So much had suddenly scrambled; the future was unclear. During those four and a half minutes, Anchorage seemed to be passing fitfully through an inflection point in history; life was ripping into a before and an after. “Even in those moments while the earthquake was still shaking the earth,” one man recalled, “I kept thinking: ‘What will Alaskans do now?’”

Maybe you’ve lived through a natural disaster like this. Maybe you’ve just lived through the last couple of weeks, or the last few years. Increasingly, daily life feels suffused with similar unpredictability — a quiet quivering that surges, again and again, into a shock. Another constitutional check or political norm is shamelessly shattered. Another wildfire leaps the highway. The virus scatters beyond the latest isolated case.

We all know there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes, when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about it, but we know that instability is always there: At random, and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.

II.

News of the Great Alaska Earthquake reached a small team of sociologists at Ohio State University early the following morning, when communication from Alaska to the Lower 48 was still scant, and rumors ricocheted wildly. The sociologists heard that downtown Anchorage had been swallowed in a ball of fire. They heard 300 people were dead. Or 600 people. The trauma and confusion would be horrific. Professionally speaking, it was too good to be true. “They roused me out of bed and I threw on my duds,” one of the graduate students said. “And I was off to the airport in an hour and a half.”

The Disaster Research Center at Ohio State was, at the time, a new, first-of-its-kind institute, aiming to dispatch social scientists to wherever disaster struck, as quickly as possible, to dispassionately document that disarray. The center, which has since moved to the University of Delaware, had been founded only the previous summer, with funding from the Department of Defense.

The Cold War was escalating. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, America’s Office of Civil Defense was desperate to prepare Americans for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium, desperation and barbarism among survivors. “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” the social scientist Richard M. Titmuss wrote in 1950. “They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.”