Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Moravia in 1885;
41
the
New York Times
reported on his apparent successes
in 1887.
42
Scientists accused the press of feeding the frenzies surrounding
his forecasts. hoernes lambasted the
Neue Freie Presse
for sending Falb off
to investigate the eruption of Mount etna in 1874 with all the fanfare of
another Stanley in search of Livingstone.
43
to be fair, the
Neue Freie Presse
also expressed skepticism. In 1887 it quoted the quip that, when it came to
Falb's predictions, “a year has 365 'critical days' and a leap year 366.”
44
Clearly, Falb had struck a chord. this was an era when many newspa-
per readers were relinquishing religious interpretations of catastrophes and
looking to science as an alternative source of certainty. In 1885, in Falb's
home province of Styria, one village “spent a full night outdoors out of
fear of a prophesied earthquake.”
45
Meanwhile, the initial response to Falb
from trained natural scientists was critical but not dismissive. the ques-
tions they raised concerned both theory and method. Falb attributed all
earthquakes to volcanism, while central european geologists increasingly
followed Suess in classifying most as tectonic.
46
Methodologically, Falb's
predictions seemed so vague as to be unfalsifiable. Based on their own sta-
tistical investigations, other scholars acknowledged that a slight influence
of celestial bodies on weather catastrophes and earthquakes had not been
ruled out. however, they insisted that Falb was doing more harm than good
with his predictions. the scientific questions required calm deliberation:
one must do “one's statistics properly and not allow memory and judgment
to be clouded by the sensational impression of isolated conspicuous coin-
cidences, which it is well known is one of the most fundamental and most
dangerous weaknesses of human judgment.”
47
the tone of Falb's critics grew more shrill in the wake of his claim to have
predicted the severe earthquake on 9 November 1880 in Zagreb (German:
Agram; chapter 7). It came several months after Falb's return from a research
trip to South America, where a bout of rheumatism had left him with poor vi-
sion and swollen ankles. “Only with the Agram earthquake on November 9,
1880 did the old energy and motivation return fully,” he later recalled. he
hurried to the scene of the disaster and “had the satisfaction of seeing posi-
tively confirmed the secondary recurrence of the impact predicted according
to the tide theory for the 16th of December.”
48
Falb's claim to have pre-
dicted this catastrophe—and his prophecies of more to come—transformed
the wary skepticism of some professional scientists into bitter opposition.
But men of science learned a nuanced lesson from Falb. his demagoguery
prodded them to cultivate their own mode of public outreach.
rudolf hoernes, one of the pioneers of the monographic method in
Austria, was the first to draw this conclusion. “the popular form in which
