From my childhood years I’ve spent much of my precious time trying master the innumerous theses on how things work...
If I remember right there about 4 or 5 volumes of the books and me and my friends would spend hours on the marvelous ways by which man and nature got things to work.
It was only when I had grown up sufficiently I realized that if there is one way by which things can work then there are 10^10 by which they can stop working or not work at all. Am not Murphy’s law votary-forever skeptical about things going right! But yes the impalpable laws of the universe have almost beyond doubt proved to me that by the time something(or) someone works right it has already gone wrong 10^10 times!! To take these electronic gadgets for example, we talk of them working alright when all inside parts are in perfect working conditions and in places meant for them....but the ‘What-ifs’ of it are endless..a malfunction in one. Multiple malfunctions, voltage fluctuations, aging wear and tear and yes, an overenthusiastic or an extra belligerent household, the mischiefs of a boisterous kid or a flash of lightning..Well..And I guess a lot more..! And yes...if you invent ways by which you can make systems fail proof then there are quite a good number of ways that the fail proof systems can fail. And so the overall possibility of things not working only increases..!if you cant get me right think of the infinite number of ways that a well grown adult may do(intentionally/unintentionally) to un-work things that are supposed to be 'child-proof’. I am not sure if there is enough scientific evidence, but truly perfect thing that works well all the time is non-existent...!Clocks that slow down, computers that crash, files that go missing, vehicles that have both power steering and power breaks but only on an average only one of them will work...!
Examples are aplenty for things that don’t work or work wrong...right from transport buses that break down amidst chaotic traffic to optimistic rocket launches that end up as ‘disgraceful’ debacles. So if human kind has to tackle these omnipresent problems with things that don’t work,
We need treatises and theses and dissertations on the numerous ways by which things don’t work rather than documents on the how they do. The latter is by and far meant for the utopia of our dreams and illusions and is not suitable for our ever so imperfect world. The task is a mammoth one, but it is a worthwhile exercise that finds ways of reducing imperfections that surround us. So while the we embark on this magnum opus we shall leave the ‘how things work ‘aficionados to their cloud cuckoo land!
