Funk's Law

Anyone who has ever built something new or useful has certainly run into problems and small failures along the way. As we talked about last quarter, these failures are not to be viewed as a setback, but a learning opportunity! That being said, after many hours of blood, sweat, tears, and sometimes a couple beers, it can be frustrating when things just won’t work out the way you want them too. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t get a win. No matter how hard you try, some nagging little thing keeps breaking or failing, or maybe despite all your troubleshooting efforts, checking and double checking your circuits, making sure nothing is broken or misplaced, things still don’t work the way you planned. Many engineers have experienced this, and just as many have said something along the lines “I don’t understand! It should be working!” But it isn’t.  When working on complicated machinery you will most often find, despite who you are, the system is much smarter than you, and you may only predict, not dictate, how it will behave. 

That being said, years of study and engineering by our ancestors have provided us the huge bedrock of empirical knowledge that we all stand on, as we previously mentioned. So, while we may not understand the magnitude of an effect that an experiment might show, a competent engineer should certainly know the direction of that effect.  Still, the longer you troubleshoot a problem, and the more invested you get into making something to work, the more likely something small and nagging is to get overlooked. For this problem, I present Funk’s Law, which takes its name from one of the engineers I’ve been able to look up to in my so-far short career. It goes something like this:

“If the results don’t make any sense at all, the problem is probably something small and stupid.”

Remember this the next time you find yourself completely stumped by a problem, and hopefully you can save yourself a few hours of head scratching.