Murphy’s Law: Origin, Meaning and Examples

Murphy’s law has come across every one of us in everyday life. When exactly and what is behind it, you can find out here.

Murphy’s Law: Examples

• It always starts raining right when you leave the house.
• The fallen toast always lands on the smeared side.
• Clothes are never found in the store in the right size. Only the ones you don’t want.
• On the train, people always sit down next to you, although there are many other seats available.
• What you are looking for you will only find if you have looked everywhere else before.
• All items always break when the warranty has just expired.
• Five minutes of work always take three times as long as five minutes of free time.
• As soon as you have your hands full, your face itches.
• If everything seems to have worked perfectly, then you just missed something.

• For an unpacked suitcase, you need two suitcases to get the things back into place.
• What we bought dearly yesterday is on special offer today.
• One is always in the longest queue at the supermarket.
• Whenever you walk barefoot, most of the broken pieces are lying on the floor.
• The postman always rings when you are taking a shower or bath.
• If the delivery is supposed to arrive between 7 and 19 o’clock, it arrives at 19.30 o’clock.
• The slow truck in front of you goes exactly where you need to go and therefore costs you a lot of time.
• As soon as you sit down to take a break, someone comes to you with a task.

Murphy’s law: Meaning

Murphy’s law can be translated as follows: Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Surely each of us can be found in many of the above examples. Above all, the law is intended to make it clear that scientists, engineers and the like in particular should also take into account the extremely unlikely extreme cases in order to avert catastrophes.

Murphy’s Law: Origin

Murphy’s Law is a wisdom created by the American engineer Edward A. Murphy jr. that explains human error or sources of error in systems.

Murphy established his law because of the faulty way in which sensors were attached to a US Air Force rocket sled program. The sensors could be attached in two different ways and ultimately the experiment failed because the sensors were attached in the wrong way. So Murphy came to the conclusion: If there are multiple options to get the job done, and one of them ends in disaster, then somebody is going to do it the bad way.

The law is limited to closed systems and cannot be applied to future, unfinished actions, because there is a stronger influence of factors that speak against it.

Thus, the worst-case scenario does not always occur in daily life. But when it does occur, it always remains particularly strong in our minds. We often take positive events for granted, while the negative ones remain for a long time.

However, a cognitive distortion to the negative has been quite appropriate under an evolutionary-biological background. If the caveman did not take emerging sounds seriously, life could be endangered faster than one would like. Simply put, one could say that pessimists live longer and positive events are less noticeable.