Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

An interesting book written by Mark Buchanan.  The book sets out to find why catastrophes happen.  What is the difference between the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the 10,000 earthquakes that happen in California every year?  Why do some wildfires cause massive damage while others go unnoticed?  What about major wars compared to minor conflicts?

The book goes through all of these cases, along with many more, in an attempt to find a pattern in the difference between a catastrophe and a minor blip in time.  The results, backed by many different researchers in different fields, are unsettling.  In each case study, a power scale is found.  Basically, an earthquake that is 1.0 on the Richter scale is 4 times more likely to occur than a 2.0 earthquake.  And a 2.0 earthquake is 2.2 times more likely to occur than a  3.0 earthquake and so on.  The power scale number will vary based on what is being studied.

The book goes on to talk about many more examples like wars and international conflicts.   What made the World War II a huge war compared to some of the smaller conflicts that have occurred over the years? What can be done to forecast the probability of these catastrophes?  Stunningly, the difference ability to forecast the severity of a war is just as impossible as attempting to forecast the severity of an earthquake or forest fire.

In the end, you learn that when something gets into a critical state, the severity of occurrences cannot be determined.  A little disconcerting but also fascinating that you can look at anything in a critical state and, once you find its power law, can spot the similarities of the chance of occurrence.