2024/03/23

I once said that the more dubious a scientific theory is, the more politically important it becomes.
It is common scientific knowledge that major earthquakes cannot be predicted.
Professor Ikeda’s “Armchair Commentary”
This article is a chapter I published on July 1, 2011, from my room at Kitano Hospital, where I spent eight months after a doctor told me that I had a 25 percent chance of survival.
It is drawn from a column by Professor Kiyohiko Ikeda published in the July 8 issue of Weekly Asahi, to which I subscribed at the time.
Today, it is essential reading not only for the people of Japan but also for people throughout the world.
The bold emphasis in the text is mine.
Professor Robert Geller, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, published an opinion article in the April 14 online edition of the British scientific journal Nature.
In it, he argued that the Japanese government should now tell its citizens frankly that earthquakes cannot be predicted.
It had long been common knowledge in the scientific community that major earthquakes cannot be predicted.
The government has squandered enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money under the illusion that earthquakes can be predicted.
Under the pretext of predicting major earthquakes, it enacted the Act on Special Measures Concerning Countermeasures for Large-Scale Earthquakes, and the responsible government agencies and certain privileged seismologists have continued to reap the benefits.
The same applies to earthquake prediction and the prevention of global warming: they stir up public fear and, using the dubious precautionary principle as a cover, claim that what cannot be done can be done, pouring taxpayers’ money down the drain.
I once said that the more dubious a scientific theory is, the more politically important it becomes.
In the case of global phenomena such as global warming and major earthquakes, the validity of theories that predict them cannot be demonstrated experimentally.
This is because we cannot experimentally cause a major earthquake or global warming on the basis of a theory.
However, because these phenomena profoundly affect people, claims that they can be predicted or controlled can carry a powerful political message.
This is where a scientifically dubious theory becomes a politically robust one.
I once wrote somewhere that power is a mechanism for control, and that any claim of controllability, whatever its subject, appears attractive to power.
Indeed, in the early days of science, people dreamed that the future would be entirely predictable if only the laws of physics and the arrangement of matter were known.
This is called “Laplace’s demon.”
Although it is now clearly understood that Laplace’s demon holds neither in practice nor in theory, it is easy to understand why science cannot predict future phenomena.
We human beings are part of nature, not the other way around.
Even an elementary school child can understand that a part cannot comprehend the whole.
Whether we are dealing with measures against major earthquakes or against global warming, we can enact laws and spend taxpayers’ money on them.
However, we cannot predict major earthquakes or control global warming.
This is because neither earthquakes nor temperatures obey laws.
People who live in the largely controllable space of cities may have forgotten such an obvious fact.
＊From here onward, the annotation is mine.
I urge Naoto Kan and Masayoshi Son to read this article with their eyes wide open, particularly the passage stating that “neither earthquakes nor temperatures obey laws.”
[The portions of this annotation corresponding to “the pettiest men in history” and “criminals against the nation of Japan” are garbled in the Portuguese translation, so the exact original wording cannot be reconstructed.]
Kiyohiko Ikeda.
Born in Tokyo in 1947.
Completed the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University.
Biologist.
At the time, a professor at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University.
His principal publications include The Lies About Environmental Problems and The Real Environmental Problems (coauthored with Takeshi Yoro).