Scientists Define Murphy's Law

Jesrad writes "A mathematician, a psychologist and an economist commissioned by British Gas have finally put into mathematical terms what we all knew: that things don't just go wrong, they do so at the most annoying moment.The formula, ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)), indicates that to beat Murphy's Law (a.k.a. Sod's Law) you need to change one of the parameter: U for urgency, C for complexity, I for importance, S for skill, F for frequency and A for aggravation. Or in the researchers' own words: "If you haven't got the skill to do something important, leave it alone. If something is urgent or complex, find a simple way to do it. If something going wrong will particularly aggravate you, make certain you know how to do it." Don't you like it when maths back up common sense ?"

Comments

IT'S A JOKE!

[grasshoppa]

Notice the foot? It's supposed to be a somewhat humorous little blurb about something silly.

What a fun crowd we've got around here on Sunday...

Close

[Minwee]

If that actually were Murphy's Law, then that would be an impressive story.

It's not, it's not the same thing as Sod's Law, and the law you're thinking of is Finagle's.

Ironicly, having it called Murphy's Law by a reporter from the Courier-Mail is an example of Murphy's Law.

Re:equals

[Coryoth]

Those axioms are observations. One important observation, one of two axioms underpinning all of math (and therefore science), is "consistency". The other is falsifiability, that only statements that can be proven false are scientific - the rest are metaphysical. Math such as "all triangles are composed of three interior angles totaling 180 degrees" is an observation, that is supported by theories and constructions. Physics applies math by interpreting the mathematical relationships in observed phenomena.

I suggest you go and read some Bertrand Russell on philisophy of mathematics. Mathematics isn't based on observation at all. It's based on what axioms you choose to start with and using deductive logic from there - and you would be very surprised about how basic and not based on observation the funcamental axioms of mathematics are, presuming you bother to look at works that build up math from as small a foundation as possible. On that front, I would suggest you look at Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead, which is pretty much the book on purest mathematical foundations.

Jedidiah.

Re:not a story until there's a real reference

[Jesrad]

My bad, the news.com.au story dropped the last paragraph of the original story:

The equation has seven steps to forecasting a potential Murphy's Law moment, so you can work out which factors you need to change to avoid it:

1. Rate the urgency, importance and complexity on a scale of one to nine and add the three figures together.
2. Rate from one to nine how skilled you are at the task, then subtract this from 10.
3. Multiply answers to 1 and 2 and divide by 20.
4. Rate from one to nine how frequently you perform the task and divide this by 10.
5. Rate the sine (or sin) of your answer to step 4 and subtract this from 1.
6. Divide 1 by your answer to step 5.
7. Multiply your answer to step 3 by 0.7 and multiply this by your answer to step 6, and that's your Murphy's Law rating.

The closer to 10 it is, the higher your risk of falling victim.

That's what's being calculated. I should have provided the SBS link instead.

Re:Bullcrap

[ISaidItOmega]

Actually, most people have the wrong impression of what Murphy's Law actually is. It doesn't state that things go wrong at the worst moments, it states that if there exists the possibility that something can go wrong, then it eventually will. Murphy developed it when he was working on the reliability of systems as a function of their components:

[lim(L -> infinity)][P(L < infinity|some component has a positive failure rate)] = 1 where L is the lifetime of the system

INTERESTING ADDENDUM FROM RBL

[sqwrell]

INTERESTING ADDENDUM FROM RBL (first featured in RBL's KISS Guide to
Windows, 1999): http://rblevin.net

It's ironic. One of the world's favorite axioms on the inevitability of
failure is itself an example of such inevitability. It's Murphy's Law, most
often stated as "anything that can go wrong, will." The irony: That's not
Murphy's Law at all. It's "Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives," devised by
the famous science fiction author Larry Niven. The real Murphy's Law was
coined sometime around 1949 by USAF engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr.

Murphy was part of a team of USAF engineers working on a project that tested
the effects of extreme G-forces on the human body. One such test involved
mounting 16 sensors to 16 different parts of the test subject's body. Each
sensor could be connected in one of two ways: Correctly or incorrectly. On
the first run, a technician installed all 16 sensors backwards, after which
Murphy issued his now-famous maxim: "If there are two or more ways to do
something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone
will do it." Someone did, and now Finagle's Law is almost always misrepresented as Murphy's.

Try it yourself here.

[da3dAlus]

For those that didn't RTFM, the value for each variable should be on a scale of 1-9, with 9 being very high. A (aggrivation) should be 0.7 as set after the study. I put together something in PHP just to do the work for me. The biggest variable seems to be skill--with all others set to very high (9) it certainly "proves" that an idiot can totally screw stuff up.

Re:that is not a limit on math

[swillden]

The hermetic nature of basic math is from a limitation of mathematicians, us, rather than math itself.

You've got it backwards. This joke doesn't illustrate a weakness of mathematical thinking, it illustrates a key strength. Mathematics is all about precise, rigorous reasoning, and that's what makes it both useful and beautiful. Fuzzy thinking that makes unnecessary assumptions limits the thought processes and closes off interesting lines of investigation. What if the the sheep *was* black only on one side? What might that imply? Or is it possible to demonstrate that a sheep that is black on one side must therefore be entirely black? Avoiding assumptions is a good thing, a way to free your mind, not to limit it. Even better is to go ahead and make assumptions, with the clear understanding of what you are assuming and see where it leads. You can even make assumptions that are counter to observed facts and see where that goes (e.g. non-Euclidean geometry -- which turns out to be highly useful in the real world -- was created in the midst of an attempt to demonstrate that Euclid's parallel postulate must be "true" because to assume otherwise leads to contradictions -- only it doesn't).

I'm a mathematician* and I think that joke spreads a valuable and important meme. Don't counter it, clarify it.

*Speaking of precision: Perhaps I shouldn't call myself a mathematician. I have a BS in Mathematics (pure, not applied or any somesuch) which doesn't so much make me a mathematician as someone who once wanted to be a mathematician. I still occasionally study a little math for fun.