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Have you ever noticed how a buttered toast always falls on its buttered side? Or how when you are travelling in an auto the vehicles on the lane next to you moves at a faster speed than your lane? Or if you are standing in a queue at the bank or the ticket counter, the adjoining queue moves at a faster rate?
Toastmasters and dear guests these are classic examples of Murphy’s law which states that ‘If anything has to go wrong it will go wrong’. This is not a real law of course. It’s an adage, a saying if you will. But a very interesting one indeed.
If you have watched the Hollywood movie ‘Interstellar’, and actually understood the movie then you know what a Murphy’s law is, but if you haven’t watched the movie let me talk about it a little bit.
The Wisconsin State Capitol Building in Madison has an interesting history. It was rebuilt thrice. In the February of 1904, the building caught fire. And although the building had an advanced fire-fighting system, the nearby University of Wisconsin – Madison’s reservoir, which supplied the capitol, was empty, because of which the fire spread rapidly. The Madison firefighters could not handle the blaze on their own, so additional men and equipment had to be brought from Milwaukee. But being February, the water in their vehicles froze before it could be used to douse the fire. And to make things worse, the state legislature had cancelled the insurance on the capitol just 5 weeks prior to the fire. The entire structure was brought down. This is another case of Murphy’s law, because a lot of things that could have gone wrong did go wrong in this case.
So how did Murphy’s law come about? The Murphy’s law came about in 1949, when an army engineer Edwards Murphy was performing some experiments for NASA. His experiment consisted of subjecting volunteers to peak forces of about 50 Gs. After one such experiment, where the subject nearly had his eyes torn out of their sockets, Murphy had realised he did not have any force measurements because the sensors were mounted backwards. Murphy blamed his assistant by remarking “If there is a wrong way to do something someone will do it”. This is how Murphy’s law came about.
But how true is Murphy’s law? Does the universe constantly conspire against us to make our lives a living hell? It probably does not. We as humans tend to remember our bad experiences and tend to forget our good ones. If something goes wrong, it gets stuck in our head, but we forget the many times things work perfectly. And there are perfectly good reasons for the other things that go wrong in our life. A buttered toast will always fall on its buttered side, because its heavier on the buttered side. And the next lane will always appear to have a fast-moving traffic because, we spent so much time watching the other lane.
So why is Murphy’s law so popular? Murphy’s law probably came about because of our need to blame something when things do not go our way.
Murphy’s Law reminds engineers, computer programmers and scientists of a simple truth: systems fail. And while Murphy’s law can be total nonsense, engineer’s keep it in mind when designing equipment’s. Designers must often take in to consideration all the scenarios that can go wrong while designing something. For me as a software engineer, it means I must code and test for all possible scenarios. We assume that the application users are not smart and must test for all possible inputs.
And while we may think we can actually use Murphy’s law to learn from our past mistakes this is not always the case. In 2014, the Genesis capsule by NASA crashed because the sensors in the capsule were again connected backwards. So yes things do wrong.
Murphy’s law might not be an actual law, but it can be used in a positive way too. Do not hesitate to try something new just because of the fear that it will go wrong. If it has to go wrong, it will. Do not repent the things that have gone wrong. Learn from your mistakes and give it another chance. Always give your best and leave out all the rest.
The capitol building was totally destroyed in the fire of 1904. It was not rebuilt until 1917. But it when it was built, it was stronger and more beautiful than before like a Phoenix rising from its ashes. It’s now a hundred years old and still standing strong.
