Galileo and the Oscars
Remember those award ceremonies where the person on stage reads out the winner after opening an envelope? In 2016, at the Oscars, the winner of the best movie was called out wrongly on stage… and to millions on TV. Tim Harford’s podcast explores how that happened. Far more importantly (and scarily), it cites the same pattern to be behind other far more disastrous events. And to top it off, that pattern had been pointed out by good old Galileo! So what led to the Oscars gaffe? The Best Movie envelope had the name of a movie and an actress . Why the actress name? Because it was the wrong envelope! But wait, there’s more. The previous award had been for the Best Actress: this envelope was for that category. Wait a minute, wouldn’t the previous award not have been called out wrongly in that case? Aha, they kept duplicates of each envelope. It was the wrong duplicate that had been handed on stage. But why did they keep duplicates? As a safety measure, as a backup syst...