![\"749px-Rocket_sled_track.triddle.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scientopia.org\/img-archive\/goodmath\/img_303.jpg?resize=375%2C300\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I know better than to attempt to write an april fools day post that really
\ntries to fool anyone. I’m not a good enough writer to carry that kind of thing off
\nin a genuinely amusing way. On the other hand, I love april fools day pranks, and
\nI generally like the silly mood of the day. So I thought I’d write some posts in
\nthe spirit of silliness.<\/p>\n
As someone working in engineering, one of my favorite rules is Murphy’s Law. The thing about Murphy’s law is that odds are, what you just thought when I said “Murphy’s Law” is not, in fact, Murphy’s Law. Odds are, you think that Murphy’s law says “If anything can go wrong, it will”. That’s not what it says – Murphy’s law is almost always stated wrong!<\/p>\n
The real Murphy’s law: If there’s more than one way to do something, <\/p>\n The real Murphy’s Law probably wasn’t even actually created by anyone named Murphy. It dates back to some work done by Colonel John Stapp, a military scientist studying the effects of acceleration on human bodies. <\/p>\n According to the story, Stapp was working with a Major Edward Murphy In a famous error, on the first launch of a new, higher acceleration Someone – accounts differ as to whether it was Murphy, Stapp, or someone else What I like about the real Murphy’s law in contrast to the popular one Stapp later came up with another law, which is known as Stapp’s law, which makes that point even clearer: “The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know better than to attempt to write an april fools day post that really tries to fool anyone. I’m not a good enough writer to carry that kind of thing off in a genuinely amusing way. On the other hand, I love april fools day pranks, and I generally like the silly mood of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-a1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nand one way will result in disaster, then someone will<\/em> do it that way.<\/b><\/p>\n
\non acceleration sleds. The idea of the work was basically to set a sled on
\na track, attach a rocket, stick a chair on top with a test subject (generally Colonel Stapp himself) sitting it in, and launch. A bunch of accelerometers were wired to the sled, so that you’d know just what a given experiment did to
\nthe poor Colonel. (The image at the top of this post is a picture of Colonel
\nStapp riding the sled during one of these experiments.)<\/p>\n
\nversion of the sled, all<\/em> of the accelerometers on the sled were
\nwired backwards<\/em>, meaning that the experiment provided no information – but Stapp walked away with broken ribs and a detached retina.<\/p>\n
\n– who was talking about the technician who set up the accelerometers, said,
\nroughly, “If there’s more than one way to do it, and one of them will cause a
\ndisaster, that’s the one that that guy will choose.” It’s most likely Stapp who
\nrestated this as a general principle, and made it into a guiding principle in the
\ndesign of their later experiments and test apparatuses. Whoever said it first,
\nStapp is clearly the one who popularized it: in press conferences, he told people
\nthat the reason that there were so few serious injuries in their work, despite its
\nimmense danger, was because “they always took Murphy’s law into
\nconsideration.”<\/p>\n
\nis where it assigns the blame. The popular Murphy’s law basically says that
\nthe universe itself is pathological – that it’s just the way the world works. The real Murphy’s law places the blame where it really belongs: given the opporunity, people<\/em> will find a wind to screw things up.<\/p>\n