ORIGIN

Murphys law is an eponymous law which was born out of the Edwards Air Force Base in
California in 1949.
Capt. Edward A. Murphy jr. was working on Air Force Project MX981 designed to see how
much sudden deceleration a person could stand in a crash. One day he found that the transducer
on the sled was wired wrong and said "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it" referring
to the technician who wired it and out of this born was the original murphys law i.e. 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. The now known law If anything can go wrong, it will became famous
when dr. John Paul Stapp, guy who rode the sled tesing the deceleration gave a press conference
about the project. The doctor himself had his own adage known as Stapp's Ironical Paradox,
which says, "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an
incredible miracle."
Although this is the origin of murphys law but its spirit was there in british culture much before
murphys law as sods law .Sod's law is a name for the axiom that "if something can go wrong, it
will and at the worst possible time.

Modern Form
From the time it has become famous, people have made other observations and the list of
Murphy s Law have grown enormously all of them have been listed murphys law.com which I
have linked in the description and many books have been written on the topic such as murphys
law and other reasons why things go wrong by Arthur bloch. Some of my favorite modern
murphys laws are friends come and go but enemies accumulate, to get a loan you have to
prove you dont need one left to themselves things go from bad to worse

WHY DO PEOPLE BELIEVE IN IT

So why do people believe in it. Well the answer to that lies in the fact that life sucks, really. But
we actually notice it when something out of the ordinary happens, this is called van restorff
effect, things go south because we analyze and a very idealistic world and cannot predict all the
possibilities from an an event. This has been beautifully summarized in a murphys law i.e f
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 and It will be impossible to fix the fifth fault, without
breaking the fix on one or more of the others

Another reason is fatalism , Fatalism is the idea that we're all powerless to the whims of fate.
This notion says that the things that happen to us are unavoidable. It's the idea that there's some

kind of universal law at work that takes a certain glee at toying with us and we cannot do about
it. Although not everyone believes in this but many people does.

PROOF
Although may people have taken a dig at it, all of them are available on the internet only two
have been satisfactory enough to make it to be called proof
One by a mathematician, a economist and a psychologist commissioned by British gas The
formula, ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)), indicates that to beat Murphy's Law you
need to change one of the parameter: U for urgency, C for complexity, I for importance, S for
skill, F for frequency and A for aggravation. All of these are rated between 1-10.
The second one was by a Joel Pel, a biological engineer at the University of British Columbia
created a formula that predicts the occurrence of Murphy's Law.

Here, PM is the Murphys probability that something will go wrong. KM is Murphys constant
(equal to one) and FM is Murphys factor, FM 0.01. I, C, U and F are parameters on a scale of 110 I is the importance of the result or outcome of the event, C is the complexity of the system, U
is the urgency and F is the frequency.
In an essay he wrote for Science Creative Quarterly which has been linked in the
description, Pel uses the example of predicting the occurrence of Murphy's Law
when a driver needs to drive his Toyota Tercel a distance of about 60 miles to his
home in a rainstorm without the clutch going out. Using Murphy's Equation, Pel
comes up with an answer of 1, meaning the clutch on the Tercel will definitely go
out in a rainstorm, and practical data also suggest that it will definitely go out in the
rainstorm.
Conclusion
So do we need to know about murphys law, yeah we do. Dr. john paul stapp, yeah
the same guy from before said in the press conference that their good safety record on
the project was due to a firm belief in Murphy's Law and in the necessity to try and circumvent it.
And scientist specially while doing experiments always try and think of complex ways it could go
wrong and then try to find a way around it. Although it may not seem as a law at all because
then it has to true everytime but it gives a bigger picture about the world we live in and the fact
that we cant control everything