The question of why things "break" is only meaningful in the context of our notion that they should "work". Having been deeply involved in trouble-shooting electronic devices (learn more about the electron here) and the software that controls them for many years, I have become an expert in analyzing the processes of failure in inanimate objects. What I've discovered is that we profoundly misunderstand what it means for something to be inanimate. It's our misunderstanding that confounds us not the thing misunderstood.

In the cold reality of Nature, things cannot break, the Laws of the Universe forbid it. Things exist because their non-existence is impossible. The whole question of whether these things "work" pertains to nothing. The universe is utterly and eternally choiceless, the option of something not working just doesn't exist. Anything inanimate is, by its very definition, unable to affect its own behavior; it can only react and the reaction is totally determined. There's no possibility that any inanimate object can "do" anything other than what it does.

The things we use as tools only work when they conform to our design for them. They really can't do anything else. When they break it's because they no longer conform to their intended purpose. But all of this is so outrageously abstract. The whole idea of a design is only an idea; it relates to nothing that actually exists. The idea of something breaking is only relevant if its design is "real". A tool implies function which implies the accomplishment of some purpose. The only significant parts of any tool are the design, fuction and purpose we preceive it to have. Our insistence that tools exist is a complete mystery to the universe, something so alien to the raw physical existence of nature that it is incomprehensibly impossible. We have created an alternate universe. Our reality is, literally, supernatural. A tool cannot possibly exist in nature because a fundamental component of any tool is that it possess function and purpose and design and that it can break. None of these attributes apply to anything anywhere in the universe. If a tool is solely an artifact of the human mind, so too is the possibility that it can break.

Troubleshooing requires that one understand that the malfunction being sought is in the design of the tool and not the tool itself. One cannot address the inanimate pieces to resolve the problem; these are merely representations of the underlying reality of the design. To "fix" something broken, one has to confront the essense of the thing, its soul. Since the whole reality in which a tool exists is supernatural, the techniques and methodologies to fix it must likewise be supernatural.

In the case of electronics, one uses various incantations of carefully crafted words and formulae. Words like ohm, and ampere and joules, magical phrases like inductive reactance and fullwave bridge rectifier and arcane acronyms like LED, CRT, RAM and CMOS. There is just no way to discover why a device fails without mastery of the language of its design. As the complexity of the design increases, so too must the vocabulary describing the design. Since the whole thing is fundamentally supernatural, magic is required to both comprehend and manipulate it. Like every other science, electronics only has meaning to the human mind. In itself there is only an intellectually inert chaos devoid of all meaning, purpose and function.