2024/03/22

I once said that the more dubious a scientific theory is, the more important it becomes politically
It is common knowledge in science that major earthquakes cannot be predicted.
Professor Ikeda’s “Armchair Free Talk”
This article is a chapter I posted 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 draws on a column by Professor Kiyohiko Ikeda published in the July 8 issue of Shūkan Asahi, which I subscribed to at the time.
It is now 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 stated that now was the time for the Japanese government to tell its citizens frankly that earthquakes cannot be predicted.
It has long been common knowledge in the scientific community that major earthquakes cannot be predicted.
The government has wasted enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money under the illusion that earthquakes can be predicted.
[The English version says “under the illusion that earthquakes cannot be predicted,” but this has been corrected to fit the surrounding context.]
Under the pretext of predicting major earthquakes, the government enacted the Act on Special Measures Concerning Countermeasures for Large-Scale Earthquakes, and the responsible authorities and a handful of privileged seismologists have continued to reap the benefits.
The same applies to earthquake prediction and the prevention of global warming: taxpayers’ money is poured down the drain to stir up public fear and claim that the impossible is possible under the cover of a dubious precautionary principle.
I once said that the more dubious a scientific theory is, the more important it becomes politically.
In the case of global phenomena such as global warming and major earthquakes, the validity of theories predicting them cannot be proved experimentally.
This is because neither a major earthquake nor global warming can be produced experimentally on the basis of a theory.
However, because these phenomena profoundly affect people, claims that they can be predicted or controlled can convey a powerful political message.
This is where a scientifically unprovable theory becomes a politically robust theory.
I once wrote somewhere that power is an apparatus for control, and that any claim of controllability appears attractive to those in power.
Indeed, at the dawn of science, people dreamed that the future could be predicted completely 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 does not hold up either practically or theoretically, it is easy to understand that science cannot predict future phenomena.
We humans are part of nature, not the other way around.
Even an elementary school student can understand that a part cannot comprehend the whole.
Whether we are dealing with major earthquakes or 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 legislation.
People living in the largely controllable environment of cities may have forgotten such an obvious fact.
＊My annotation begins here.
I urge Naoto Kan and Masayoshi Son to read this article with their eyes wide open, especially the passage stating that “neither earthquakes nor temperatures obey legislation.”
[The descriptions of the two men and the passage concerning “criminals against Japan” are garbled in the English translation, and 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 major publications include Kankyō Mondai no Uso (The Lies of Environmental Issues) and Hontō no Kankyō Mondai (The Real Environmental Issues, coauthored with Takeshi Yoro).