Geologist as detective: "The present is the key to the past."

             When a crime scene is being investigated the challenge is to collect and examine present-day evidence, and then work backwards from the current facts and infer what happened in the past, to deduce the sequence of events that led up to the murder.  This is just like the so-called “scientific method” where you form an hypothesis, then do experiments to test it.  The results let you support or reject your initial ideas.  But some sciences, such as geology (and also astronomy and archaeology), are historical and can’t be studied this way.  And the protagonist in my novels is a geologist.

Now, a geologist could look at the rocks from a volcano and figure out a lot about what happened in some past volcanic eruption, but there’s no way he can rerun the eruption—he can’t do an experiment to see if his ideas are right.  Watching erupting volcanoes, however, can lead to an understanding of the processes, and hopefully shows how volcanic rocks were formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

So, searching for clues that lead to an understanding of the past is what geologists do.  Which is why the protagonist in my novels, a geologist, is good at solving crimes.  A detective will search for more clues and hunt for more detailed evidence, just as a geologist will try to get more data as the best way to limit the possible sequence of events leading up to the present.

This all assumes, of course, that everything in the past worked the same way as it does today, what geologists call “uniformitarianism.”  That’s a big word that can just as well be expressed by the saying, “the present is the key to the past.”  And that applies to both crime and geology.

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Nobody has a monopoly on important insights, so here’s what Albert Einstein said:

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form.  The greatest scientists are artists as well.”

And a piece of trivia:

“The combined weight of all the ants on Earth is about the same as the combined weight of all humans.”  That’s right now, of course, but with rampant obesity, we could soon overtake the ants.

A mushroom discovered on one of our hikes into the Sangre de Cristo mountains in early August