George F. Will's Op-Ed for the Washington Post "Dark Green Doomsayers" begins: A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." That is false; there is no such corollary. Murphy's Law is itself a corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be stated as disorder always increases. It is not a mantra of the pessimist. It is a scientific law which is absolutely true. If something can happen and you wait long enough it will happen.
Most times you don't have to wait very long. Just think of those poor scientists in the 1970s who had discovered that the climate changes suddenly. They had evidence that the last ice age ended in less than 50 years. (Now we think the climate of Greenland jumped 20 F in three years.) Moreover the global climate had been cooling from a peak in 1945, see adjacent figure from the CRU Information Sheet , so they were worried that a new ice age would start soon. They wrote a letter to the President of the USA, but Murphy's Law struck and temperatures rose!So now what is going to happen? Well if something can go wrong it will, and the Arctic ice looks as though it could disappear suddenly. All I can say is that it will happen this summer, and hope that I fall victim to Murphy's Law and am proved wrong :-(
PS. Wikipedia has a list of corollaries to Murphy's Law. I thought I had better check them in case I was doing George Will a disservice, and "Thing are worse than they could possible be" was there. I shouldn't have worried. The second entry in that list is wrong, so the list is unreliable anyway. Item 2 states "Anything dropped in the bathroom will fall in the toilet (or the sink)." I had an ink jet cartridge today that was leaking, and when I took it to the sink, it fell on the bathroom carpet. So much for Wikipedia!
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2 comments:
Hi Alastair,
Of course, Murphy's Law ensures that your, mine, and the Wikipedia's definitions of Murphy's Law are all probably wrong! Doh! :-)
More to the point, perhaps George Will was actually referring to Murphy's Law of Research: "Enough research will tend to support your theory," or Murphy's Law of Computer Modelling: "A complex enough computer model will tend to support your theory?"
IMHO, I would think a charge of AGW confirmation bias would be one that would, or at least should, be taken seriously. After all, the issue is just a bit political.
Recently some British scientists investigated whether predictions based on Murphy's Law, that toast always falls butter side down, were true.
They found that if a slice of toast was pushed off a table at normal height, it had just enough time to rotate by 180 degrees before hitting the floor butter side down, as Murphy predicts.
It was decided to demonstrate this to the listeners of BBC's Radio 4, and when the toast fell, it landed butter side up, so proving Murphy's Law! One could almost claim that it also proved Murphy's Law of Research.
But a better example of that is the problem with the MSU (satellite) temperatures. They show no warming in the upper troposphere where the maximumum warming should be happening according to theory. After twenty years of research they have finally found a way to alter the calculations so that they get the result that agrees with their theory, and they can now use these new results to recalibrate the thermometer reading from radiosondes which were giving similar results to the MSUs.
So not only have they shown that enough research will tend to support their theory, they have also proved that with complex enough modelling of the MSU data then it will support their theory, so establishing Murphy's Law of Computer Modelling.
But let's face it, the scientist's ususally get things right. It is just Sod's Law 'Things don’t just go wrong, they do so at the most annoying moment’, that when the future of mankind is at stake, then that is when their theories are wrong :-(
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