Murphy's Law is Really Practical Advice

Everybody has heard of Murphy's Law which states that Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. This has become a mantra of sorts for pessimists who always assume the worst.

Anyone searching for the origins of Murphy's Law will come across various stories of its origin along with various versions, all centered on the same theme, of the law. Most agree that this law originated with a statement by one Edward A. Murphy Jr. Many claim that Murphy's statement was not really original but simply a re-statement of an observation that has been around for eons. Further, depending upon your source, there are different variations of the law such as If there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way or If there are two or more ways to do something,and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it. Do a search on the Internet and you will find dozens of other variations. But, regardless, Murphy uttered something along these lines that was both memorable and frequently repeated in the years that followed, with the result that, for now, this observation has come to be known as Murphy's Law.

Edward Murphy was born in 1918 and died in 1990 and most accounts have the law originating with an observation he made in 1949 while in the Air Force working on high speed rocket sled experiments on a project designated by the Air Force as Project MX981.

According to Murphy and his son, Edward A. Murphy III, the more accurate versions of the law, as he intended it, are those that place the emphasis on people screwing up such as, If there are two or more ways to do something,and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it.

It is people, not systems or machines with usually cause failure and the point of the law is that systems and components should be designed to minimize the possible range of mistakes that people can make. With engineering systems it is often possible, if great care is taken, to design mechanical, electrical, etc. systems to minimize the possibility of operating them incorrectly. This is especially true if the systems are properly tested by representative groups before release and the information obtained used to redesign the system to eliminate the possibility of users being able to innocently operate the system incorrectly.

Thus, Murphy's Law should be looked upon not as predicting inevitable doom or failure but, rather, as a piece of wisdom, the observance of which will help to avoid failure and doom.

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