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

Charles Francis Richter

ScienceTimeLongYouInevitable

If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.

Charles Francis Richter

EnergyQuantityEarthquakeConcept

Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.

Charles Francis Richter

ScienceNothingDevelopmentActive

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.

Charles Francis Richter

MovingDifferencesMeanEventsCurve

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