Editing Murphy's law (section)

== Academic and scientific views ==
According to [[Richard Dawkins]], so-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. He gives an example of [[aircraft noise pollution]] interfering with filming: there are always aircraft in the sky at any given time, but they are only taken note of when they cause a problem. This is a form of [[confirmation bias]], whereby the investigator seeks out evidence to confirm their already-formed ideas, but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.<ref>Dawkins, pp. 220-222</ref>

Similarly, [[David Hand (statistician)|David Hand]], emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator at [[Imperial College London]], points out that the [[law of truly large numbers]] should lead one to expect the kind of events predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. [[Selection bias]] will ensure that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true are forgotten.<ref>Hand, pp. 197-198</ref>

There have been persistent references to Murphy's law associating it with the [[laws of thermodynamics]] from early on (see the quotation from Anne Roe's book above).<ref name="Roe" /> In particular, Murphy's law is often cited as a form of the [[second law of thermodynamics]] (the law of entropy) because both are predicting a tendency to a more disorganized state.<ref>Robert D. Handscombe, Eann A. Patterson, ''The Entropy Vector: Connecting Science and Business'', p134, World Scientific, 2004, {{ISBN|981-238-571-1}}.</ref> Atanu Chatterjee investigated this idea by formally stating Murphy's law in mathematical terms and found that Murphy's law so stated could be disproved using the [[principle of least action]].<ref>Chatterjee, p. 1</ref>