As with anything sufficiently universal, the origins of Murphy’s Law—which broadly states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong—are disputed. No doubt people have been expressing something similar for as long as there has been language and our cave-dwelling ancestors were wondering why it always rained on their woolly mammoth barbecue. Still, we know that the Murphy bit was coined by an American aerospace engineer, Edward A. Murphy Jr., after a mishap during the testing of a rocket sled in the late 1940s. As he said: “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

The inference—that there is human agency at work in the catastrophe—is subtly different from how Murphy’s Law is more commonly used, which has a more fatalistic sense. The classic example is that a piece of toast will always fall on the buttered side. In this vision, all human endeavor is a Sisyphean struggle against a universe that wants to ruin your breakfast. 

There may be an element of pessimistic selection bias at work here: We remember the things that go wrong more clearly than those which pass without incident, and it’s always more amusing to talk about disasters than triumphs. But various experiments have been performed to put Murphy’s Law to the test. One study concluded that a standard piece of toast, standardly buttered and dropped from a standard kitchen table, will tend to complete one rotation: Murphy’s Law turned into simple physics. Murphy’s Law also seems to echo the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy will always increase. No matter how organized you might be, a sock drawer will inevitably move toward disorder over time . . . and you will end up with mismatched socks.

If there is a lesson to be taken from Murphy’s Law and its cousins, such as Sod’s Law, it’s that a little humility and forgiveness never go amiss. In copyediting, there is Muphry’s Law, which states that if ever you criticize someone’s proofreading, you will make your own mistakes in the process. And of course, when things go wrong, it may not be through malice or incompetence, but simply a natural order asserting itself. As frustrating as Murphy’s Law can be to encounter (especially if you have a white carpet), it is ultimately proof of the fact that we are all in this together, doing our best as we travel through a cold and uncaring cosmos.