Six seismologists were finally acquitted last month after
they made rash comments before Aquila earthquake of 2009. They were victims of unreasonable expectations
and not scientific ignorance.
At 3am on 6 April 2009, an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the
Richter scale devastated the medieval city of L’Aquila in the Apennine
Mountains of central Italy. Over three
hundred people died and the city’s cultural treasures were left in a parlous
state. But it is events that unfolded
shortly before the quake that have continued to attract worldwide
attention.
Six days before the disaster, a government committee of six
seismologists and a public official tried to dampen down fears that an
earthquake was imminent. In particular,
the one member of the committee who was not a scientist, Bernardo De
Bernardinis, stated that there was “no danger”.
In 2012, a local court convicted the committee members of involuntary
manslaughter. When they were first charged,
numerous professors, decorated with the weightiest of credentials, wrote
letters attacking the prosecutors. Putting
these men on trial was an affront to the dignity of science, they cried. When the seven were found guilty, the
cacophony of outrage doubled in volume. The
Aquila seven joined Galileo as paradigms of scientific martyrdom.
The wheels of Italian justice turn extremely slowly and only
now have appeals against the decision of the local court been handed down. The six scientists have had their convictions
quashed, but that of De Bernardinis, who said there was no danger, was
upheld. Further appeals are still
possible.
So what was really going on?
The world’s media misreported the 2012 trial with an even greater level
on ineptitude than usual. No prosecutor
had alleged that failing to predict the earthquake was a criminal offence. This was because predicting an earthquake is
impossible. The record of failure is
long and inglorious. We’ve only recently
found out why earthquakes happen at all.
Aristotle thought they were a result of vapours escaping from the
soil. In the eighteenth century, some
theorists blamed lightning strikes. The
development of plate tectonics in the early-twentieth century means that we now
understand what causes the ground to shake. But mainstream geologists long
derided this theory and it only achieved widespread acceptance in the 1950s.
Prediction remains a pipedream. Studies of animals have found that, while they
can act strangely before a major quake, plenty of more innocent occasions set
off the same behaviour. A retired
engineer claimed that an earthquake was looming at L’Aquila because he was
picking up higher readings of a radioactive gas. But again, this also happens when no
earthquake is due. Foreshocks, such as
those felt at L’Aquila, occur before about half of large quakes. In contrast, large quakes only follow
foreshocks about one occasion in fifty. Thus,
major seismic events do give some warning signs. It’s just that those warnings don’t usually
presage a serious earthquake. In the
jargon, “false positives” are far more common than true predictors. Just imagine if scientists demanded the
evacuation of Los Angeles, promising the big one was around the corner, and
then nothing happened. That is the most
likely outcome given the current state of knowledge.So, the seven Italians were not convicted of failing to predict the disaster in L’Aquila. Rather they were accused of going about their duties negligently. And negligence that causes death is often characterised as manslaughter. Given De Benardinis assured the public they were completely safe, the failure of his appeal seems fair. But the seismologists were in the impossible position of not knowing what the risk was, just that it probably wasn’t very great.
One question the case raises is the extent to which
scientists should be held accountable.
The implication of many of the L’Aquila seven’s defenders is that
scientists should be given carte blanche
to say what they like. Anything else
would obstruct free enquiry. But that
can’t be right. A scientist who carried
out their work without due care or made off-the-cuff pronouncements would
surely be culpable. Given that we cannot
predict earthquakes, a confident statement that no earthquake was due would be
as bad as saying that it was imminent.
As in many other fields, an honest mistake is a defence, but negligence
is not. Scientists enjoy the status of
latter-day sages. Many imagine that their
methods provide the only road to truth, not only in physics and biology, but in
the social sciences as well. So perhaps
the message from L’Aquila is that in making those claims, scientists
unintentionally erect expectations that they cannot possibly meet.
Still, there is another way of looking at the case of
L’Aquila. The government set up a
committee to advise on earthquakes and people of the city felt betrayed when it
failed to protect them. No matter that
the state could no more control the ground than Canute could the tide. Like so many westerners, the citizens of
L’Aquila thought that their government was an indomitable Leviathan. The media fuels this mood with its constant
refrain that “something must be done” even when there is patently nothing that
can be. So grandiose has the rhetoric of
the state become, that people imagine the reality should match the words. Even in a country like Italy where the
government is so self-evidently incompetent, it is still expected to be in
control of events that are intrinsically beyond control. Extending the scope of a government’s tasks
to scientifically impossible tasks such as earthquake prediction is only a
small step further from expecting it to achieve the economically impossible by
“kick-starting the economy” or the mathematically illogical task of preserving
generous entitlements without raising taxes or cutting other spending.
We have come to expect too much from our politicians and our
scientists. What it needed is for both
professions to become more humble. Otherwise, they can expect to be severely
punished if they can’t live up to their rhetoric.
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