Stuff You Should Know - How Murphy's Law Works

Episode Date: July 1, 2008

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by Consumer Guide Automotive. We make our buying easier. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com. And with me, as always, is my trusty, Etitrix, Candice Gibson. How's it going, Candice? Going okay, Josh. 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 the way I planned. Well, you know, I know exactly

what you're talking about. You kind of have the feeling that the entire universe is against you. I do. Being kicked around a little bit by the powers that be. 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 that can go wrong will. Yeah, and you know where it came from? I do, actually. It all originated back in 1949. 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 worked for 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. Yeah, but that's kind of a mouthful, isn't it? It really is. And so, Colonel John Paul Stapp, later on, exactly, he was sort of being the mouthpiece of 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 sort of silver-tongued it. Well, you know, there's a lot of confusion. A lot of people slap Murphy's Law into just about anything that goes wrong, right? Indeed. 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 takeoff on Saad's Law. Have you heard of that? No, I haven't. It's an old English saying that any bad thing that can happen to some poor Saad will. So it's pretty much the English version. And in England, they still call it Saad's Law. But there's plenty of corollary laws to Murphy's Law that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Like, take a Torah's observation. Have you ever been in traffic? In the other lane, always move faster. Exactly. That's a Torah's observation. But actually, that's kind of based on a little bit of psychology. You know that? Yeah, it's true. You ready? Yeah. Okay. So say you're sitting in traffic and either side of you, both lanes are moving and you're standing stock still. Of course, you're going to 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 attention to the lanes on either side. So they're most likely stopped or at least going slower than you are. You never notice. The only time we 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 people adopt that, you know, everything goes wrong and that's when they pay the most attention. I use an example in the article, like say you're walking along and you make it to the place you're trying to get to 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 or you fall and skin your knee, you're going to sit there and say, why does it 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, so it's sort of a whimmy attitude.

Exactly. But if you were a little bit more careful or maybe even a little bit more optimistic, you could avoid Murphy's law. I don't know that that's entirely true. I think that the key is optimism. And I know you're not much on faith, right? Not so much. Well, 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. 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 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 them into an equation. And he used his 89 Tercel as an example. You know about that?

That's a Toyota. Yes, it is a Toyota. An 89 one at that. But Pell calculated the probability of his 1989 Toyota Tercel's clutch going out in a rainstorm when he was 60 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 fact that Toyota no longer makes the Tercel. So who knows how sturdy an automobile it was in the first place. That is a good argument or it could mean that Murphy's law is real and we should all fear it. If you do fear Murphy's law and want to know your enemy, go read how Murphy's law works on

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