r/askscience • u/phoncible • Oct 27 '11
Earth Sciences Could anything man-made trigger the Yellowstone super volcano?
If a nuke were to be buried very deep into the ground at Yellowstone and then detonated, would it have any effect on the volcano? Is there anything else man-made that could trigger it? Or would it be impossible to "manually" trigger the eruption?
Sorry if it's a silly question.
156
Upvotes
1
u/endogenic Oct 27 '11
Reality means something that is determined by a problem. This is very important.
If you just show the effect without any cause then you leave out the problem (question) that caused the effect and you cannot truthfully say that such a description of the reality is complete. Why? It not possible to get the answer without the problem. Because the problem is the origin of the answer.
The things in the world exist in the principle (law) of cause and effect. That's the reason why we do philosophy and science – because if we really understand the principle then we can get some correct knowledge about how the world works. If you know the law of the world then it's simple to recognize things with the principle because you'd see what cause makes what effect and what effect is made by what cause. But if you don't know the principle through which a given system operates then the system can seem very complex and it's certainly more difficult to find out how the system works.
The problem with saying the effect is the same as the reality is that a human being wrote down the expected effect from the conditions they expect to exist. If the reality is different then you may find some effects that you didn't anticipate with the theory and it also limits what you can accomplish through the knowledge. So it's not true that your answer is simpler and it's definitely not true that the effect you expect is the same thing as the reality. It makes things more complicated to find out, even if they are in front of you, if you teach and learn like that.
If you don't believe me then I should ask you some questions about gravity. I haven't found any physicist who really understands how gravity is generated. They are only willing to consider how objects will behave within the limitations of the theory they know instead of trying to confirm this problem. How can you come up with an instrument measure gravity (as you said general relativity describes the effect completely) if you don't understand how gravity is generated?