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Geophysical Numerology

Abstract

THERE has been a trend recently to seek empirical relationships between certain geophysical parameters in an attempt to simplify a problem. In these days when there is a tendency to use the computer to try to solve everything, such an approach has much to commend it. There is, however, a danger in playing the “numbers game”, for by algebraic manipulation we can sometimes obtain additional relationships which may be far from valid even within restricted ranges of some of the variables. Again different workers may get incompatible relationships even though they approximately agree for certain ranges of the parameters. I shall give some examples.

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JACOBS, J. Geophysical Numerology. Nature 227, 161–162 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1038/227161a0

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