As a veteran consumer of butter, jam, and toast, I find it a continuing source of irritation that the side of the toast upon which I put the jam and butter is almost always the side that hits the kitchen floor when the toast slips off the plate. What I’m curious to know is, is there a statistically larger chance of the toast’s falling on its buttered side rather than the plain side? Or is it merely my mind playing “the van is always at the corner” on me? –Hans W., Copenhagen, Denmark
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By far the grandest conclusions to date have been drawn by UK physicist and science journalist Robert A.J. Matthews, who sees in tumbling toast a demonstration of Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”) and by extension the ineluctable perversity of the universe. (Actually, he says “innate cussedness of the universe,” which is to my mind too mild coming at the end of a paper [European Journal of Physics, 1995] that drags in the electronic fine structure constant, the mass of the proton, and the speed of light.)
Momentarily digressing, we note that Matthews attributes Murphy’s Law to an honest-to-God person named Murphy, specifically U.S. Air Force captain Edward A. Murphy, whose assistant apparently hooked up the electrodes wrong during rocket-sled tests in 1949. Initially I was reluctant to credit this too-neat account because its source was a BBC-TV program, which admittedly was by the BBC but on the other hand was still TV. However, evidence turned up online squares with Matthews’s take: while the basic proposition expressed by the law is ancient, Captain Murphy and associates may have given it its modern formulation.
