Murphy's Law

Murphy's law

Murphy's Law

• "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will" -- original phrasing by Edward A. Murphy, Jr. according to George Nichols .

• "If it can happen, it will happen" -- precedent condensed by team members according to George Nichols .

• Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. -- attributed to Major John Paul Stapp

• "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way". -- according to Robert Murphy (son of Edward A. Murphy, Jr.) his father statement was along these lines.

• “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.” -- correct original phrasing from Jargon File .

• "Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong, Does" -- epigraph of John Sack's The Butcher: The Ascent of Yerupaja 1952.

• "Colonel Stapp's favorite takeoff on sober scientific laws—Murphy's Law, Stapp calls it—'Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong'". -- Lloyd Mallan's "Men, Rockets and Space Rats" 1955 (possibly the earliest printed use of Murphy's name in connection with the law)

Derivated

• A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

• An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

• If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.

• No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

• The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

• If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.

• Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.