law so stated could be disproved using the principle of least action. Variations (corollaries) of the law From its initial public announcement, Murphy's law quickly spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before long, variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Author Arthur Bloch has compiled a number of books full of corollaries to Murphy's law and variations thereof. The first of these was Murphy's law and other reasons why things go wrong!. Yhprum's law, where the name is spelled backwards, is "anything that can go right, will go right" – the optimistic application of Murphy's law in reverse. Peter Drucker, the management consultant, with a nod to Murphy, formulated "Drucker's Law" in dealing with complexity of management: "If one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time." Mrs. Murphy's Law is a corollary of Murphy's Law. It states that things will go wrong when Mr. Murphy is away, as in this formulation: The 2014 movie Interstellar includes an alternate, optimistic interpretation of Murphy's Law. Protagonist Joseph Cooper says to his daughter, named Murphy, that "A Murphy's law doesn't mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen." See also Buttered toast phenomenon - Idiom representing pessimistic outlooks. Defensive design - Practice of planning for contingencies in the design stage of a project References Bibliography Matthews received the Ig Nobel Prize for physics in 1996 for this work (see list). David J. Hand ( 2014). The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, Macmillan, . Richard Dawkins (2012). The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, Simon and Schuster, . External links 1952 proverb citation 1955 term citation of phrase "Murphy's law" Murphy's law entry in the Jargon File Murphy's Law of Combat Murphy's Law's Origin Reference to 1941 citation of the proverb The Annals of Improbable Research tracks down the origins of Murphy's law Adages Risk