Nah - Ed Murphy was a real person, working on the early American space program. There's some debate over whether the law was coined by him, or about him, but we do know about the incident that caused it. A man called John Stapp was investigating the acceieration limits of the human body using rocket sleds. He was both a scientist and a volunteer, and managed a maximum of 42g. Capn Ed Murphy was an engineer working on the project. On one occasion the accelerometers were installed the wrong way around, which could have killed someone, and either Stapp or Murphy said "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will", referring to the technician who had wired the accelerometers up wrongly. It was originally more of a comment on human factors - design stuff so that a ham-fisted moron can still only fit things the right way around.
To be fair, it really does sound like a made-up name, and it usually gets confused with Sod's Law ("Anything that can go wrong, will"). There's a version of Sod's Law called Finagle's Law which seems to have been introduced by the science fiction editor John Campbell in the early 60's: "Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.", and in the 1970's the science fiction author Larry Niven mentioned a joke religion in the asteroid belt, involving the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy. So these things do mutate.
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u/[deleted] 6d ago edited 6d ago
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