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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

#151

Post by breck »

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…

In GWAS studies there's a nice visualization for dealing with this called Manhattan Plots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_plot

Basically if you test a lot of hypotheses plot all the p-values and look to see if there is something that is a true outlier or whether it is expected given so many tests.

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

#152

Post by mnky9800n »

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…

Most of particle physics is people searching for jobs that give meaning to their life. This often biases them against finding results against meaning.

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

#153

Post by mnky9800n »

jvanderbot wrote: post #94
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…

Precursor signals for earthquakes is a field that has about as much credibility as astrology, from the few conversations I've had with professional geologists and planetary scientists. I had a minor and short-lived role in designing a sensor network that might be useful for these kinds of low-signal, high-noise precursors, and I got nothing but strange looks from actual geologists.

There are plenty of precursors for an earthquake. Or maybe there are none. But it doesn't much matter because timescales of earthquakes can be thousands or more of years. While timescales of data is about a hundred years.

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

#154

Post by tobinfricke »

kanzenryu2 wrote: post #130
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.

One aspect of gravity waves is that other than being extremely weak, they cannot perform work. So they don't cause mechanical forces.

This is not true, and in fact there is a very famous thought experiment called the "sticky bead argument" that was pivotal in developing the consensus that gravitational waves are a real, physical effect and not just a "gauge" effect (an artifact of the coordinate system):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bead_argument

On the other hand, I definitely agree that gravitational waves are almost certainly too weak to cause any tectonic effects.

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

#155

Post by tobinfricke »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #19
idlewords wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is loopy because the energy that reaches the earth from even a massive solar flare is orders of magnitude less than the energy released by a major earthquake, and that is orders of magnitudes less than the energies that drive the dynamo in the Earth's core. It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelli…

when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10? (i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)

> when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?

Yes, and that has always bothered me just a little bit, given that there is nothing intrinsically special about base 10 and yet the phrase seems to suggest something fundamental.

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

#156

Post by rcxdude »

madrox wrote: post #148
bryan0 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It can be useful, it's just you need to keep monitoring it: if the effect seems to shrink or disappear on future tests, it's probably spurious.

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

#157

Post by heisenzombie »

aftbit wrote: post #137
kanzenryu2 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One aspect of gravity waves is that other than being extremely weak, they cannot perform work. So they don't cause mechanical forces.

Oh really? I didn't know that. If they cannot perform work, how can we detect them?

The OP might be making a more subtle point, but my understanding is they absolutely can do work. We can measure the deceleration of binary neutron stars with a rate predicted by the emission of gravitational waves. Deceleration == work.

However, we can also measure things that don’t do work, for example, a static magnetic field does no work on a charged particle (it cannot change its kinetic energy) but look at the swirls in a cloud chamber and it’s clear as day if there’s a magnetic field there.

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

#158

Post by nearbuy »

mjhay wrote: post #57

I think it's telling that none of the authors are geophysicists, and they definitely aren't statisticians either. The causality they're claiming just does not have any physical plausibility. > Dr. Homola states, “In the scientific world, it is accepted that a discovery can be said to have been made when the statistical confidence level of the corroborating data reaches five sigma, or standard deviations.” > Homola co…

Unless I'm missing something, that statement appears to be correct. They don't say their result isn't erroneous. They say there is statistically only a very tiny chance that the correlation is due to chance. If the correlation is caused by an error in their experiment, their statement is still correct, since the correlation was not due to chance.

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

#159

Post by booleandilemma »

aftbit wrote: post #139
ithkuil wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, islands are islands, aren't they?

That depends on the sea level, doesn't it? Even islands are connected to the rest of the world.

Maybe nothing can be an island in a metaphorical sense, but literal islands are possible?

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

#160

Post by anigbrowl »

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

That seems like an extremely good thing to me. Looking for patterns and then figuring out causality later is a great way to solve real-world problems. Of course you can be led astray if your filters are too open, but if your work is rigorous and you still come out with a 6-sigma correlation then congratulations, you found a signal. What does it mean? How does it work? Who cares, there's plenty of time to figure that out. But in the meantime you can hypothesize that the connection exists, monitor it for a year or two, and if the correlation holds up and turns out to have some predictive value, then a winner is you.

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