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MURPHY'S LAW
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Who was Murphy?
Murphy's Law is often referred to as the proposition that if something can go wrong,it will. Another allegedly correct and original reading of Murphy's law is that if there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it. Tomorrow will be worse is the catchphrase of the Murphy philosophy.
The origin of Murphy's law can first be traced in the U.S. Navy educational cartoons of the 1950s in which a fictitious Murphy was the name of a bungling mechanic whose doings inevitably brought about catastrophes. But the real Murphy was Edward A. Murphy, Jr, one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981).According to Anu, "one experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body.There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later. Within months "Murphy's Law" had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering."
Anything that can go wrong will!
Since then, variants have passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went, spreading to all sectors of human activity, and also providing inspiration to the world of popular entertainment.
The Kellermans
In The Out-of-Towners, a comedy written by Neil Simon in 1970, Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis played the Kellermans from Ohio, a nice couple whose trip to the Big Apple becomes the ultimate fulfillment of Murphy's Law when they lose their luggage, their hotel room, their money and their good names. In the comedy updated by Marc Lawrence, the Kellermans have been remade into 1990s baby boomers suffering from "empty nest" syndrome.
As in the first version,the new Kellermans, Henry & Nancy Clark (Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn) encounter a series of bizarre events as they are being mugged, arrested, chased, evicted, kidnapped and attacked by vicious dogs while British actor and "Monty Python" alumnus John Cleese gleefully makes a vocation out of harrassing the innocent Midwestern couple.
Laurel & Hardy
The
slapstick comedy works of the two comic legends Stan Laurel
& Oliver Hardy are an adequate
illustration and fulfillment of Murphy's Law, too.
In the episode of The Music Box in which they have to deliver a piano, their level of incompetence is such that the instrument happens to be completely destroyed at destination. In their comedy films, Ollie and Stan have several ways to do what they have to do, but, failing to oberve the tenets of the law of parsimony, there is always one moment when one of the two opts for the choice most likely to bring about a catastrophe.
Food for thought!
What does Murphy's law finally mean? Here are three contrasted views about how we can possibly understand Murphy's philosophy.
Murphy Was optimistic!
An optimistic wiew is that losers can take advantage of a good knowledge of Murphy's law and defeat it. O'Toole once said ironically that Murphy was optimistic. This is paradoxically and challengingly true, for a better knowledge of Murphy's law can give us a better awareness of our foibles and defects. After all,if we agree that Murphy's law is descriptive of challenges of design for losers, there are reasons to believe that we can counter it and take up the challenge by adopting adequate decisions. For example, a percussionist doesn't put his sticks in different boxes and then label one of the boxes "DRUMSTICKS"; if it matters where the sticks can always be found, he just puts all the sticks in the same box.Thanks to Murphy's law, we can decide what is the best way of doing things.
Tomorrow will be worse!
Murphy invented an explosive device.The problem is that, according to Murphy's law, we will inevitably make the wrong choice whatever we decide. Murphy's law actually applies to everything in the most fiendish way, always ready to establish a new rule. In music,for example,it is claimed that "On every bandtrip one important piece of equipment will be left at the performance site" What if our percussionist's box is left at the performance site? Murphy's Eighth Law even makes matters worse :"If everything seems to be going well, you've overlooked something." Seems hopeless. Doesn't it?
Defensive design principle
Perhaps this explains why some people think that the principle would be one of defensive design.The idea is that bunglers and losers can only take advantage of Murphy's law as an excuse for their own blunders and mistakes.
Murphy's law is undoubtedly food for thought.
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