In 1949, Captain Edward Murphy, an engineer at Edwards Air Force Base in the United States, participated in an experiment designed to determine the limit of human beings’ tolerance to acceleration—the MX981 rocket deceleration overweight experiment.
Among them is an experimental project that requires 16 sensors to be fixed on the brackets of the subject’s chair. The sensor needs to be installed with two wires. Once the wires are reversed, the data cannot be read normally. What is incredible is that when these sensors were installed, Captain Murphy found that the wiring of these 16 sensors was all reversed without exception!
Afterwards, Captain Murphy admitted that this was because he did not consider that someone would reverse the wires when designing the sensor. He laughed at himself: “If a
thing Someone will handle it in the wrong way.”
And this self-deprecating sentence has become the most famous psychological law in the 20th
century – “Murphy’s Law”.
”Murphy’s Law” was born in the middle of the 20th century, which is the era of rapid economic growth and technological explosion in European and American countries. The western world is full of a confident and optimistic spirit. It is believed that human beings will eventually overcome all difficulties and transform everything without any problems. It is invincible. And “Murphy’s Law” sounded a wake-up call to people at that time: technology will be perfected day by day, but people will always make mistakes. If you don’t consider all the possibilities of things, as long as things can go wrong, someone will definitely do things wrong.
As long as there are people involved, it is impossible to ensure that no mistakes are made in every link. The more complicated the link and the more people involved, the greater the probability of mistakes. Arguably, the better our problem-solving methods, the more trouble we’re going to face—things will always go wrong, and the worst will always happen.
Afterwards, people dug further into Murphy’s Law, and explained four connotations from it:
1. Nothing is as simple as it appears on the surface.
Second, the completion cycle of all tasks will be longer than you expected.
3. If anything can go wrong, there will be a great probability of going wrong.
4. If your hunch might go wrong, it will.
Murphy’s Law is simply a pessimistic argument: since things can never go in the best direction, and once they can get worse, they will definitely get worse. So, in the face of Murphy’s Law, can we just resign ourselves to fate?
Fortunately, everything has two sides. Looking at it from another angle, Murphy’s Law is just reminding us that we must pay attention to the various possibilities of mistakes from the details, make comprehensive plans in advance, and kill as many hidden dangers as possible. Bud.
It can be said that on the one hand, Murphy’s Law warns us that the worst will definitely happen, and we should not have blind confidence in technology or probability; , Eliminate potential hidden dangers.
The Asian Air crash in 2014 killed all 162 people on board. Based on various investigation results, it was found that the accident was caused by two unexpected problems.
The Airbus A320 belonging to Indonesian AirAsia crashed on December 28, 2014 while en route from Surabaya to Singapore. At the time, the plane’s FAC (Flight Augmentation Computer) had a bad solder joint. This failure has existed for a long time, and in the year before the plane crashed, this failure occurred 23 times. Each time, the captain had to go to the rear of the co-pilot’s seat and manually pull out the FAC jumper switch.
After all, pulling the switch manually is a trivial matter, so it has not been paid attention to. Before the accident, the captain left the seat again to pull out the FAC jumper, and the first officer took control of the aircraft. However, this time the FAC of the aircraft was in a certain critical state. After the FAC trip switch was unplugged, the aircraft climbed rapidly, and this situation was far beyond the control ability of the co-pilot, so they missed the best time to respond, resulting in The plane exceeded the normal flight envelope and entered a stall state, which eventually led to the occurrence of an air crash.
After the AirAsia crash, a large number of airlines learned lessons, strengthened pilot training subjects on the basis of further strict testing procedures, and prevented minor changes, and added high-altitude flight and extreme attitude flight training to ensure that the pilots will be safe in the event of a sudden stall. have sufficient coping capacity.
There is an old Chinese saying: “The great things in the world must be done carefully.” Since the worst will always happen, then, at least, we can make a comprehensive plan in advance-this is the biggest inspiration that Murphy’s law brings us.
