Newswise — What is it about technology and eponymous "laws"? Some are sublime and a lot more are silly. But mixed among the musings are a few laws that actually are laws; for technology, they define how things operate. Ohm's Law relates voltage across a component to the product of its resistance and the current through it, and Kirchoff's Laws deal with the sum of currents at any point in a circuit; they are the bedrock of electrical engineering. But the laws that have reverberated and become ingrained in mainstream culture and even the popular consciousness aren't really laws at all, but rather folksy rules of thumb.
Murphy's Law was first uttered by the military aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr., who is said to have declared after an improbably botched test in 1949 that "if there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." And then there's Moore's Law. People who don't know the difference between CMOS and Spanish moss generally have heard of it.
A little more than half a century into the solid-state age, a half dozen or so rule-of-thumb laws have stood out. How have they fared? IEEE Spectrum looks at o Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip doubles annually. o Rock's Law: The cost of semiconductor tools doubles every four years. o Machrone's Law: The PC you want to buy will always be $5000. o Metcalfe's Law: A network's value grows proportionately to the number of its users squared. o Wirth's Law: Software execution is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating.
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