This is part of the UC Davis College of Engineering's Distinguished Lecture Series by Ares Rosakis, Theodore von Karman professor of aeronautics and professor of mechanical engineering; and chair, Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology. He says directly studying earthquakes presents a host of insurmountable difficulties, the least of which is our inability to trigger earthquakes of various magnitudes at will and the lack of means of scrutinizing the behavior at depth while the quake propagates. Ares' lab has developed techniques to produce miniature (or surrogate) laboratory earthquakes and follow their progress with high-speed imaging tools.