How Murphy's Law Works

the mouth. I am. Yeah, just everything today, it's just it's not going to way I planned. Well, you know, I know exactly what you're talking about. You you kind of have the feeling that the entire universe is against you, being kicked around a little bit by the powers that beat. 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. Well, yeah, and you know where it came from. I do. Actually, Um, it all originated

back in nine 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 a 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. But it's kind of a mouthful, and yet it really is. And so um Colonel John Paul stepped later on exactly he was sort of being the mouthpiece with 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 started silver tune it. Well, you know,

there's a lot of a lot of confusion. A lot of people slept Murphy's Law into just about anything that goes wrong, right, 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 take off on Sod's law. You heard of that it's an old English saying that any bad thing that can happen to some poor side will So it's pretty much the English version, and in England they still

call it Sod's law. But there's plenty of corollary laws to Murphy's raw law that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Uh Like, take a tours observation. You ever been in traffic and the other lane always moves faster? Exactly? That's any tours observation. But actually that's kind of based on a little bit of psychology. You know that. Yeah, it's true. You ready, okay, So so you're standing in traffic and either side of you, both lanes are moving,

and you're standing stock still. Of course you're gonna 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 to the paying attention to the lanes on either side, so they're most likely stopped or at least going slower than you are. You never noticed. 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 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, so you're walking along and you make it to the place you're trying to get to, uh, 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 and or you fall in skin your knee, you're gonna sit there and see, why does this 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. It's sort of a whiny attitude. If you were a little bit more careful, or maybe even a little bit more optimistic, you can 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 fate, right, not so much. Well, I 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. Uh. 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 um 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 him into an equation and he used his eighty nine ter cell as an example. You know about that. That's a toyota, Yes, it is in toyota and eighty nine one at that.

But Pell calculated the probability of his nine toyota Chursell's clutch going out in a rain storm when he was sixty 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 Toya no longer makes it yourself, So who knows how sturdy and automobile it wasn't the first place? That is it is a good argument. Or it could mean that Murphy's Law is real and we should all

fear it. Uh. If you do fear Murphy's Law and want to know your enemy, go read how Murphy's Law works on how stuff works dot com for moral this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you