Murphy's Law

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. Nick Spark fell down a rabbit hole tracking down the origins of Murphy’s Law, the ubiquitous phrase that says “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”. On this episode of Decoder Ring, we follow Nick on his journey while taking a few detours of our own to find out how Murphy’s Law was [maybe] born out of the rocket sled experiments of the dawning jet age. We talk to Nick, hear some of the recordings he collected during his own research, plus talk to researchers who are skeptical of Nick’s hypothesis, all to try and find out how an obscure engineering aphorism spread to world-conquering philosophical observation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast contains explicit language.
0:07.0	There's a place out in the Mojave Desert called Edwards Air Force Base.
0:14.0	After World War II, it became the desolate hub of the dawning jet age.
0:18.2	The place where the Army had its best test pilots do the incredibly dangerous work of trying out a whole new generation of experimental aircraft.
0:26.0	In 1947, it's where the pilot Chuck Yeager first cracked the sound barrier.
0:32.0	Eventually, it's where others achieved unprecedented
0:34.7	speeds of over 4,000 miles per hour, six times the speed of sound. It's where pilots
0:40.4	flew as high as 100,000 feet right to the edges of outer space.
0:44.0	It's where over 40 different types of jets were tested out for the first time,
0:48.0	and it's where dozens died in the process.
0:50.0	Tom Wolf in his book The Right Stuff, about the early years of the space program
0:54.6	describes Edwards like this. The place was utterly primitive, nothing but
0:58.9	bare bones, bleached tarpollons, and corrugated tin rippling in the heat, a fossil landscape that had long
1:05.1	since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. In the summer, the temperature
1:09.9	went up to 110 degrees. The sun baked the ground hard. The lake beds became the greatest
1:15.2	natural landing fields ever discovered.
1:18.4	It's a kind of storied evocative place that has fascinated many people.
1:22.7	Nick Spark is one of them.
1:24.1	Well, I had read the book, the right stuff,
1:25.9	before I saw the movie, and just was infatuated with it.
1:30.0	Just loved all those stories.
1:32.0	By the early 2000s, Nick had turned this interest into a job.
	...

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