Murphy’s Law is the name given to any proverb that says that if something can go wrong, it will definitely happen. Properly interpreted, Murphy’s Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it will definitely go wrong, and we must prepare for the inevitable. Murphy’s Law not only warns you that something can go wrong, but also tells you how to work around it so that Murphy’s Law doesn’t actually work. Even before it was written, Murphy’s Law was called the Law of the Trash, which states that everything bad that can happen to some poor fellow will definitely happen.
Murphy’s Law seems to ridicule us for being so short-tempered, and it uses the rules of probability – the mathematical probability that something will happen – to support itself. Iprams’ Law, spelled backwards, says, “Whatever can fit, will do” is an optimistic application of Murphy’s Law in reverse. When Murphy’s law spread around the planet, two things happened: people forgot that our hero was there, and Murphy’s law was changed to the pessimistic form “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Colonel Stapp’s favorite deduction on sober scientific laws – Murphy’s Law, Stapp calls it – Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong Lloyd Mullan in Men, Rockets and Space Rats (1955), possibly the first printed use of Murphy’s name in connection with the law.
A short story by Lee Corry in the February 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction refers to “Riley’s Law”, “In any industry of science or engineering, anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Pessimistic thinking about anything is the simplest version of a concept expressed in many ways. If your paradigm is to have a great idea, build it, and release it to the world, chances are something will go wrong and your idea will fail. In a world where things can go wrong, every little thing you can foresee and prevent will make your designs better for everyone.
If more things can go wrong, then the one that does the most damage will be the one that goes wrong. Given the most inopportune time for something to go wrong, that’s when it will happen. Whatever happens enough times to annoy you will happen at least once more. If you joke about something for a long time, you will spoil it.
In a sense, this interesting prediction repeats the second law of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics state that “entropy must always increase in the universe and in any hypothetical system isolated in it”. The practical application of the second law of thermodynamics shows that it is necessary to introduce energy into any system in order to compensate for the effects of entropy.
With this extrapolation, the second law of thermodynamics explains why a table or a garage becomes more and more unwieldy until cleaning (injection of energy) is started. Although the law was intended as a confirmation of scientific property, it was used by “philosophers” who defined the system as a machine, a house, an economy, a civilization, or anything else that was dirty. In this format, the law was popularized by science fiction writer Larry Niven as “Finagles’ Law of Dynamic Negatives” (sometimes known as “Finagles’ Corollary to Murphy’s Law”). The author of the laws was Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an American Air Force engineer who in 1947 participated in an experiment with a rocket skid in which all 16 booster instruments were installed incorrectly. as a result of Murphy’s observation.
As Edward J. Murphy and his team broke new ground, they could not rely on tried and tested procedures effectively used elsewhere in the military to ensure that there were no defects. As a result, they had to rely on their own initiative to get things right, and could actually rely on one team member in particular to step on the proverbial banana peel. On Monday morning, Simon L. Tod made a list of the key things he needed to do this week, when they should have been done, and some of the reasons why they could go wrong.
Things that Simon L. Tod didn’t expect happened, and something always went wrong at 5:00 pm on a Friday, or just when the team started working on a rush order. He now realized that the theory predicted that shortly before the deadline, something other than the risks he expected would go wrong. Stapp replied that it was because they always considered Murphy’s law; Stapp then summarized Murphy’s law and said that in general this means that it is important to consider all possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before testing and taking steps to counteract them.
In more recent publications, the phrase “whatever happens, will happen” is sometimes referred to as “Murphy’s law”, which raises the possibility – if something goes wrong – that “Murphy” is a misinformed “De Morgan” (one of the options, Incidentally, Fellow Steven Goranson was nominated on the list of the American Dialect Society). Murphy’s Law, which governs the presentation of evaluation results, states that the broader and more complete the evaluation, the less likely it is that its results will be used by decision makers.