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Richter's Scale - Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man (Paperback)
Loot Price: R541
Discovery Miles 5 410
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Richter's Scale - Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man (Paperback)
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List price R596
Loot Price R541
Discovery Miles 5 410
You Save R55 (9%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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By developing the scale that bears his name, Charles Richter not
only invented the concept of magnitude as a measure of earthquake
size, he turned himself into nothing less than a household word. He
remains the only seismologist whose name anyone outside of narrow
scientific circles would likely recognize. Yet few understand the
Richter scale itself, and even fewer have ever understood the man.
Drawing on the wealth of papers Richter left behind, as well as
dozens of interviews with his family and colleagues, Susan Hough
takes the reader deep into Richter's complex life story, setting it
in the context of his family and interpersonal attachments, his
academic career, and the history of seismology. Among his
colleagues Richter was known as intensely private, passionately
interested in earthquakes, and iconoclastic. He was an avid nudist,
seismologists tell each other with a grin; he dabbled in poetry. He
was a publicity hound, some suggest, and more famous than he
deserved to be. But even his closest associates were unaware that
he struggled to reconcile an intense and abiding need for artistic
expression with his scientific interests, or that his apparently
strained relationship with his wife was more unconventional but
also stronger than they knew. Moreover, they never realized that
his well-known foibles might even have been the consequence of a
profound neurological disorder. In this biography, Susan Hough
artfully interweaves the stories of Richter's life with the history
of earthquake exploration and seismology. In doing so, she
illuminates the world of earth science for the lay reader, much as
Sylvia Nasar brought the world of mathematics alive in A Beautiful
Mind.
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