The Paradox of Improvement: How adding a third support to stabilize a marble column in 1638 caused it to break, exposing the counterintuitive physics of structural failure that still plagues modern engineering.
If history is relevant to engineering—and the sources insist it is—then we must remember that sophisticated tools and advanced analysis are useless if the underlying assumptions are flawed. We have finite element analysis today. We have building codes written in the blood of past failures. Yet the Hyatt Regency collapsed anyway, killed by the same conceptual error that broke Galileo’s column three centuries earlier.
So we arrive at an uncomfortable question: If the same error can persist from ancient Rome through Renaissance Italy to 1980s America, what makes us think we’ve finally learned our lesson? In our next post, we’ll examine three of the most catastrophic disasters of the 20th century—Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Three Mile Island. Surely modern safety systems and regulations have evolved past the mistakes of Paconius and the marble column mechanic. Haven’t they? We’ll discover that not only do these patterns persist, but they compound and accelerate in complex systems, with consequences measured not in broken marble but in lost lives and contaminated cities.
External Sources
- Galileo Galilei. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. 1638.
- Petroski, H. (1985). To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. St. Martin’s Press.
- Levy, M. & Salvadori, M. (1992). Why Buildings Fall Down. W.W. Norton & Company.