... why You can't trust Your elevator anymore...

Hooke, Huber , von Mises... .Actually, very few people entering daily office lift, mounting a bridge, or boarding a plane think of those names. Even assuming they ever heard any of them....

Engineer designers usually either - they use written and approved Standards and Norms, so that they are protected by laws in their deeds. These days , CAD -software has it all already inscribed ,whatsoever. However, the thinkings and equations of mentioned titans are the very background of our trust in the forseeability of the materials' behaviour. They (equations) help us to assess how far is the material from breaking. Simple logics + massive statistics tell us that "the more - the better" is main safety rule. Von Mises was probably the closest of them to understand how deeply rooted in our minds is statistical picture of surrounding world - "if something happens often, it is more probable than something that happens rarely or never before".

Let us , for a short moment and as a pure thought experiment - imagine the world where statistic & probability can not be trusted anymore. In thermodynamical sense of probability - let us imagine short , local reversal of enthropy , low-energy , but non-spontaneous , i.e. remotely ordered and controlled.

Very minor portion of energy is needed to arrange a small number of crystal-net faults (e.g. in a metal) along one breakage-line, rendering a very solid piece of iron non-continous along one plane. The amount of energy is very small comparing to otherwise large macroscopic stress required to damage the sample. The problem is of course how to deliver the information to molecules , each and every , so that they humbly arrange themselves in desired configuration...