20 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
20 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
Murphy's Law
|
|
|
|
prov. The correct, original Murphy's Law reads: 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. This is a principle of defensive design.
|
|
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of McDonnell-Douglas's test engineers on
|
|
the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949
|
|
to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981).
|
|
One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different
|
|
parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued
|
|
to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 in a replacement
|
|
set the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his
|
|
pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) mis-quoted
|
|
(apparently in the more general form Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong)
|
|
at a news conference a few days later. Within months Murphy's Law had spread
|
|
to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too
|
|
many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination,
|
|
changing as they went. Most of these are variants on Anything that can go
|
|
wrong, will; this is more correctly referred to as Finagle's Law.
|