  Fundamentally related to the UV divergence problem in Physics, conventional
wisdom in seismology is that the smallest earthquakes, which are numerous and
often go undetected, dominate the triggering of major earthquakes, making the
prediction of the latter difficult if not inherently impossible. By developing
a rigorous validation procedure, we show that, in fact, large earthquakes
(above magnitude 6.3 in California) are preferentially triggered by large
events. Because of the magnitude correlations intrinsic in the validated model,
we further rationalize the existence of earthquake doublets. These findings
have far-reaching implications for short-term and medium-term seismic risk
assessment, as well as for the development of a deeper theory without UV
cut-off that is locally self-similar.
