Have you heard of Murphy’s Law? Or have you ever experienced before? I bet you have. To briefly explain the meaning of Murphy’s Law, it’s an experimental rule that can be applied to human’s daily lives while having certain experiences. The term has been first used by Edward A. Murphy, an American captain in air force. There was an experiment calculating body conditions with electrode bars, when accelerated human body stops abruptly by random forces. However, the experiment was failed because all of the electrode bars were connected in a wrong way. In that situation, a captain Murphy said that there is always one exception, which can make the whole condition into a worst state when doing something, and that one exception happens without fail, when people are actually putting into action.
Therefore, the Murphy’s Law largely means a certain moment when all things are messed up. We use this term when trivial misfortunate things happen in our lives. For example, the Murphy’s Law can be spoken when a side with a jam of a bread hits the ground when we drop it, the line that we are standing dwindles away at a slow rate, or when we pick different pairs of socks from a drawer in the busy morning. We usually think that these happens incidentally. However, there recently has some proofs which supports the idea that Murphy’s Law is not an accidental circumstances, but possible scientific happenings. For readers who are curious about how the proofs work for Murphy’s Law scientifically, this post will introduce various verifications for two different daily life experiences.
Why a side with jam of a bread faces the ground when it falls to the earth?
If we dropped just a piece of bread without any jam or additional toppings, the possibilities for each side facing the ground will be 50% each. However, because we spread jam or butter on bread, the probabilities aren’t the same. There are four variables which make the side with jam faces the ground.
- Gravity
- The height of kitchen table (which you use when spreading jam or butter on a bread)
- The size of a bread
- The angle that bread falls from the table (there is no circumstances that a bread falls parallel to the ground. All bread should fall with certain gradient.)
First two variables decide the amount of time a falling bread consumes, and the rest of two variables determine the action a falling bread will take.
When we calculate the amounts of rotation that a falling bread takes, it takes almost a half round. Therefore, unless we make a side with jam of a bread to face down, jammed side will definitely face the ground when it falls down. In a practical manner, there was an experiment of dropping bread that has jam on one side in England, and the probability distribution of each occasions, when jammed side or plain side face the ground was 60% to 40%.
Why the line we stand always diminishes at a slowest rate?
Imagine that there are five counters in a grocery market, the probability that the line we stand shrinks at the fastest rate among those four lines, is one over five, which means, 20%.
In other words, it’s 80% that the lines that we are not standing will shrink faster. It’s four times frequent. Moreover, this numbers of probability will increase proportionally to the increased numbers of counters. When we express this situation with simple mathematical symbols, it’s like as the following.
▪ the number of counters: ‘n’
▪ the possibility that the line of ours will shrink the fastest: ‘1/n’
▪ the possibility of other lines getting diminished faster than ours: ‘(n-1)/n’
In conclusion, we are more likely to be unfortunate in this situation.
Even if we don’t think this much specifically for each situations, we can still proof Murphy’s Law’s existence by a term called, ‘herd condition.’ To understand this term, look at the following two pictures.
These two pictures are showing two different occasions of putting dots on papers. First picture has regularly drawn dots, and second has irregularly drawn dots. Let’s imagine that we had drawn these dots for each papers. Then we notice that we had to put dots with careful consideration for the first paper, and be more random for the second paper. Which one do you think will happen more often and naturally? The second one, right? Just like this, when we assume these dots as unfortunate happenings in our lives, they will happen together and more frequently.
Even Murphy’s Law is such an interesting subject to deal with as a third perspective, it is still annoying when happened in our real lives. Also, because we humans remember bad situations well than the good ones, we tend to be very stressed even about tedious misfortunes. To figure this out, we people all should dismiss our greed, which will only make stupid expectations, and strive to make fortunate things happen in our lives.
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