The Expert Opinion

The question put to Wenzel was narrow. Given the loads recorded in the log, and given nothing else, could the bracket have failed on the eleventh? He was asked for a yes or a no and for the reasoning behind it, and he was asked to keep it to four pages.

What he delivered ran to thirty-one pages and answered a larger question: whether the bracket was a sound design for the duty it was doing. It was not, and he demonstrated that carefully, with figures that nobody has since disputed.

The trouble is that a decision was waiting on the narrow question, and the narrow question is answered in the document only by implication, in a subordinate clause on page nineteen. Two readers took opposite meanings from that clause, and both readings are available.

Adaeze, who commissioned the work, asked him to add a covering page with the yes or the no on it. He declined, on the grounds that a single word could be quoted without its conditions, and that the conditions were the substance of the opinion.

He was not wrong about that. Experts who allow themselves to be reduced to a headline are quoted for years afterwards saying things they carefully did not say. Everyone in this field knows a story of that kind, and most of them know it at first hand.

What he underestimated was the alternative. In the absence of a plain answer, the decision was taken by people who had read page nineteen once and remembered it differently, and the conditions he was protecting played no part in it whatsoever.

The compromise they reached eventually is now standard in that office and is worth stating. The opinion begins with the question as it was put, in the words in which it was put, followed by the answer and by the conditions that qualify it, in that order and on the same page.