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Who’s the Murphy of Murphy’s Law?

Murphy’s Law is less of a law and more of an old saying: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” It is named after Edward Murphy, who was an American aerospace engineer who worked primarily on safety-critical systems. Most of his efforts went into developing escape systems for experimental aircrafts, such as the F-4 Phantom II and the SR-71 Blackbird. Murphy thought that people in his profession should always consider the worst-case scenario, so he often cited his old adage as a central tenet of defensive design. However, his efforts to have the law taken seriously were unsuccessful.

There also exists a corollary to Murphy’s Law, called Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives: “Anything that can go wrong, will, at the worst possible moment.”