Your long diatribe is curiously devoid of the level of detail that is the bread and butter of science. We must combine indirect evidence to advance on many problems, not just friction.

You seem blissfully unaware that rate-and-state friction is the subject of not just observations of the response of earthquake rate to loading, but also theoretical studies (Rice, Dieterich, Ruina, etc.), studies on blocks of rock in labs (Lockner, Rosakis, Tullis, Marone, etc.), and we're even in the process of drilling toward sites of known earthquakes on the San Andreas fault and elsewhere in California, Taiwan, and Japan.

It will be a long time before people are present to directly observe the minor constituents of the Earth's core, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or the Big Bang that marked the beginning of the universe as we know it, but people work on those problems and are making progress anyway.

I had thought your dispute was based in a small misunderstanding of earthquake science, but see it has much deeper roots,