What is Murphy’s Law about? Introduction to Murphy’s Law

1. Murphy's Law is about: If there are two or more ways to accomplish something, and one of the chosen ways will lead to disaster, someone will definitely choose this disaster way. Simply put: if there is a chance that things will go bad, no matter how small the possibility is, it will happen.

2. Murphy’s Law was proposed by Edward A. Murphy, also known as Murphy’s Law and Murphy’s Theorem. The original text is: If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of the choices will lead to disaster, someone will make that choice. The bottom line is: if there is a chance that things will go bad, no matter how small the possibility, it will happen.

3. "Murphy's Law", "Parkinson's Law" and "Peter's Principle" are collectively known as the three major discoveries of Western culture in the 20th century.

4. Source of the law

In 1949, an Air Force captain engineer named Edward Murphy made a casual joke to one of his unlucky colleagues. : "If something is likely to be done badly, it will definitely be worse if you ask him to do it." An innocent joke did not have a deep meaning at first. It just expressed the helplessness brought by bad luck. . Maybe it’s because there are too many unlucky people in this world, or maybe it’s because people always make mistakes of one kind or another. This sentence spread quickly, and finally it was interpreted as: If bad things are possible, no matter how small the possibility is. , it will always happen and cause the greatest possible loss.

5. Conditions for occurrence

In mathematical statistics, there is an important statistical rule: Assume that the probability of an unexpected event occurring in an experiment (activity) is p (pgt; 0 ), then the probability that at least one occurrence occurs in n experiments (activities) is P=1-(1-p)^n. It can be seen that no matter how small the probability p is (that is, a small probability event), when n becomes larger and larger, P becomes closer and closer to 1.

7. This conclusion was applied to safety management by Edward Murphy. He pointed out: When doing anything, if there is an objectively wrong approach, or there is a possibility of an accident. Possibility, no matter how small the likelihood of it happening, when doing it repeatedly, an accident will happen at some point. In other words, as long as the possibility of an accident exists, no matter how small the possibility is, the accident will happen sooner or later.