As distinct from Sod’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will”) and Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives (“Anything that can go wrong, will, and at the worst possible moment”).
Murphy’s Law seems to be coloquially used as though it were stating that any time an event can have an ironic negative outcome, it will.
But as I understood it, that’s not correct. Rather, I was informed that it was “things will always go wrong if given the chance.” But recently it occured to me that that is exactly the same as Sod’s Law. Is this correct, or is there some missing fine distinction between the two?
Wikipedia lists it as: “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.”
Aside: Is there a law that states that “in any given situation, at least one thing will always go wrong?” Would this effectively be a restatement of the military axiom “no plan survives contact with the enemy?”
PS. In the interest of full disclosure, I referred to wikipedia to fact-check while writing this post, which may have skewed my perceptions incorrectly.
I don’t know Sod (heh), but Finagle is from Larry Niven’s Known Space books. He’s a sort of pseudogod, not-really-worshipped by a majority of spacefaring types and some planetbound people too. The idea is that people who live and work in space or other highly dangerous environments are either smart and observant, or dead. Finagle is the embodiment of all the hazards one might face.
I always thought Sod, as in Off, was a British thing. So Sod’s Law would be something along the lines of Bastard’s Law in American English.
The original Murphy’s Law was an attempt to get people to pay attention to their surroundings instead of happily doing things the wrong way. (‘Happy’, in this context, means blind and ignorant as well as its usual meaning.) It morphed into the current formulation because of the That Van is Always On the Corner Syndrome: When we notice something, we subsequently notice things similar to that which reinforce whatever idea we hold about it. If you think blondes are stupid, you will notice dumb things blondes do to the exclusion of more intelligent things blondes do, reinforcing your notions. In this specific case, the thing you keep noticing is that things screw up at bad moments.
Here is the story of Murphy. About `1/2 way down on part one is where it came about.
Part way down this page is a comparison of Murphy’s Law and Sod’s law.
You know, before asserting “glaring factual errors” you might try reading up on Murphy’s Law first. Like by looking at the article on it at Wikipedia which, while not necessarily the “best” source of information, at least has reference to the whole controversy about how the law got started, with some rather detailed factual information, all culled from books on the subject. You know, kinda like the Straight Dope.
Oh, and in answer to the OP, there IS no accepted formulation of ‘Murphy’s Law.’ The “Law” itself is merely a formulation of a generally well-known concept that predates the famous Murphy. So, in short, you cannot easily seperate Murphy’s Law from Sod’s Law from Finagle’s Law. Which, in a way, is Murphy’s Law in action.
I was going to reference the site that Rick did as well. It is fascinating. Plus, you can’t get better than the original story for the original intent of the meaning. I actually learned about it years ago from another Doper. The Annals of Improbable Research author put it in a book available on Amazon.
The most formal definition I’ve heard for Murphy’s Law is “The perversity of inanimate objects tends towards a maximum.” In other words, stuff never does what you expect it to do. I am certain that it was originally meant as a joke, a way of dealing with an increasingly complex world of technology, and an acknowledgement that our trust and certainty in progress is ill-founded.
I prefer to illustrate the technological philosophy of Murphy’s laws by various corollaries I’ve learned over time, such as:[ul]
[li]If the assembly of an object requires n parts, then the kit will arrive with n - 1 parts.[/li][li]A tool will fall where it will do the most damage.[/li][li]A $300 CRT tube will protect a 50-cent fuse by blowing first.[/li][li]For the set N of all conceivable tests of a component, there exists a superset M of tests that wholly contains N. Each member of M that is not in N has a corresponding member in the set E of known failures of the component. In other words, all the testing you do ensures that the component will fail in some other way.[/li][/ul]
So, what we’re looking at is essentially a universal thought thing (same concept is developed independently in multiple places at various times), with Finagle’s Law essentially being a corollary to Sod and Murphy’s Laws.
Oh, and as for my brief aside: Is there a law, distinct from the above which only says that something will always go wrong, as opposed to “anything that can go wrong, will?” And if I’m not retreading old ground, can I name it myself?
I once saw a mathematical equation for Murphy’s Law. Of course, I cannot remember the source and I did have to change the mathematical symbol which was originally a pointing finger, but you’ll get the idea.
1 + 1 » 2, where » is a mathematical symbol meaning “hardly ever.”