Written by Swastika Shankar; Researched by Pranav Kulkarni, Nilay Aundhe, Ritwik Pattnaik
1949.
Edwards Air Force Base.
A team of engineers, working on Air Force Project MX981, trying to find out how much sudden reduction in speed can a human body withstand in the event of a crash. The only possible way of testing this was to first accelerate a (very brave) human test subject to high speeds, and then suddenly reduce it. The engineers achieved this by repeatedly strapping the subject, John Paul Stapp, onto a rocket-propelled platform on rails, a rig known as a rocket sled.
During the tests, questions were raised about the accuracy of the instrumentation used to measure the forces Stapp was experiencing. For this, Edward A. Murphy Jr., an Air Force Captain and a reliability engineer, proposed using electronic gauges for measurements. But when Murphy went to deliver the new gauges for the apparatus, they malfunctioned. An irritated Murphy allegedly blamed the problem on his technician, muttering, “ If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will.”
Fast forward to a few months later, and Stapp was asked how it was that nobody had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. To this, his reply was that they always took “Murphy’s Law” into consideration, coining the most famous version — “Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong”.
From Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar to explaining your exam marks, Murphy’s law has become pretty popular over the years. We use Murphy’s law to explain certain situations in our daily lives, like reaching out for an eraser you dropped only to see that it is at the least accessible spot, or getting a message or call as soon as you put your phone down to work on something important, and other such instances.
Murphy’s law is nothing new, and versions as old as 1877 have been recorded, and the concept may be as old as humanity. In its simplest form, the law states that “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”, but there are other variations of it. Drucker’s management law states that if one thing goes wrong, everything else will at the same time, while Murphy’s Philosophy states that tomorrow will be worse.
From its initial public announcement, Murphy’s law quickly spread among cultures and fields, and a lot of people had a lot of things to say about it.
According to Richard Dawkins, so-called laws like Murphy’s law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one’s own desires. He pointed out that certain events may occur all the time but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. Take aircraft noise, for example. Aircrafts are in the sky all the time but are only taken note of when they cause a problem (say, during filming). This is a form of confirmation bias whereby one just seeks evidence to confirm his already formed ideas (in this case, the existence of Murphy’s law) but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.
Several others, however, argue that Murphy’s law is completely misinterpreted and is, in fact, a call for excellence. It helps us consider all possible outcomes, (and not just the worst ones) and try to avoid them. People thus are better equipped and feel less stress when they are faced with tough situations.
Further, scientists and engineers prepare for system failures and come up with instruments and devices for smooth functioning of systems and missions, anticipating Murphy’s law coming into play. It is also a very powerful business tool and is used by data analysts and management teams to come up with strategies.
Coming back to the Edwards engineers, the Murphy’s law approach worked. Their experiments revolutionized air and road safety, and for a while, even made Stapp the fastest man on Earth. The Edwards engineers came up with devices to fix all the possible damages that could be caused and ensured that they also have very little margins for error. They succeeded because they didn’t assume that everything would go wrong, but that it could go wrong. And sometimes, that makes all the difference.
