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

The average rating for Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-03-05 00:00:00 Patrick Sheely Wanders a bit and often gets a bit lost in the details.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-08 00:00:00 Robert Long I think I liked it Maybe. I'm at least certain that I'm glad I read it. The deeper into it I got, the more annoyed I became as it felt more and more that I was being asked to share the author's cathartic (sp) experience of having gone through all of Richter's papers that are archived at Caltech. Although I never formally met RIchter, I did "meet" him when he came to the Seismo Lab during the May 1980 Mammoth Lakes sequence of earthquakes. He was exactly as Hough describes him in this book, but to be honest, Caltech is one of those places where there seem to be a higher than average number of peculiar, even difficult people. Thank goodness for Caltech Am curious, why no mention of John Nordquist? And, personally, I would have liked more detailed accounts of those earliest days of the Seismo Lab, the late '20s and '30s. I know that there are "proto-phase cards" from 1927 and 1928, I believe with times only for a Riverside station.... (I read paper records and did the phase cards from 1983 till they came to an end, and spend many happy hours over that drafting table in the Measuring Room.) Regardless, the book resonates with my sense that observational scientists, even the greatest of them, do not get the respect and honor due them that seems to come more easily to theoretical scientists. I say this thinking also of Tycho Brahe, without whose observations the world would have had to wait a lot longer before seeing the likes of the work done by Kepler. And it's clear to me (having never thought of it like this) that Richter's work did indeed turn the seismology of the early 20th century into a truly quantitative science of the late 20th century. Elementary Seismology is a great book.