Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: > A good engineer will imagine a billion ways in which an invention will > fail so that invention is built to avoid all those failure modes. > It is not possible to avoid a billion failure modes, or even 100. A product designed to avoid too many modes will not work. It will have so many layers of protection they will interfere with one another. Early designs for many products suffer from this problem. For example, a railroad locomotive design on paper (that was never built) had spikes in the wheels, and holes in the rails, to prevent slipping. This would never have worked in the real world.
You have to discover first whether a failure is possible, or plausible. If it is not, a design to avoid that problem will itself be cause problems, interfere with other functions, and add unnessary cost and complexity. For example, suppose you imagine that cold fusion causes intense muon radiation. You might take steps to avoid damage from this. These steps will cost money, and they may interfere with the operation of the machine or cause a safety problem. It is a fact easily established that cold fusion does *not* cause muon radiation. This is an imaginary problem. So there is no need for protection against it. Adding unnessary protection and unwanted features to a product does not make it better. Keep doing this and the product becomes unusable, and even dangerous. - Jed
