04 April 2011

Murphy's rule

Haven't you noticed when you wait for bus at a bus stop, all the buses go in the direction opposite to that you want to go? When you wait in a queue in railway station, the queue next to yours will move faster and the person in front of your queue will always have a long transaction. A coin dropped from your hand will move towards the farthest corner of your room. When a particular part of your hand is injured, you will more often hit that particular part thereafter. When you try to learn cycle riding on a ground where there is a single tree nearby, your cycle will definitely go towards that tree.
You can find so many such examples and many of them are already put to your notice by rigorous sms senders! But how many of us know that there is a particular name for that phenomena? Yes, there is. And that rule is called Murphy's Law. The law is stated as follows,
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"
The essence of this rule is that the universe is against you! If you do something which has so many possible outcomes, and one of them being a bad one, then that bad outcome will have more probability. There are so many researches going on in this topic. There is even a book titled 'A History of Murphy's Law' by Nick T Spark.
Such incidences often have statistical explanations too. E.g. When you wait at a bus stop, you see buses in the opposite direction because if you get bus in your direction soon, you will not notice those buses in the opposite direction. So statistically, the probability of seeing buses in the opposite direction increases as you spend more time in that bus stop.
I must tell you that the things I told you in the first paragraph is just a common loose interpretation of Murphy's law. Edward Murphy, who was an aerospace designer, coined this word as key principle in defensive design. The law is actually is somewhat too philosophical and I'm not sure all of you will bear it. Interested buddies who can stand philosophical jargon may go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

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