Earthquakes, Logic and Science

Logic—and probably logic alone, no “scientific” evidence—might suggest that the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Turkey may be related. After all it seems to make sense that a quake large enough to make the entire planet wobble and to cost us all an instant of time might be part of a general shake up of the tectonic plates that make up this globule of rock and earth.
But there’s no hard evidence, so, so far, no one is suggesting out loud that there might be a correlation. So what if the Nazca, South American, Caribbean, African and European plates all touch each other—show us the irrefutable evidence. Isn’t any. So it didn’t happen.
Einstein sensed the deficiencies of this approach. He once suggested that imagination (which logic can be part of) is more important than knowledge (which rises out of evidence and proof). But, then again, he died the subject of mockery and rejection by most of his scientific peers.
And he came up with his theories of relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy under the most primitive conditions—not in a scientific laboratory but as a bureaucrat sitting in an office reviewing patent applications. Lousy science to say the least.
Where was his proof? It took decades to finally prove that the Einsteinian universe he imagined in his mind actually existed. That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen.
Perhaps Einstein intuited that this is the way science OUGHT to be done. Imagine it first—working within the mind, mulling “what if’s”, scribbling on yellow sheets of paper—and finally come up with an entire theory that hangs together out of pure logic—no scientific proof.
When the logic is wrong—or misses something important—the empirical evidence will provide the necessary course correction. But we made a misstep, scientifically—two missteps, actually: one was about two thousand years ago; the other about two centuries ago.
Two men are at the root of our scientific methodology. Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that scientific truth should be arrived at exclusively in the mind. Aristotle believed in arriving at it through experimentation.
Already in those days, back in ancient Athens 2300 years ago, the argument had begun. Aristotle left Athens and, for the next two millennium science was done Plato’s way, exclusively. Which left science a one-armed man. Mind only, no experimentation to back it up.
The problem was that, with no experimentation at all to back it up, logic can and does go astray. It took Galileo in approximately 1600 to reintroduce observation into science. Unfortunately he all too thoroughly discredited imaginative science.
The story may be apocryphal—but it illustrates what Galileo did for AND TO science. It had been argued for centuries—logically—that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. He is said to have climbed the leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two unequal cannon balls. They fell equally fast—upending centuries of scientific dogma, based purely on logic.
But Galileo had an effect he may not have intended. He rendered Einstein’s “imaginative, intuitive”, kind of science completely unacceptable in correct scientific society. To be merely logical, rational, Platonic is to incur the greatest modern curse: “unscientific”.
So we mustn’t use logic. What seems to possibly make sense must be proven by costly machinery found only in laboratories. Knowledge (proof) trumps imagination.
No one seems to know how to make them work together. Since Galileo—with the possible exception of Immanuel Kant—no one has really wanted to. Science is left like a man with one arm—he loses something by not having both.
No proper scientist would ever suggest a theory based on logic and/or imagination. Not since Einstein did. What might happen if the tectonic plates really started slipping all over the planet?