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News
News: February/March 2018
Remembering Murphy’s Law • Control cars with your mind! (What could go wrong?) • Children and chimpanzees crave revenge — News reports by Anja Steinbauer and Filiz Peach
Inventor of Murphy’s Law Born 100 Years Ago
Does a dropped slice of toast always land buttered side down? Is the queue you choose at the supermarket checkout always the slowest moving? January saw the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward A. Murphy Jr, inventor of Murphy’s Law. An aerospace engineer, he is reported to have said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” during a frustrating set of rocket-sled experiments in 1949 in which he was investigating how much acceleration the human body could withstand. As it turned out, the sixteen painstakingly-arranged sensors on the test pilot had been fastened at the wrong angle so that no readings could be taken. Murphy was irritated by jocular interpretations of his Law; far from being a fatalist he simply wanted to highlight as a design principle that: “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will at some point do it.
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