Murphy's law

• Murphy's Law

Named after Edward A. Murphy Jr. (1918–1990), a development engineer who worked for a brief time on the rocket-sled experiments of the United States Air Force in 1948.

Murphy's law

1. An adage which states that if anything can go wrong, then it will.

   Synonyms: Sod's law, Finagle's law

   • 1953, Anne Roe, The Making of a Scientist, page 214:

     I ran into the perfect exemplification of “Murphy's law” at one university, where everything that could go wrong did!

   • 2004, Ian Stewart, Math Hysteria, OUP Oxford, →ISBN:

     Thus we find that Murphy's Law is not a coincidence at all, but the consequence of a deep ‘anthropomurphic^[sic] principle’: any universe built along conventional lines that contains intelligent polymurphs will conform to Murphy's Law.

   • 2014, Muriel Spark, The Golden Fleece, Carcanet, →ISBN:

     ‘It was an application of Murphy's Law,’ said one Vatican dignitary in a resigned voice. What was Murphy's Law? ‘Murphy's Law,’ said the dignitary, ‘is that everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong.’

• Ettore's observation
• serendipity

• Muphry's law

• Murphy's law on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• Muphry's law