17 January 2024

Anyone who has lived in California ten or fifteen years have their own earthquake stories.  Mine begins in Athens, Greece.  That’s not where it happened, but where my story starts.  I had seen my student group off the day before, and was savoring a cup of espresso and baklava in a plaza in front of the Acropolis on January 17, 1994.  It had been a good tour, in which we had visited Israel and Jordan, and then Greece.  I had been the lecturer as well as director in the latter country.  Ushering eighteen people through unfamiliar regions of the world was difficult in that some of the group had never been outside of Southern California—Tijuana and Las Vegas do not count.  It was a bit of a challenge, and I needed a while to “decompress.”  The day was clear and warm, with the sun playing hide and seek through the columns of the Parthenon high above me.  I had spent the morning at the National Archaeological Museum viewing exhibits that were too specialized for the students, and was packed and ready to return home.  After a leisurely walk back to the hotel for my luggage and a bus ride out to the airport, I checked through and settled down with a book in the waiting room.

My plane was called and I joined the line of people passing through the check stand.  Two women stood in front of me in the queue, and, being friendly, I asked them where they were going.  They said Boston and New York.  They asked to where I was flying and I responded Los Angeles.  Their faces immediately expressed shock and they said:  “You can’t go there!  Haven’t you heard?  They’ve had a terrible earthquake there!  The whole city is destroyed!  All of the freeways are down!  Cars are disappearing into cracks in the earth, and everything is on fire!”  I was stunned, and turned to the man behind me and asked what he had heard.  He said that he had heard the same thing on “CNN” on the television.

I didn’t know what to do but to board the plane and continue my journey.  Los Angeles is a large city.  Some streets, like Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards, alone, are ninety miles long.  The pass through dozens of communities joined by suburbs that have grown, seamlessly, together.  The region contains some ten million people in valleys that extend north and east.  Usually, the most severe damage in earthquakes is quite localized, and, while they shake up the area around them, it is the epicenter that gets the worst.  I decided that I could not worry until I got some specific information where it happened.  When we transferred planes in Paris, I asked some other passengers what they knew.  I suggested the usually active regions, such as Long Beach, Orange, San Bernardino, or the Owens Valley.  One woman said that she thought it was at “north-something.”  When I responded “Northridge,” she said, “Yes, that’s it.” Located in the north-central part of the San Fernando Valley, this town was not very far from my home at Thousand Oaks.  Now, I worried!

When we arrived in New York, I ran up to the desk to inquire about the next leg of the flight.  “Can I get to LAX (the Los Angeles Airport)?”  The clerk said, “Yes.  The airport was closed for several hours, but now it’s open.”  I boarded the plane and, again, decided not to worry until I arrived in Los Angeles.  When I arrived and walked out to get my luggage, a familiar couple was standing there.  I was stunned.  “What are you doing here?”  I asked.  They said, “But, you told us to pick you up!”  “How did you get here?” I asked.  “We drove,” they said with a puzzled voice.  “But I thought that all of the freeways were destroyed?”  “Yes, the Simi Valley Freeway on the north side of the valley, but the others are all right.”

As we drove up the pass on the San Diego Freeway and merged onto the Ventura Freeway, I could see that large portions on the north side of the valley were dark.  Obviously, the electricity was off, but the freeway was fine all the way to my house.  The couple had checked the rooms after the quake to see if there was any damage.  Besides some books off of a shelf and a lamp fallen over—one that tips if one merely looks at it—everything was all right.  Jet lag and exhaustion caught up with me, and I took a quick shower and collapsed into the bed.

I was not to sleep very long.  An hour or so later, the whole house began to rock back and forth, making a tremendous noise.  It continued ten seconds or so, and stopped as suddenly as it began.  Then, it did it again, and again, and again.  Tired as I was, there was little rest that night, and, as my internal clock was now ten hours off, I finally got up and turned on the television.  The newscasts were filled with horrible pictures of damaged buildings, of miraculous rescues from crushed apartments, and of predictions of further quakes.

The next morning I went into the office at the university where I teach.  While there was little visible damage at my home, my office was a shambles. A filing cabinet had fallen over.  Bookshelves had “pancaked” down, spilling several thousand volumes onto the floor and on my desk, smashing the lampshade, the computer, and my favorite coffee cup.

Most of the after-quakes were small, but occasionally, there were some that really shook up things a bit.  The inexplicable thing is that they began to become almost routine.  It would start to shake, and I would pause to see if it was going to intensify or not.  When it was over after five, ten or fifteen seconds, I would continue doing what I was doing before it started.  The frequency decreased over the next few days, and then they were too rare to notice.  Repairs to the bridge over Los Angeles Boulevard in Moorpark and the Simi Valley Freeway were made with surprising speed, and, over the course of the next months, the supports for other bridges were “retro-fitted” with metal straps.  Californians went back to their obsessions with weather, beaches and traffic, and the earthquake was forgotten.  Why worry until the next one?

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Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D.

3.14.2024

            This day, March 14, written as 3.14, has been designated as national “Pi Day” by the United States House of Representatives in 2009.  It is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.  It commemorates the mathematical formula of the constant ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, 3.14159. . . .  The Greek letter for “P” is π, “pi,” and refers to the perimeter of the circle.  The ancient Greek  mathematician, Archimedes (287-212 BC), who studied in his youth at the great center of learning, Alexandria, Egypt, but returned to his home in Syracuse in Sicily for the rest of his life, was the first to verify the ratio.

Archimedes has been one of my heroes.  Years ago, I went to a lecture at  the Huntington Library where the palimpsest with the tractate of Archimedes  was displayed.  The manuscript of Archimedes had been written on vellum (parchment) around 300 A.D.  Bound into a book around 1000 A.D., the pages were scraped off by a monk who inscribed the prayers in 1229, probably in Jerusalem.  It was stored in a library at Mar Saba Monastery in the desert south of Jerusalem until the German explorer and scholar Constantine Tischendorf discovered it in Constantinople in 1846.  There was an attempt to copy the mathematical text by the Danish scholar Johan Ludwig in 1906 using photography and a magnifying glass.  In the evacuation of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1922, during the Greek genocide when the Greek population was being removed from Turkey, the manuscript disappeared.

The manuscript remained missing until 1998 when it appeared in a badly damaged condition at an auction in Paris.  Purchased by an anonymous American collector, it was donated to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in 1999.  The faint writing in the “Archimedes Codex” (codex=book), was revealed by using infrared, ultraviolet, and rakng lighting, as well as digital manipulation.  Alongside each vellum page in the exhibit was a photograph of the writing under the later text revealing Archimedes essay.  An unknown essay of 9,000 words, a commentary on “Aristotle’s Categories” by Archimedes was also discovered.  It was exciting to see these pages and to see tracings of the geometric diagrams in the text by the greatest mathematician of antiquity.

Archimedes also discovered the screw device for raising water, a pump still used for irrigation and to pump water out of ships, war engines to drop big rocks on ships, cranes to lift whole ships out of the water, and sets of mirrors to incinerate enemy ships.   He also proved to King Heiro that a gold crown intended to be donated to a temple was a forgery by noting the displacement of water by immersing a real gold piece with an imitation.  The crown could not be melted down into a cube to be measured, so Archimedes had to discover a way to determine its volume in another way.  Since the crown displaced more water, the denser gold in it had been mixed with silver or another lighter metal.  King Heiro had been cheated by the goldsmith.

Archimedes was taking a bath when he observed water spilling out over the sides of the tub.  He realized that this was the solution to his problem of determining whether the crown was pure gold.  He was so excited that he ran naked down the streets of Syracuse shouting “I have found it!  I have found it!”  By the way, the Greek word  he used to exclaim “I have found” (it) is not pronounced in Greek as “y-rika”  but “horeka.”  Those Californians up north have it all wrong!

I’m not sure how to celebrate “Pi Day.”  Perhaps we can hoist a glass of water (commemorating Archimedes’ famous bath), or if you don’t have water, use milk or whatever, and shout three loud and hearty “Horekas”!

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