Scientists Worry over 'Bizarre' Trial for Failing to Predict Earthquake - Yahoo! News It seems to me that the Italian courts have gone mad.
It's about time we start making scientists accountable. Now we should go after mathematicians and their irrational numbers. Tom
It's nice to know that the Italian court system has scientifically verified earthquake prediction techniques. If the state wins the case, then they have settled an area of science that even dumb scientists haven't been able to figure out definitively - or even close. I can tell you what is going to happen now: scientists in this field are going to scream like chicken little whenever they get some positive data points until people come to ignore them, or sue them to recoup the costs of constantly bailing out of a danger zone, OR to recoup lower property values due to the constant state of caution. ALSO, these scientists will also need to purchase liability insurance in order to hold a job - or they will have to be indemnified by their employer. Lawyers are wonderful rent seekers.
sounds like the sort of thing i"d read about in a third world country. Parts of Italy really are third world, though
I don't know if they'd be able to win a case against the engineers. It's a complex matter. As for the quakes, seismology is the science of telling people how powerful the earthquake that just happened was. I expect that will come out in court. The Italian legal system is a mixed adversarial-inquisitorial system. In an inquisitorial system it could be more like a public inquiry than a trial: here they're considering whether the people involved were negligent.
