Murphy’s Law proved!
Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”) was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base.
It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.
One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
The contractor’s project manager kept a list of “laws” and added this one, which he called Murphy’s Law.
There are several corollaries to that famous law that has been proved to be true over and over again!
- If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the FIRST to go wrong
- If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway
- If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop
- Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse
- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something
- Nature always sides with the hidden flaw
- If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong
Here is a graphical sequence that amply proves the Law:
