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Learning from failure

Nature Physics volume 5, page 705 (2009)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 01 December 2009

This article has been updated

Catastrophes of all sorts — social, biological, environmental — stir-up feelings of unease from which the human mind naturally recoils. What seemed stable and dependable — a community or a financial market, an organ or a portion of the Earth's crust — suddenly seems charged with invisible menace. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted long ago, longing for that feeling of safety is a prime force behind the human weakness for fabricating comforting, if illusory, explanations: “To trace something unknown back to what is known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown — the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.”

But catastrophic failures also alarm us because they seem to violate our intuitions about cause and effect, striking with no prior warning: a tissue that has functioned perfectly for 50 years suddenly becomes cancerous; or tectonic plates locked in place for centuries shift abruptly, releasing devastating energy in a matter of seconds. The trigger for the event, in other words, is by no means evident on the scale of its consequences, or the natural level of its description.

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Change history

  • 28 October 2009

    In the original version of this Thesis, the name of Markus Buehler was spelled incorrectly. This error has been corrected in both PDF and HTML versions.

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  1. Mark Buchanan
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Buchanan, M. Learning from failure. Nature Phys 5, 705 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1411

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