There is another common misapprehension that the magnitude scale is itself some kind of instrument or apparatus. Visitors will frequently ask to 'see the scale.'
If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.
As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.
Logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.
