How Murphy's Law Works

Murphy's law originates in 1949, and states 'anything that can go wrong, will.' Check out this HowStuffWorks to learn more about how the Air Force discovered Murphy's law.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from How Stuff Works dot Com? Brought to you by
Consumer Guide Automotive We make Garbine Easier. I am welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here
at how Stuff Works dot Com, and with me, as
always is my trustee Edit Tricks, Candice Gibson. How's it going, Candice? Okay, Josh,

(00:25):
it's going okay. Oh yeah, you're a little down in
the mouth. I am. Yeah, just everything today, it's just
it's not going to way I planned. Well, you know,
I know exactly what you're talking about. You you kind
of have the feeling that the entire universe is against you,
being kicked around a little bit by the powers that beat. Yeah,
what you're talking about is Murphy's Law. You know about this?
I do. I do. Murphy's Law. It says that anything

(00:49):
that can go wrong. Well, yeah, and you know where
it came from. I do. Actually, Um, it all originated
back in nine so this is an ancient history. This
is pretty recent and essentially the Air Force was doing
a couple of tests on g forces and trying to
figure out how much a human being could handle. And
what it all boiled down to was some people who

(01:12):
worked for a Captain Edward A. Murphy weren't really doing
their jobs exactly right. They were messing up the little things.
And he said, pretty exasperated, there are two ways to
do something. They're always going to pick the one that
results in catastrophe. But it's kind of a mouthful, and
yet it really is. And so um Colonel John Paul
stepped later on exactly he was sort of being the

(01:34):
mouthpiece with these experiments that they were doing, and he
essentially said that, you know, well, the experiments aren't going
exactly as planned. It's all, you know, following Murphy's law, Well,
what's that? And he explained that anything that can go
wrong will so he started silver tune it. Well, you know,
there's a lot of a lot of confusion. A lot
of people slept Murphy's Law into just about anything that

(01:55):
goes wrong, right, But there's actually a lot of corollary
laws that have come about. Some of them are even
older than Murphy's Law, which, by the way, Murphy's Law
is a take off on Sod's law. You heard of
that it's an old English saying that any bad thing
that can happen to some poor side will So it's
pretty much the English version, and in England they still
call it Sod's law. But there's plenty of corollary laws

(02:17):
to Murphy's raw law that whatever can go wrong will
go wrong. Uh Like, take a tours observation. You ever
been in traffic and the other lane always moves faster? Exactly?
That's any tours observation. But actually that's kind of based
on a little bit of psychology. You know that. Yeah,
it's true. You ready, okay, So so you're standing in

(02:38):
traffic and either side of you, both lanes are moving,
and you're standing stock still. Of course you're gonna notice
you're in traffic. You want to get home, but your
lane starts moving again. You're paying attention to the car
in front of you, and behind you, you're no longer
paying to the paying attention to the lanes on either side,
so they're most likely stopped or at least going slower
than you are. You never noticed. The only time we

(03:00):
notice something is when it's not going our way. So
are you saying that we want to feel victimized by
the universe. I don't know that we want to feel
victimized so much, but I think we have a sense
of fatalism. You know that we're all kind of powerless
at the hands of faith. We're not actively making our
own choices. It depends, you know. I think that there's
a whole mindset surrounding Murphy's law that that people adopt

(03:21):
that you know, everything goes wrong, and that's when they
pay the most attention. I use an example in the article, like,
so you're walking along and you make it to the
place you're trying to get to, uh, and you have
no problems. You don't stop and think, wow, you know,
I really am a good walker. But if on the
way you stop and or you fall in skin your knee,

(03:42):
you're gonna sit there and see, why does this happen
to me? That's the thing you pay attention to. We
humans are almost programmed to pay attention to all the
terrible things that can happen to us and ignore all
the great things. Ah. It's sort of a whiny attitude.
If you were a little bit more careful, or maybe
even a little bit more optimistic, you can avoid Murphy's law.
I don't know that that's entirely true. I think that

(04:02):
the key is optimism. And I know you're not much
on fate, right, not so much. Well, I I kind
of tend to believe in Murphy's law just because I'm
you know, clinically paranoid. But you know there's a certain
amount of science to Murphy's law. Did you know that
I did. We're talking about Pell's equation, right, Yes, Pell's
Pell's equation of Murphy. Well, no, it's Joel Pell's Murphy's equation. Uh.

(04:24):
And Joel Pell's this guy out of the University of
British Columbia, and he basically quantified Murphy's law. He took
all these factors like um that surrounding event, like how
badly you want it to happen in a certain way,
or the complexity of the system involves, or the urgency
of it going a certain way, and he plugged him
into an equation and he used his eighty nine ter

(04:46):
cell as an example. You know about that. That's a toyota, Yes,
it is in toyota and eighty nine one at that.
But Pell calculated the probability of his nine toyota Chursell's
clutch going out in a rain storm when he was
sixty miles from home, and he came up with a
factor of one, which means it would definitely happen. Well,
you know, Josh, that could actually be attributed to the

(05:08):
fact that Toya no longer makes it yourself, So who
knows how sturdy and automobile it wasn't the first place?
That is it is a good argument. Or it could
mean that Murphy's Law is real and we should all
fear it. Uh. If you do fear Murphy's Law and
want to know your enemy, go read how Murphy's Law
works on how stuff works dot com for moral this
and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works

(05:30):
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