Charles Richter Quotes

And you were instrumental in capturing Richter?" "Yeah. He was a squirrel." I heard Charles snicker in the background. "Lissa, this is no time for humor." "But he was. A squirrel, I mean. Richter was a vampire shapeshifter.

At just about the time that Lehmann was refining our basic understanding of the Earth’s interior by studying the seismic waves of earth­quakes, two geologists at Caltech in California were devising a way to make comparisons between one earthquake and the next. They were Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg, though for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness the scale became known almost at once as Richter's alone. (It has nothing to do with Richter either. A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale by his own name, but always called it "the Magnitude Scale.") The Richter scale has always been widely misunderstood by non scientists, though perhaps a little less so now than in its early days when visitors to Richter's office often asked to see his celebrated scale, thinking it was some kind of machine. The scale is of course more an idea than an object, an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements.

By the time we made our way through the crowded tables and reached the hotel lobby, the two men were nowhere to be seen. Lucy pressed on to the front entrance, and we followed. On the steps in front of the hotel, we looked across the boulevard to a vast green expanse of trees, shrubs, and lawns. There was still no sign of the two men. We looked up and down the wide pavement, again without seeing either Dietrich or Richter

Since my first attachment to seismology, I have had a horror of [earthquake] predictions and predictors. Journalists and the general public rush to any suggestion of earthquake prediction like hogs toward a full trough. —CHARLES RICHTER2