“The safest place to be during an earthquake would be in a stationary store”*…
The United States is currently gripped in a bout of earthquake mania, following a series of significant tremors in the West. And any time Yellowstone, LA, or San Francisco shakes, people start to wonder if it’s a sign of The Big One™ to come. Yet even after decades of research, earthquake prediction remains notoriously hard, and not every building in quake-prone areas has an earthquake-resistant design. What if, instead of quaking in our boots, we could stop quakes in their tracks?
Theoretically, it’s not a crazy idea. Earthquakes propagate in waves, and if noise-canceling headphones have taught us anything, it’s that waves can be absorbed, reflected, or canceled out. Today, a paper published in Physical Review Letters suggests how that might be done. It’s the result of French research into the use of metamaterials—broadly, materials with properties not found in nature—to modify seismic waves, like a seismic cloaking device…
Read all about it in “How a ‘Seismic Cloak’ Could Slow Down an Earthquake.”
* George Carlin
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As we think soothing thoughts of stability, we might send scientific birthday greetings to Vincenzo Viviani; he was born n this date in 1622. A mathematician and engineer, Viviani is probably best remembered as a discipline of Galileo: he served as the (then-blind) Galileo’s secretary until his death; he edited the first edition of Galileo’s collected works; and he worked tirelessly to have his master’s memory rehabilitated. But Viviani was an accomplished scientist in his own right: he published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects, and was a founding member of the Accademia del Cimento, one of the first important scientific societies, predating England’s Royal Society.
