In 1958, an article in The Nation explained, "There is an old military maxim known as Murphy's Law which asserts that wherever there is a bolt to be turned, someday there will be someone to turn it the wrong way." The article was a sign that Murphy's Law was beginning to flourish in the civilian world as well as the military.

The basic statement of Murphy's Law is "If anything can go wrong, it will." It has enough variations to fill at least one book. "Murphy's Law states that if it is possible to connect two things together the wrong way round, then someone will do it that way," explained the New Scientist in 1967. Or there is "Murphy's first law of biology," revealed in Scientific American in 1970: "Under any given set of environmental conditions an experimental animal behaves as it damn well pleases." One other variant is from the Gulf War: "Anything you do can get you shot, including doing nothing."

Where did this name come from? "'Murphy' was a fictional character who appeared in a series of educational cartoons put out by the U.S. Navy," explained astronaut (later Senator) John Glenn in his 1962 book Into Orbit. "Murphy was a careless, all-thumbs mechanic who was prone to make such mistakes as installing a propeller backwards."

According to another story, there was a Captain Edward A. Murphy, Jr., who worked on the effects of acceleration on humans who were riding rocket sleds at Wright Field Aircraft Laboratory shortly after World War II. Setting up the sensors for measuring physical effects, he managed to connect them all backwards. That supposedly inspired Major John Paul Stapp, one of the people riding the sleds, to name the phenomenon Murphy's Law