Question: is it hard to find out how things break

David Taylor answered on 9 Nov 2014:

It’s not too hard to find out HOW something broke: what’s more difficult is to find out WHY. When people ask me to do forensic work, they want to know WHY, because they want to know who was responsible for the failure. For example, say you were riding your bicycle and it broke, so you fell off and got hurt. You would want to know if it bike was badly designed, or badly made, or if the shop who sold it to you made some kind of mistake. It might even have been your fault for not looking after your bike properly. To answer these questions needs a kind of detective work, which is very interesting.