It's not in your mind. The toast IS more likely to fall on the buttered side. The science of Murphy's Law

If anything can go wrong, it will.

This well-known and oft-quoted expression called Murphy's Law provides a humorous if not pessimistic explanation when everything seems to go wrong. For instance, when toast falls off a table, why does it land butter side down? Or, why is it so hard to find a matching pair of socks when scrambling to get to work? And the line at the grocery store - why does the line you choose at the grocery store move slower than the others?

Is it all coincidence? Not so. One physicist has made a morbid discovery that's sure to make us throw our hands up in defeat - the universe IS against us.


Click on the picture of Robert Matthews to hear a RealAudio clip of him.
Robert Matthews, a visiting research fellow at Aston University in Birmingham, England, made the awful discovery after testing the common observation that toast falls on its buttered side. First, he tested the theory by dropping pieces of wood the same size over a table. Then he tried buttered toast to make sure "but that gets sort of messy." He found that yes, the buttered side will more likely hit the floor - and not because the butter changes the aerodynamics of the flying toast. "It'll happen with just a light covering of butter."

Matthews found that the toast's landing is determined by its spin rate. The table is too low to allow the toast - or any flat object the same size - to make a complete revolution and land on its unbuttered side.


The more variety of socks you have, the more likely you'll get mismatching socks.
The tumbling toast phenomenon set Matthews on a path of uncovering more instances of Murphy's Law, propelled by a rather subversive motive.

"I think there's a real problem with the way science is presented. There's a 'sniffy' attitude towards the beliefs of ordinary people," says the British scientist and journalist. Matthews has come up with more science to back what many scientists dismiss as trivial.

Take odd socks. Over time, we inevitably lose some of them, and it turns out it's not our imagination when we notice that the remaining socks produce more mismatched pairs than not. It's called combinatorics or the math of arrangement.


Imagine you have multiple pairs of one type of sock. If you pull out any two socks, you will always get a matching pair. If you have several pairs each of two types of socks - there's a 50/50 chance you'll get a matching pair when you pull out two. Pull out three, and you will certainly get a matching pair. The more types of socks you own, the less likely you'll pull out a matching pair.

"The more variety of socks you have, the worse it gets," says Matthews.

Not one to be pessimistic, Matthews came up with a solution. Owning only one type of sock is boring, if not draconian. So Matthews suggests several pairs each of two types. He bought eight pairs each of two types of socks. It worked!

But, socks still go missing. True to Murphy's dictum, "when I went back to the store [to buy more], one pair was cancelled." (Matthews hasn't investigated why socks go missing in the first place).


Murphy's law of queues - The line next to you will usually finish first - is also rooted in simple math.

If you're waiting behind a person with a two-months supply of groceries, it's hardly a surprise if you get through more slowly than your neighbours. But what about joining a line that's identical in length from the ones on either side of you. Is it all in your mind when you are the last one to get through?


Mathematically speaking, chances are you WILL be in a slower-moving line.
Actually...NO.
Over time, it's true that on average the lines will move more or less at the same rate, says Matthews. Each will suffer random delays when for example the cashier runs out of change or a customer's cheque or bank card is declined. But when we're lined up at any one particular time, we don't care about averages, we care only about that one instance. In these cases, chances of you picking the fastest moving line is one out of the number of lines there are in the store. If there are 10 lines, you have a 1 in 10 chance (or 10%) of picking the fastest line. Even if you're only concerned about beating the lines on either side of you, you only have a 1 in 3 chance that you will. You're more likely to be in a slower line.

If these trivial incidents are rooted in the nature of our universe, are others?

Not all, says Matthews. Some are more to do with selective memory than anything else. For example, when your car breaks down on your way to that all-important meeting, you're more likely to remember it than when it conks out at an otherwise insignificant time.

That's some relief. Matthews even provides a solution to fight that proverbial tumbling toast phenomenon. When you see that piece of toast about to fall to the floor, do what you may instinctively resist: "Either swipe it off the plate or swiftly snatch the plate from underneath," says Matthews.

Help it to fall to the floor? Exactly. What causes the toast to spin is the time the toast spends teetering on the plate. If you reduce that time, it's less likely to spin onto its buttered side.

"There's one payoff about doing these things," says Matthews. "You can actually do something about them - understanding is 90 per cent of getting around it."

To learn more about the intriguing Robert Matthews, check out Robert Matthews's homepage.