Italy Putting Science on Trial

The earthquake in question.

I'm not sure what to say about this. Italy convicted scientist, actual scientists, for manslaughter, because they didn't science well enough to predict an earthquake that killed about 300 people in a town in central Italy. Now, the scientists are appealing, but their prospects don't look good. Looking at this story and another story going into more detail about the incident, it's clear that these people did communicate that earthquakes were unlikely, and that they didn't do a great job of stressing that earthquakes are not predictable, giving people the wrong idea so that the town was not as prepared as it could have been. But that's not the issue here, not really. The issue is that these scientists are being held accountable for getting their geophysics wrong.

We can't predict earthquakes, not with any accuracy. All we can say is that an earthquake is likely on a particular fault line in 10, 20, 50 years. If we had a way to know if San Francisco was going to have a major earthquake on December 15, 2014, it would be big news. But we don't. It probably isn't possible to predict earthquakes with that level of accuracy, and it certainly isn't possible today. These scientists are being held accountable for failing to predict the unpredictable, and it isn't right.

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