Murphy's law
See also: Murphy's Law
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
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.
Proper noun
- 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.’
Coordinate terms
Derived terms
Translations
adage which states that if anything can go wrong it will
|
Further reading
- Murphy's law on Wikipedia.Wikipedia