规范如下：

1，说明想实现的内容和形式，图文并茂为佳

2，说明内容出错的形式，图文并茂为佳

3，若熟悉相关知识，贴出出错的代码

It refers to the evils of too much information in making decisions.

Murphy’s law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

It is used as either a purely sarcastic musing that things always go wrong, or, less frequently, a reflection of the mathematical idea that, given a sufficiently long time, an event which is possible (non-zero probability) will almost surely take place. Although, in this case, emphasis is put on the possible bad occurrences.

History

The perceived perversity of the universe has long been a subject of comment, and precursors to the modern version of Murphy’s law are not hard to find. For example, in 1841 a newspaper in Norwalk, Ohio printed this verse (a parody of famous lines in Thomas Moore‘s Lalla Rookh^[1]):

I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side.^[2]

Recent research in this area has been carried on to a significant extent by members of the American Dialect Society. ADS member Stephen Goranson has found a version of the law, not yet generalized or bearing that name, in a report by Alfred Holt at an 1877 meeting of an engineering society:

It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later, so it is not to be wondered that owners prefer the safe to the scientific…. Sufficient stress can hardly be laid on the advantages of simplicity. The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery. If attention is to be obtained, the engine must be such that the engineer will be disposed to attend to it.^[3]

American Dialect Society member Bill Mullins has found a slightly broader version of the aphorism in reference to stage magic. The British stage magician Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1908:

It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, worry, or what not, the fact remains.^[4]

Murphy’s law emerged in its modern form no later than 1952, as an epigraph to a mountaineering book by Jack Sack, who described it as an “ancient mountaineering adage”:

Anything that can possibly go wrong, does.^[5]

Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, has shown that in 1952 the adage was called “Murphy’s law” in a book by Anne Roe, quoting an unnamed physicist:

There were a number of particularly delightful incidents. There is, for example, the physicist who introduced me to one of my favorite “laws,” which he described as “Murphy’s law or the fourth law of thermodynamics” (actually there were only three last I heard) which states: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”^[6]

Earlier, in May 1951, in Genetic Psychology Monographs volume 43 page 204 Anne Roe gives a transcript of an interview (part of a Thematic Apperception Test, asking impressions on a photograph) with Theoretical Physicist number 3: “…As for himself he realized that this was the inexorable working of the second law of the thermodynamics which stated Murphy’s law ‘If anything can go wrong it will’. I always liked Murphy’s law,….” Ann Roe’s papers are in the American Philosophical Society archives in Philadelphia; those records (as noted by Stephen Goranson on the American Dialect Society list 12/31/2008) identify the interviewed physicist as Howard Percy “Bob” Robertson (1903-1961). Robertson’s papers are at the Caltech archives; there, in a letter Robertson offers Roe an interview within the first three months of 1949 (as noted by Goranson on American Dialect Society list 5/9/2009). The Robertson interview apparently predated the Murdoc scenario said by Nick Spark (American Aviation Historical Society Journal 48 (2003) p. 169) to have occurred in or after June, 1949.

The name “Murphy’s law” was not immediately secure. A story by Lee Correy in the February 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction referred to “Reilly’s Law,” which “states that in any scientific or engineering endeavor, anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.^[7] Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss was quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune on February 12, 1955, saying “I hope it will be known as Strauss’ law. It could be stated about like this: If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”^[8]

Arthur Bloch, in his 1977 book “Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG”, prints a letter that he received from George E. Nichols who recalls the event that occurred in 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base, Muroc, California that, according to him, is the origination of Murphy’s Law. An excerpt from the letter reads:

…The Law’s namesake was Capt. Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab. Frustration with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gage bridges caused him to remark – “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will” – referring to the technician who had wired the bridges at the Lab. I assigned Murphy’s Law to the statement and the associated variations. ^[9]

The Matthew effect (or “accumulated advantage”) in sociology is the phenomenon where “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.^[1][2] Those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. The term was first coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 takes its name from a line in the biblical Gospel of Matthew:

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

—Matthew 25:29, New Revised Standard Version.

Sociology of science

In the sociology of science, “Matthew effect” was a term coined by Robert K. Merton to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous.^[3][4] For example, a prize will almost always be awarded to the most senior researcher involved in a project, even if all the work was done by a graduate student.

[edit] Examples

As credit is valued in science, specific claims of the Matthew effect are contentious.

• 20th century mathematician John von Neumann is frequently called the “father of game theory” or the “father of the computer”, even though his influential publications were sometimes restatements of the ideas of his collaborators (see the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC). However, for game theory, the three winners of the 1994 Nobel prize for economics do believe that von Neumann and Morgenstern’s 1944 book did establish game theory as a separate mathematical discipline.^[5]

• There was a controversy involving George Sudarshan and the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005. Several physicists wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy, protesting that Sudarshan should have been awarded a share of the Prize for the Sudarshan-Glauber representation (or Sudarshan diagonal representation) in quantum optics, for which Roy J. Glauber won his share of the prize. Because the terms of Alfred Nobel‘s will restrict the number of Nobel Prize winners to three in a given year, the Nobel Committee has often been criticized for allegedly ignoring scientists who did seminal work on a topic while awarding a prize to other scientists for the same topic.

• In algorithmic information theory, the notion of Kolmogorov complexity is named after the famous mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov even though it was independently discovered and published by Ray Solomonoff a year before Kolmogorov. Li and Vitanyi, in “An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications” (p. 84), write:^[6]

Ray Solomonoff [...] introduced [what is now known as] ‘Kolmogorov complexity’ in a long journal paper in 1964. [...] This makes Solomonoff the first inventor and raises the question whether we should talk about Solomonoff complexity. [...] (Associating Kolmogorov’s name with the complexity may also be an example of the “Matthew Effect” first noted in the Gospel according to Matthew, 25:29-30, “For to every one who has more will be given, and he will have in abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”)

• There are many uncontroversial examples of the Matthew effect in mathematics, where a concept is due to one mathematician (and well-documented as such), but is attributed to a later (possibly much later), more famous mathematician who worked on it.

For instance, the Poincaré disk model and Poincaré half-plane model of hyperbolic space are both named for Henri Poincaré, but were introduced by Eugenio Beltrami in 1868 (when Poincaré was 14 and had not as yet contributed to hyperbolic geometry).

[edit] Education

It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss)

In education the term Matthew effect has been adopted by Keith Stanovich, a psychologist who has done extensive research on reading and language disabilities. Stanovich used the term to describe a phenomenon that has been observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read: early success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of life-long problems in learning new skills. This is because children who fall behind in reading, read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to “read to learn” (where before they were learning to read) their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.

In the words of Keith Stanovich (Adams, 1990, pp. 59-60):^[7]

Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or to put it more simply — and sadly — in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, “Reading affects everything you do”

[edit] Quotations

Witty or clever quotations by unknowns are often attached to famous individuals, for example:

• “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” is often attributed to Plato. In fact, George Santayana wrote it, and researchers have been unable to find the quote in any of Plato’s dialogues.^[8]
• “The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash,” was not said by Winston Churchill, but by his personal secretary Anthony Montague.
• Charles Manson did not say “I’m the devil, I’m here to do the devil’s business.”, his associate Charles “Tex” Watson did.
• Bill Gates never said “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one”, Charles J. Sykes did.
• Otto von Bismarck is sometimes said to have said “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”, but the earliest such quotation is by John Godfrey Saxe, who said in 1869, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
• George W. Bush did not originate the phrase “…the terrorists have won” or “…then the terrorists win.” It derives from the statements of Frank Pierson after he refused to cancel the Academy Awards: “If we give in to fear, if we aren’t able to do these simple and ordinary things, the terrorists have won the war.”
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos did not write “Revenge is a dish best served cold”, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses; neither did it originate in Star Trek or The Godfather. Its first known appearance in print is in Eugène Sue’s 1841 French potboiler novel Mathilde.
• The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is often summarized by the maxim “Shut up and calculate!”. While this slogan is sometimes attributed to Paul Dirac^[9] or Richard Feynman, it is in fact due to David Mermin.^[10]
• The quotation “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing” although often attributed to Edmund Burke does not occur in his works or recorded speeches. It first appeared in the 14th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1968), which incorrectly sourced it to a letter that did not in fact contain the quote. ^[11]

Parkinson’s Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:^[1][2]

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

It was later reprinted together with other essays in the book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958). He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.

The current form of the law is not that which Parkinson refers to by that name in the article. Rather, he assigns to the term a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time. Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting his law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while Great Britain‘s overseas empire declined (indeed, he shows that the Colonial Office had its greatest number of staff at the point when it was folded into the Foreign Office because of a lack of colonies to administer). He explains this growth by two forces: (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and (2) “Officials make work for each other.” He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that “‘Parkinson’s Law works everywhere.”^[3]

[edit] Corollaries

In time, however, the first-referenced meaning of the phrase has dominated, and sprouted several corollaries: for example, the derivative relating to computers:

Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

In terms of computer executable code filling CPU resource (see software bloat), a similar law is Wirth’s law.

A second aphorism, attributed to Parkinson and sometimes called “Parkinson’s second law”, is “expenditures rise to meet income”.

A modern version is that no amount of computer automation will reduce the size of a bureaucracy.^[4]

[edit] Generalisation

“Parkinson’s Law” could be generalized further still as:

The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.

An extension is often added to this, stating that:

the reverse is not true.

This generalization has become very similar to the economic law of demand; that the lower the price of a service or commodity, the greater the quantity demanded.

[edit] Related efficiency

Parkinson also proposed a rule about the efficiency of administrative councils. He defined a coefficient of inefficiency with the number of members as the main determining variable.

Some define Parkinson’s Law in regards to time in which The amount of time in which one has to perform a task, is the amount of time it will take to complete that said task.