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Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will. It is named after Captain Edward Murphy, who discovered that all sensors in an experiment were installed incorrectly. Engineers use Murphy’s Law to test and consider all possible outcomes to prevent disasters. There are many variations of the law in popular culture.
Murphy’s law is commonly expressed as “If anything can go wrong, it will.” Sometimes “and at the worst possible moment” is added to the end of the saying. Many problems, failures and annoyances are attributed to Murphy’s law, but most people don’t know where the name came from.
Murphy’s law is usually thought to be named after Captain Edward Murphy, a development engineer in the United States Air Force. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was working with acceleration and deceleration experiments at Edwards Air Force Base. Murphy’s Law most likely arose during his projects with Dr. John Paul Stapp.
Dr. John Paul Stapp designed experiments on gravity, or G-forces. He rode in a rocket-propelled sled that accelerated to over 630 miles per hour (over 1000km per hour). The G-forces were extreme and unpleasant, but even worse was that all the sensors malfunctioned. When Stapp stepped off the sled, each sensor read “zero.”
Captain Murphy checked the sensors and, to his disappointment, learned that every single sensor had been installed the wrong way around. He commented that if people have options on how to do something, with one of those options resulting in a catastrophe, people will always choose the option that results in a catastrophic outcome.
Murphy’s Law is a good reason engineers are always testing, testing, and testing everything. They need to imagine every possible disastrous outcome for these outcomes not to happen. The use of Murphy’s law when designing new technologies is also called “defensive design” or “Murphy’s test”. Designers need to consider all the possibilities that a user could make mistakes and somehow make them impossible or at least incapable of causing harm.
There are many variations of Murphy’s Law in today’s culture. It’s generally accepted, for example, that bread will always fall jelly-side down when dropped, that it will rain as soon as you wash the car, and that you’ll always pick the line at the supermarket that doesn’t seem to have any leftovers at all. People have even been known to try to use Murphy’s Law to their advantage, such as washing cars to make it rain.
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