Magnitude Scales
The first attempt to qualitatively define a single, absolute value to describe the size of earthquakes was the magnitude scale (the name being inspired by scales used to represent the brightness of stars).
Read more about this topic: Seismic Scales
Famous quotes containing the words magnitude and/or scales:
“Sometimes you’re overwhelmed when a thing comes, and you do not realize the magnitude of the affair at that moment. When you get away from it, you wonder, did it really happen to you.”
—Marian Anderson (1902–1993)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)