Murphy's law: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Line 35: Line 35:




poop
== The spirit of the law ==
Regardless of the exact composition and origin of the phrase, its spirit embodies the principle of [[defensive design]] — anticipating the mistakes the end-user is likely to make. Murphy's g-force sensors failed because there existed two different ways to connect them; one way would result in correct readings, while the other would result in no readings at all. The end-user — Murphy's assistant, in the historical account — had a choice to make when connecting the wires. When the wrong choice was made, the sensors did not do their job properly. Thus, defensive design is sometimes referred to as a "Murphy proofing" procedure.

In most well-designed technology intended for use by the average consumer, incorrect connections are made difficult. For example, the 3.5-inch [[floppy disk]] used in many [[personal computer]]s will not easily fit into the drive unless it is oriented correctly. In contrast, the older 5.25-inch floppy disk could be inserted in a variety of orientations that might damage the disk or drive. The newer [[CD-ROM]] and [[DVD]] technologies permit one incorrect orientation — the disc may be inserted upside-down, which is harmless to the disc. A defensive designer knows that if it is possible for the disc to be inserted the wrong way, someone will eventually try it. Fatalists observe that even if it seemingly is not possible to perform something incorrectly, someone will eventually manage it. This is often expressed as "Make something idiot-proof, and they will build a better idiot".

From its initial public announcement, Murphy's law quickly spread to various technical cultures connected to [[aerospace engineering]]. Before long, variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Generally, the spirit of Murphy's law captures the common tendency to emphasize the negative things that occur in everyday life; in this sense, the law is typically formulated as some variant of "If anything ''can'' go wrong, it ''will''," a variant often known as "[[Finagle's law]]" or "[[Sod's law]]" (chiefly British). Laws such as Murphy's are a direct expression of such seeming perversities in the order of the universe.
<!--- I've concerns I've read all this before verbatim somewhere... damn it, it's still funny!
Additional mutations of the law and its corollaries have developed, many of them [[meta-|meta]]-laws in some way, either through some form of [[self-reference]] or referral to other laws or analogies. For instance, the buttered-bread analogy could be further extended: "The chance of a dropped slice of bread landing buttered-side down on a new carpet is proportional to the price of the carpet." (If the buttered side falls facing up, then obviously the wrong side is buttered.) A further example is Murphy's Ultimate Corollary: "If it could have gone wrong earlier and it did not, it ultimately would have been beneficial for it to have." [[John Gall]]'s [[systemantics]] offers further expansion of Murphy's law.

"Laws" can occasionally be found to lead to a [[paradox]], or which have positive outcomes; for example: when a [[cat]] is dropped from above a certain height, it will always land on its feet. In almost a canonical example of the hackish love for wordplay and cultural in-jokes, it has been noted that, therefore, if you strap a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat, butter side up, and drop the cat out a window, it will fall to approximately a foot above the street, and hover there, spinning.
--->

Some state that Murphy's law cannot operate as a subset of something useful; for example: "It will start raining as soon as I start washing my car, except when I wash the car for the purpose of causing rain." O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's law is: "Murphy was an optimist!" These mutant versions demonstrate Murphy's law acting on itself, or perhaps Finagle's law acting on Murphy's law. These perversions of Murphy's Law can be summed up in Silverman's Paradox: "If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will."
<!---

Author [[Arthur Bloch]] has compiled a number of books full of corollaries to Murphy's law and variations thereof. These include the original ''Murphy's Law'' (1977) and ''Murphy's Law Book Two'' (1980), which are very general in scope, and the domain-specific volumes, ''Murphy's Law: Doctors: Malpractice Makes Perfect'' and ''Murphy's Law: Lawyers: Wronging the Rights in the Legal Profession!''. Later, a collection of three volumes was also published. This led to a corollary: "Stores selling Volume I have not heard of Volume II; stores selling Volume II have run out of Volume I". Certainly, when it comes to collecting the meta-laws, "If something is worth doing, it is worth overdoing".

Murphy's Law is sometimes also presented as a life philosophy. Also embodying defensive design, many simply see it as a way of saying in the approach of anything whatsoever that could have a possible flaw (be it an engineering project, a romantic relationship, an argumentative case, carrying an upright bass down a flight of stairs, or putting on your suit), then it's always within good measure to make the necessary precautions to make sure that those flaws can't happen. Many see it as the initial meaning behind what Murphy was saying, a simple philosophy of defensive design that has been highly misinterpreted. However, this is left open to controversy.

<!--NOTE: This is NOT to be a list. It is only to have a couple of select demonstrative examples. -->


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 05:15, 25 April 2007

Template:Otheruses2

Wikiquote has quotations related to Murphy's law.

Murphy's law is a popular adage in Western culture that broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance. "If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way." It is most often cited as "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" (or, alternately, "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time," or, "Anything that can go wrong, will," or even, "If anything can go wrong, it will, and usually at the most inopportune moment"). The saying is sometimes referred to as Sod's law. Finagle's law, which can be rendered as "Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment," is a variation.

History

The earliest known versions of Murphy's law are in reference to stage magic. According to research by American Dialect Society member Bill Mullins, Adam Hull Shirk wrote in the September 1928 issue of The Sphinx, which was then the premier journal for magicians in the United States:

It is an established fact that in nine cases out of ten whatever can go wrong in a magical performance will do so. The great professors of the art are not immune from the malignancy of matter and the eternal cussedness of inanimate objects.[1]

The 1928 version was a variation on an existing saying among stage magicians that goes back at least to 1913:

There is an old saying among conjurers that it is impossible for a performer to know a trick thoroughly well until everything that can possibly go wrong with it has gone wrong - in front of an audience.[2]

Association with Murphy

File:0978638891.jpg
History of Murphy's Law

According to the book A History of Murphy's Law by author Nick T. Spark, differing recollections years later by various participants make it impossible to pinpoint who first called the saying Murphy's law. The law's name supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by the eponymous Edward Murphy. The phrase was coined in adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and was eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later—the first ever (of many) conferences given by Colonel Stapp, The fastest man on earth. These conflicts (a long running interpersonal feud) were unreported until Spark researched the matter. His book expands upon and documents an original four part article published in 2003 (Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)[3]) on the controversy: Why Everything You Know About Murphy's Law is Wrong. From 1947 to 1949, a project known as MX981 took place on Muroc Field (later renamed Edwards Air Force Base) for the purpose of testing the human tolerance for g-forces during rapid deceleration. The tests used a rocket sled mounted on a railroad track with a series of hydraulic brakes at the end.

Initial tests used a humanoid crash test dummy strapped to a seat on the sled, but subsequent tests were performed by medical doctor John Paul Stapp, at that time an Air Force Captain. During the tests, questions were raised about the accuracy of the instrumentation used to measure the g-forces Captain Stapp was experiencing. Edward Murphy proposed using electronic strain gauges attached to the restraining clamps of Stapp's harness to measure the force exerted on them by his rapid deceleration. Murphy was engaged in supporting similar research using high speed centrifuges to generate g-forces. Murphy's assistant wired the harness, and a trial was run using a chimpanzee.

The sensors provided a zero reading, however; it became apparent that they had been installed incorrectly, with each sensor wired improperly. It was at this point that a disgusted Murphy made his pronouncement, despite being offered the time and chance to calibrate and test the sensor installation prior to the test proper, which he declined somewhat irritably getting off on the wrong foot with the MX981 team. In an interview conducted by Nick Spark, George Nichols, another engineer who was present, stated that Murphy blamed the failure on his assistant after the failed test, saying, "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." Nichols' account is that "Murphy's law" came about through conversation among the other members of the team; it was condensed to "If it can happen, it will happen," and named for Murphy in mockery of what Nichols perceived as arrogance on Murphy's part. Another account credits Stapp with espousing it shortly afterwards during a press conference. Others, including Edward Murphy's surviving son Robert Murphy, deny Nichols' account (which is supported by Hill, both interviewed by Spark), and claim that the phrase did originate with Edward Murphy. According to Robert Murphy's account, his father's statement was along the lines of "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way." Other documents indicate that Robert A. Murphy himself changed his story several times on several different occasions, including on a lengthy radio station interview which survives[citation needed].

The phrase first received public attention during a press conference in which Stapp was asked how it was that nobody had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. Stapp replied that it was because they always took Murphy's Law under consideration; he then summarized the law and said that in general, it meant that it was important to consider all the possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before doing a test and act to counteract them. Thus Stapp's usage and Murphy's alleged usage are very different in outlook and attitude. One is sour, the other an affirmation of the predictable being able to be surmounted, usually by sufficient planning and redundancy. Hill and Nichol's believe Murphy was unwilling to take the responsibility for the device's initial failure (by itself a blip of no large significance) and is to be doubly-damned for not allowing the MX981 team time to validate the sensor's operability and for trying to blame an underling when doing so in the embarrassing aftermath.

The association with the 1948 incident is by no means secure. Despite extensive research, no trace of documentation of the saying as Murphy's law has been found before 1955, when the May - June issue of Aviation Mechanics Bulletin included the line "Murphy's Law: If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way,"[4] and Lloyd Mallan's book, Men, Rockets and Space Rats, referred to: "Colonel Stapp's favorite takeoff on sober scientific laws—Murphy's Law, Stapp calls it—'Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong'." The Mercury astronauts in 1962 attributed Murphy's law to U.S. Navy training films.[5]


poop

See also

Further reading

  • Nick T. Spark (2006-05-21). A History of Murphy's Law. Periscope Film. ISBN 0-9786388-9-1. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Paul Dickinson (1981-05-18). "Murphy's Law". The Official Rules. Arrow Books. pp. 128–137. ISBN 0-09-926490-0. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • "Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the Fundamental Constants". European Journal of Physics. 16: 172–176. 1995. — Why toasted bread lands buttered-side-down

References

  1. ^ http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0611B&L=ADS-L&P=R11436 "On Getting Out of Things," by Adam Hull Shirk, The Sphinx, Vol 27 No. 7, Sept, 1928, p. 316.
  2. ^ http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0611C&L=ADS-L&P=R229 "How Conjurers Research." The Magic Wand (London) May 1913, p. 529.
  3. ^ http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i5/murphy/murphy0.html
  4. ^ Fred R. Shapiro, ed., The Yale Book of Quotations 529 (2006).
  5. ^ Id.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murphy%27s_law&oldid=125738324"