“As with many areas of science, humans went into it assuming that they pretty much knew what they were going to discover, and that refining their instruments would just make their existing simplistic picture clearer. And as usual, they were wrong.” —Helen Czerski, on page 241 her book The Blue Machine (W.W. Norton, publishers, 2023) […]
Is it possible to track down the actual detail of a single historical fact? Nick Spark tried. He published his discoveries first in the Annals of Improbable Research (volume 9, number 9), then in expanded form in a book. Three people he discovered—Murphy is one of them—shared an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for (probably) […]
The Today I Found Out blog has a nice appreciation of two—really three—people who shared an Ig Nobel Prize for (probably) giving Murphy’s Law it’s name. The appreciation is called “WHO WAS ‘MURPHY’ IN ‘MURPHY’S LAW’ AND THE AMAZING DR. JOHN PAUL STAPP WHO GAVE US THE EXPRESSION.” The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for engineering […]
If our information is not wrong, Thursday, January 11, 2018 is the 100th birthday of Edward A. Murphy, Jr., the Murphy of Murphy’s Law. Murphy [pictured here] was posthumously awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, shared with two colleagues. The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for engineering was awarded to: The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. […]
