On Certain Conventional Misconceptions in Seismology

Abstract

The history of science abounds in examples when misconceptions dominated the scientific community and did it significant harm. New ideas in science have always cut their paths with great difficulty. Inertial thinking and the temptation to adhere to stereotypes often hamper the development of knowledge and lead to erroneous interpretations of experimental data. Often a scientist has to face the skepticism of his colleagues and even the distrust of the community. Moreover, if new knowledge contradicts the established methodological schemes that are generally accepted in a particular scientific field, a creator of innovations can almost inevitably expect attack. Misconceptions inhibit, but sometimes lead to the development of our knowledge in understanding processes occurring deep in the Earth’s interior. These examples, of course, do not exhaust all misconceptions in the earth sciences, and any researcher, if desired, can easily supplement this list. Misconceptions in science culminate in researchers obtaining incorrect results or simply hitting a dead end. Thus, if the coordinates of hypocenters are incorrectly determined, a subsequent chain of incorrect conclusions arises when studying particular regions. In addition to the objective consequences of misconceptions, subjective consequences cause considerable harm. Subjective consequences entail the effect of when individual scientists are held captive by misconceptions—due to ignorance or misunderstanding of individual aspects of certain problems—on the emergence of new ideas and approaches in a particular field. Most often, this manifests itself when scientists review articles and dissertations by their peers. In this article, the author gives several examples of misconceptions, which, in his opinion, are typical of the field in which he has worked for many years. In particular, this concerns misconceptions related to determining the hypocentral coordinates of earthquakes, seismic tomography, the inverse dynamic problem, reversal of seismic wave travel-time curves, etc. Twelve misconceptions are considered in all, which in one way or another affect the development of alternative methods for interpreting seismological data and our understanding of the Earth’s structure.