METADATA IN ENGLISH
About the journal
SEISMICHESKIE PRIBORY, ISSN: 0131-6230, eISSN: 2312-6965, DOI:
10.21455/si,
http://elibrary.ru/title_about.asp?id=25597)
English Translation: Seismic Instruments, ISSN: 0747-9239 (Print)
1934-7871 (Online),
https://link.springer.com/journal/11990
On
some conventional misconceptions in seismology
V.Yu. Burmin
Schmidt Institute of Physics
of the Earth, Russian
e-mail: burmin@ifz.ru
Abstract. The history of
science knows a lot of examples, when scientific misconception for a long time dominated
the scientific community and did significant harm to it. New ideas in science
always made their way with great difficulty. The inertia of thinking, the
temptation of following stereotypes often hamper the development of knowledge
and lead to an erroneous interpretation 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 this or that field of
science, attacks on the author of innovations are almost inevitable. Delusions
inhibit, and sometimes lead to the development of our knowledge in
understanding the processes occurring in the bowels of the Earth. These
examples, of course, do not exhaust all errors in the Earth sciences and any
researcher, if desired, can easily supplement this list. Misconceptions in
science lead to the fact that scientists in the conduct of these or other
studies get either incorrect results, or simply go to a standstill. Thus, if
the coordinates of hypocenters are incorrectly defined, a whole chain of
further incorrect conclusions arises in the study of certain regions. In
addition to the “objective” consequences of misconceptions, “subjective” consequences
cause considerable harm. By “subjective” consequences, we mean the influence of
individual scientists being held captive by delusions, because of ignorance or
misunderstanding of certain aspects of certain tasks, the emergence of new
ideas and approaches in the field under investigation. Most often this is
manifested in the review of articles and dissertational works of other
scientists. In the proposed article, the author gives several examples of
misconceptions, which, in his opinion, are typical for the area in which he has
worked for many years. In particular, this concerns misconceptions that relate
to the problem of determining the coordinates of hypocenters of earthquakes,
the task of seismic tomography, the inverse dynamic problem, the task of
reversal of the travel time curves of seismic waves and other problems. A total
of 12 misconceptions have been considered, which, one way or another, affect
the development of alternative methods of interpreting seismological data and
our understanding of the structure of the Earth.
Keywords: travel-time,
splane, inverse problems,
hypocenter,
earthquakes.
About the author
BURMIN Valery Yurievich – Dr. of Ph.
& Math, chief research scientist, Schmidt Institute of Physics of the
Earth,
Cite this article as: Burmin V.Yu. On some
conventional misconceptions in seismology. Seismicheskie Pribory, 2018, Vol. 54, no 1, pp. 62-88. DOI: 10.21455/si2018.1-5 (in Russ.).
English translation of the article will be published in Seismic
Instruments, ISSN: 0747-9239 (Print) 1934-7871 (Online),
https://link.springer.com/journal/11990), 2019, Volume 55, Issue 1.