Yeah, everyone knows that anything that can go wrong, will. That’s just an observation of life. But reportedly, what Murphy ACTUALLY said was more along the lines of “If there’s more than one way to do something, and one of those ways results in disaster, someone will do it that way.” This law is actually a reminder of a very important design principle: Don’t let them do it that way! When you’re designing a product, assume that people will plug things in backwards, or push the wrong button, or whatever, and you should take steps to counter the harm that the flailing monkey consumer will cause.
So, anyway, as much as I like that second version better, it’ll never be Murphy’s Law. But it’s just too good of a law to lose, so the questions I pose to you are;
Murphy’s Law, which was not meant as a statement of cynical pessimism, is the underlying principle behind a lot of modern industrial safety technology. Don’t assume people won’t make mistakes, make it so they can’t. So that’s why we have fall arrest equipment, light curtains, guards, safety switches, lockouts, and the like; it’s why your house and your car and every place you go has a zillion little safety things that you probably don’t even notice anymore, like GFCI outlets, wall anchors for heavy things, and jazz like that. The basic principle of safety management is Murphy’s Law; the best way to prevent a mistake is to make it physically impossible for the mistake to happen, because if it’s possible, it’ll happen, sooner or later. It’s also, in a more recent and raw form, being applied to managing risks to quality and environmental impact as well.
All jokes aside, the application of Murphy’s Law to industrial safety has saved a lot of lives and injuries.
So I’d just call it Edward’s Law. Murphy’s first name was Edward. He deserves the credit.
The Fastest Man On Earth is the story of the origin of Murphy’s Law. Though it is online, as I’ve linked, I bought the book – after reading it a few times over a couple/few years. It’s a fascinating story, and it took place on my old stomping grounds. The OP got Murphy’s Law right. I’m just out of bed, so I’m not going to check the quote; but it looks pretty close.
Murphy’s Law originated from a remark by Col. John Stapp, who is the subject of the title of the article and book. After his experiments in the rocket sled, he lobbied to have seat belts installed in cars. The man saved untold numbers of lives. Murphy’s full name was Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. Murphy lived from 1918 to 1990. Stapp lived from 1910 to 1999.
RickJay nicely summed up why Murphy’s Law is an optimistic one (i.e., a reminder to make sure you are doing things right) rather than a pessimistic one (i.e., things will fail despite your efforts).
I think of ‘If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong’ as Sod’s Law.
It’s all Murphy’s law. It’s a physical principle of the universe. Poorly defined future events cannot pass from the future to the past through the convergence of the present. The poorly defined future events are ‘anything that can go wrong’ and the present is always ‘the worst possible time’. Rephrasing it in any of the many variants doesn’t change that basic truth.
Research by members of the American Dialect Society has pushed the origins of the term “Murphy’s Law” back to the point in and around 1949 that it almost certainly did NOT originate with Stapp/Murphy and the rocket sled tests.
It was a known phrase used by physicist and other scientists.
As others have stated, the basic priciple goes back quite a bit farther, perhaps a hundred years before the coining of the term.
According to those links, the term may have originated in the physics community. While aeronautical engineers certainly had some schooling in physics, it seems that physicists and flight test engineers largely travel in different circles.
The term may have originated with a science fiction writer. ISTM that ‘rocket scientists’ and aeronautical engineers (i.e., the people who develop atmospheric vehicles) are not the same. I suspect that ‘rocket scientists’ might have been fans of science fiction, while aeronautical engineers might not have.
In a reference from a book written in the 1950s, one person used the term months before the origin given by Sparks. (The last article was written a decade after the events at then-Muroc.)
We know that there was a (then-) Captain Ed Murphy. We know that he made a remark after it was discovered that a technician had incorrectly installed the strain gauges. We know that the phrase ‘Murphy’s Law’ became popular in the vernacular after John Stapp mentioned it.
If the research you have uncovered is accurate, then this may be a case of coincidental independent usage. From the links it’s not clear (to me) where ‘Murphy’s Law’ came from; only that it appears to have been used within a certain circle. It is also clear from Sparks’s book that the term was ‘originated’ at Muroc and named after a known person. It’s possible that an earlier usage was known at Muroc, but there is no evidence that anyone there knew of it before the strain gauge incident.
So maybe there was a ‘Murphy’s Law’ that originated somewhere, and then later (perhaps only months later), by coincidence an unrelated group came up with the same idea and named it after Captain Murphy without knowing someone else had already used it. (This happens to me all the time.) IMO the usage in popular culture originated there in the desert, regardless of whether someone else used it earlier.
I personally subscribe to O’Toole’s Commentary on [the more common perception of] Murphy’s Law : “Murphy was an optimist.”
A variant which influences my approach to software development: “Design a foolproof system, and some ingenious fool will come up with a way to break it.” Keeping this in mind has the same effect as Chipacabra and RickJay described: try to anticipate any harebrained, counterproductive, or downright insane action someone could take in using your application, and take steps to mitigate it (or at least contain the damage).
“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.”– Rich Cook, author
They’re more commonly known as end-users, and fer shure, they will quickly find every bug that you missed (and there will be many).
The last company I worked for exploited this by not doing any testing or QA at all (well, hardly any), and leaving those tedious tasks for the [del]ingenious fools[/del] uh, end users, who always seemed to attack the challenge with great enthusiasm.