Oops: What makes things break
Philip Nobel, 21 February 2013
Whenever you step on a bridge, every bit of your weight is being transferred – part to one shore, part to the other – down to the bedrock below. If the structure is to continue standing when it takes on a new load, every link in the system has to resist the burden, kilo for kilo. Your weight, technically a ‘live load’ (which is to say transient, as opposed to the...
