Science Quote by Charles Francis Richter

“Logarithmic plots are a device of the devil” lands because it’s a scientist’s heresy: a deliberately impious jab at one of the most common tools in technical communication. Coming from Charles Francis Richter, the seismologist whose own magnitude scale is famously logarithmic, the line doubles as self-aware irony. He’s not rejecting math; he’s indicting what happens when math becomes theater.

The intent is partly pedagogical and partly moral. Log scales compress chaos into elegance, turning wild variation into tidy straight lines. That visual serenity is exactly the temptation Richter is warning about. A log plot can make radically different realities look comfortably comparable, shifting the viewer’s attention from absolute stakes (how big, how dangerous, how costly) to relative slopes and ratios. It invites the eye to accept “pattern” where the world may simply be uneven, noisy, or violently discontinuous.

The subtext is about power: whoever chooses the axes controls the story. In seismology, that isn’t abstract. A one-unit jump in magnitude isn’t “one more”; it’s orders of magnitude more energy. Logarithms are necessary to span that range, yet they also risk laundering awe and fear into a neat graphic. Richter’s quip is a reminder that representation is never neutral: the same technique that reveals structure can anesthetize judgment.

Context matters, too. Mid-century science was increasingly mediated through charts for engineers, policymakers, and the public. Richter is cautioning that when complexity gets packaged for easy consumption, the devil isn’t the equation; it’s the seduction of thinking the picture is the thing.