The Scientist Is Always Late: The Documentary Life of Uncertainty in Earthquake Science
Archives at NCBS | Research Fellowship Program
Public Talks
The Scientist Is Always Late: The Documentary Life of Uncertainty in Earthquake Science
Upasana Sarraju
Mon, Oct 12, 2026. 11.30 AM
Golgi Conference Room, ELC, NCBS
Details: https://www.ncbs.res.in/events/us
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
— Karl R. Popper, "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance." (1960)
Earthquakes cannot be deterministically predicted. This familiar limit of seismology is usually treated as a problem of forecasting: when, where, and how large will the next earthquake be? This project asks a slightly different question. What happens to uncertainty as earthquake knowledge is actually made, tested, organised, circulated, and acted upon?
Drawing principally on the C. P. Rajendran and Kusala Rajendran Papers at the Archives at NCBS, and centred on their work on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, this public talk follows scientific knowledge across a longer life cycle than the conventional scientific method suggests. It moves from correspondence in which research problems are still possibilities, through proposals and progress reports, field observations, samples, laboratory measurements, dating uncertainties, interpretation, review, publication, and scientific training.
It then follows published knowledge as it travels beyond the immediate research programme: into government technical documents through citation, into disaster-management frameworks, and into newspapers, public explanations, and preparedness material. The surviving evidence supports these forms of circulation more strongly than a direct claim that the Rajendrans authored disaster-management policy.
Across these documents, uncertainty does not simply diminish as we progress along steps of the scientific method. It repeatedly appears to acquire a form suited to the work that must happen next: a possibility becomes a project; a landscape becomes a sample; and complex scientific reasoning can eventually become a pithy survival instruction.
By placing evidentiary documents beside one another, we notice visible transformations in epistemological form. We can thus hope to glean how uncertainty travels, and what must remain visible—and what is compressed or left behind—when scientific knowledge has to become usable.
Epigraph source: Popper, Karl R. "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance." Proceedings of the British Academy 46 (1960): 39–71.
Bio:
Upasana Sarraju is a science writer, researcher, and author of Unruly: The Ig Nobel Prizes and the Science That Refuses to Behave (Penguin Random House India, 2026). She can be reached at usarraj1@alumni.jh.edu. This talk is based on her work as a research fellow at the Archives at NCBS between May and July 2026.