9

Murphy’s Law

Nobody knows who Murphy is, but virtually everyone knows Murphy’s
Law, which sums up much of life’s frustrations in seven words: if any-
thing can go wrong, it will.
We’ve already seen some of the reasons that Murphy’s Law has such a
trenchant take on reality. On our earlier visit to the garage, we saw that
changes that seem to be logical ways to improve an existing situation can
actually make things worse. Later, when we look at what chaos theory has
to say on the subject, the tiniest, almost-unmeasurable deviation from the
plan may cause things to go drastically wrong—for want of a nail, the
shoe was lost, and so on.
It’s hard for simple things to go wrong. If the only item on your daily
agenda is to go to the supermarket and purchase a few basic items, it’s
awfully hard to foul that up. Yes, the supermarket can be out of some-
thing (not your fault), or you may forget something on your list (your
fault, but it wasn’t the fact that the task was too complicated; your mind
was on other matters), but these foul-ups do not arise out of the inherent
difficulty of the problem. What mathematics has discovered is that there