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Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

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Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#141

Post by delecti »

colechristensen wrote: post #48
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf ) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that the…

Fishing expeditions are fine, they are not wrong by themselves, the just require followup. Now that somebody found a signal that seems to predict earthquakes, start trying to predict earthquakes. Dig into the signals and gather new ones to try to see if there is any more information available.

Agreed. And it seems so obvious that it makes me wonder why this doesn't include that. It says they started in 2016; they couldn't wait another year to say "we spent 7 years identifying this trend, and then a year predicting major earthquakes"?

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#143

Post by GolDDranks »

bryan0 wrote: post #140
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf ) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that the…

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter s…

The obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#144

Post by mensetmanusman »

idlewords wrote: post #102
zackees wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't talking about the earth being blown off course though, just that there is a large amount of energy that was previously unaccounted for and that this energy is large enough to trigger an earth quake at vulnerable parts.

Do the back-of-the-envelope computation of how much energy reaches Earth from a coronal mass ejection and see how well your idea holds up. (a typical flare is 10^16 grams of matter moving at about 450 km/sec)

Freezing water>ice shatters a cast iron pipe. It's just about the creation of a crack to initiate stress relief.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#145

Post by jaggederest »

bryan0 wrote: post #140
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf ) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that the…

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter s…

This is related to the fact that in a higher-dimensional space the hamming distance between two points is compact, compared to 2d/3d intuition. This problem is related to the way that e.g. embedding text into an AI for comparison purposes often produces surprisingly closely related vector distances for relatively unrelated strings.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#146

Post by Retric »

sbierwagen wrote: post #127
01100011 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or there's a common trigger event, like, say, a large gravitational wave or a passing cloud of weakly interacting matter(dark matter?) which triggers both increased cosmic ray emissions along with earthquakes. Not that I believe any of this, but it seems we're just pulling stuff out of our asses so I figured I'd give it a shot.

>gravity wave LIGO, the gravity wave detecting interferometer, has arms 4 kilometers long. Along that distance, it can detect a change in length one ten thousandth the diameter of a proton. With an instrument that sensitive, it can just barely detect a handful of gravity waves a year, out of the thousands? that occur in the observable universe. Gravity waves are subtle things.

I guess the question becomes if tectonic plates be more or less sensitive?

They are significantly impacted by tides for example.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#147

Post by Ringz »

bryan0 wrote: post #140
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf ) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that the…

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter s…

Can we transfer this to the financial markets?

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#148

Post by madrox »

bryan0 wrote: post #140
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf ) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that the…

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter s…

When I was taught statistics, this was regularly brought up as a big no-no in science. However, I read a guide to practical statistics that had a gem about predicting the stock market. If we discovered surges in the market correlated to newspaper sales, we wouldn't discard this as look-elsewhere. In fact, we'd follow newspaper sales very closely.

Predicting earthquakes has a big upside for humanity. If there is even a small correlation -- even if we don't yet understand it -- we can benefit from it.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#150

Post by ithkuil »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #138
klipt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to form a hypothesis from old data ... but it's not a theory yet until that hypothesis is challenged by (and isn't falsified by) future data :-)

Does old data discovered in the future count?

Yes it does. Because you didn't use it to overfit your model.

Same goes for data that you had in the last but decided to ignore while building the model.

In both cases there is a legitimate risk of cheating.

The only data that you cannot cheat about is future data.

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