Scientific
A quantitatively testable relationship supported within a stated domain.
ALL LAWS / EDITORIAL DIRECTORY100 PUBLISHED GUIDES / 7 DOMAINS
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100 guides found
Across every domain and classificationLAW 001Flagship
Systems & Complexity / Risk & Failure
Murphy's Law
Failure paths, reliability, and defensive design in complex systems.LAW 002Flagship
Technology & Computation / Computing
Moore's Law
The economically practical complexity of integrated circuits grew exponentially for decades, reshaping computing and the industries built on it.LAW 003Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Metrics
Goodhart's Law
When people are rewarded for a proxy, they adapt to the proxy, weakening the relationship between the number and the goal it once represented.LAW 004Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Distributions
Benford's Law
In many naturally occurring datasets, the leading digit is 1 far more often than 9, following a logarithmic distribution.LAW 005Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Cosmos
Hubble-Lemaitre Law
On sufficiently large scales, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster cosmic expansion carries it away from us.LAW 006Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Weber's Law
The smallest detectable change in a stimulus is often proportional to the starting intensity, not a fixed absolute amount.LAW 007Flagship
Culture & Communication / Language
Zipf's Law
In many large language samples, a word's frequency is approximately inversely proportional to its rank.LAW 008Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Management
Pareto Principle
Concentration, the vital few, Pareto charts, power-law tails, and disciplined prioritization.LAW 009Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Management
Parkinson's Law
Deadlines, elastic scope, procrastination, coordination drag, and bureaucratic growth.LAW 010Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Fitts's Law
Movement time, target distance and width, speed-accuracy trade-offs, and pointing-device evaluation.LAW 011Flagship
Technology & Computation / Platforms
Metcalfe's Law
Potential connections, network effects, compatibility, participation, congestion, and the limits of n-squared reasoning.LAW 012Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Social Behavior
Dunbar's Number
Active relationships, layered social networks, time budgets, cognitive constraints, cultural variation, and contested evidence.LAW 013Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Second Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy, irreversibility, heat-engine limits, statistical mechanics, open systems, information, and the arrow of time.LAW 014Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Law of Large Numbers
Sample averages, convergence, weak and strong forms, finite-sample uncertainty, and the gambler fallacy.LAW 015Flagship
Technology & Computation / Software Engineering
Brooks's Law
Why late staffing can add onboarding, communication, and integration work faster than productive capacity.LAW 016Flagship
Culture & Communication / Media Effects
Brandolini's Law
Why producing a misleading claim can be cheap while checking, explaining, and correcting it is slow.LAW 017Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Newton's Laws of Motion
Motion changes when forces act: inertia defines natural motion, net force determines acceleration, and interactions come in paired forces.LAW 018Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Bayes' Theorem
Evidence updates a prior belief by comparing how expected that evidence is under competing possibilities.LAW 019Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Statistics
Central Limit Theorem
Under broad conditions, properly standardized sums or averages of many independent contributions approach a normal distribution.LAW 020Flagship
Technology & Computation / Computing
Amdahl's Law
The total speedup from parallel hardware is capped by the fraction of work that remains serial.LAW 021Flagship
Technology & Computation / Software Engineering
Conway's Law
The communication paths of the organization designing a system tend to reappear as boundaries and interfaces inside that system.LAW 022Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Law of Supply and Demand
Prices coordinate competing plans: quantity demanded usually falls with price, quantity supplied usually rises, and their intersection defines a model equilibrium.LAW 023Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Gresham's Law
When two monies must trade at a fixed legal ratio that misprices their market values, the overvalued money tends to circulate while the undervalued money is retained, melted, or exported.LAW 024Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Fechner's Law
Equal steps in subjective sensation were proposed to correspond to equal ratios, not equal additions, in physical stimulus intensity.LAW 025Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Cosmos
Kepler's Laws
Planets follow ellipses, sweep equal areas in equal times, and obey a precise relation between orbital size and orbital period.LAW 026Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Life & Evolution
Mendel's Laws
Alleles segregate into gametes, and alleles at different loci can assort independently when biological linkage does not couple them.LAW 027Flagship
Technology & Computation / Platforms
CAP Theorem
During a network partition, a replicated system cannot guarantee both linearizable consistency and a successful response from every non-failing node.LAW 028Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Hick-Hyman Law
Choice reaction time often increases approximately linearly with the information uncertainty of the alternatives, not simply with their raw count.LAW 029Flagship
Technology & Computation / Information Theory
Shannon-Hartley Theorem
A band-limited Gaussian channel has a finite information capacity set by bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, with only logarithmic returns from added signal power.LAW 030Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Game Theory
Nash Equilibrium
A strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium when no player can improve their expected payoff by changing strategy alone while the others keep theirs fixed.LAW 031Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Earth Systems
Gutenberg-Richter Law
In many regions and time windows, the cumulative number of earthquakes decreases approximately tenfold for each unit increase in magnitude.LAW 032Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Cognitive Biases
Anchoring Effect
Numerical estimates are often pulled toward an initial reference value, even when the anchor is arbitrary or only weakly informative.LAW 033Flagship
Systems & Complexity / Emergence
Schelling Segregation Model
Even mild local preferences about neighbors can generate strong population-level segregation without any agent seeking the final pattern. It is a mechanism demonstration, not a complete theory of real segregation.LAW 034Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Incentives
Principal-Agent Problem
When one party delegates work to another but cannot fully observe action, information, or objectives, a contract must trade stronger incentives against risk, measurement error, and distorted behavior.LAW 035Flagship
Culture & Communication / Memes
Bass Diffusion Model
New adoption can combine an external innovation effect with an internal imitation effect, producing the familiar rise, peak, and decline of a product-adoption wave.LAW 036Flagship
Culture & Communication / Collective Belief
Spiral of Silence
People who believe their opinion is losing public support may become less willing to express it, making that position less visible and potentially reinforcing the perception that it is unpopular.LAW 037Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Earth Systems
Omori-Utsu Law
Aftershock occurrence rates commonly decline approximately as an inverse power of elapsed time after a mainshock.LAW 038Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Black-Scholes-Merton Model
A dynamically hedged contingent claim can be valued from the underlying price process, volatility, time, strike, and risk-free financing under idealized market assumptions.LAW 039Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Cognitive Biases
Dunning-Kruger Effect
Lower performers can show larger positive errors in self-assessment, but the size and mechanism of the pattern depend on measurement, information, task, and statistical design.LAW 040Flagship
Systems & Complexity / Emergence
Lindy Effect
For some non-perishable phenomena with heavy-tailed lifetimes, surviving longer can imply a longer expected remaining lifetime rather than approaching a fixed expiration date.LAW 041Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Distributions
Power Law
A quantity follows a power law when relative changes in scale produce proportional changes governed by a fixed exponent, often creating heavy-tailed variation.LAW 042Complete guide
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Ohm's Law
Across an ohmic element at fixed physical conditions, voltage is proportional to current and resistance is the constant of proportionality.LAW 043Complete guide
Nature & Cosmos / Life & Evolution
Hardy-Weinberg Principle
Under random mating and absent evolutionary forces, allele frequencies remain constant and diploid genotype frequencies follow p squared, 2pq, and q squared.LAW 044Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Feedback Loops
Little's Law
In a stable system over a consistent boundary and time horizon, average work in process equals average throughput multiplied by average flow time.LAW 045Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Game Theory
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
With at least three alternatives, no rank-order aggregation rule can satisfy unrestricted domain, Pareto efficiency, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship simultaneously.LAW 046Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Decision Making
Loss Aversion
Changes below a reference point can carry greater psychological weight than equally sized changes above it, under specified tasks and elicitation methods.LAW 047Complete guide
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Bernoulli's Principle
Along a steady streamline in an ideal incompressible flow, pressure, kinetic energy, and gravitational potential energy trade while their sum remains constant.LAW 048Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Networks
Braess's Paradox
Adding a low-cost link to a congested network can worsen equilibrium travel time when individually rational route choices impose congestion on one another.LAW 049Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Yerkes-Dodson Law
Performance can vary nonlinearly with arousal, but curve shape and optimum depend on task difficulty, measurement, motivation, and the source of arousal.LAW 050Complete guide
Economics & Organizations / Incentives
Coase Theorem
With well-defined rights, complete information, and zero transaction costs, bargaining can reach an efficient allocation regardless of the initial assignment of rights, though distribution still differs.LAW 051Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Birthday Paradox
A group needs surprisingly few people before the probability that at least two share a birthday becomes substantial, because the number of possible pairs grows quadratically.LAW 052Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Hooke's Law
Within an elastic system's linear range, deformation is proportional to the load that produces it; remove the load and the system returns to its original configuration.LAW 053Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Coulomb's Law
The electrostatic force between two ideal point charges grows with the product of their charges and falls with the square of their separation.LAW 054Flagship
Technology & Computation / Computing
Gustafson's Law
If a larger machine is used to solve a proportionally larger problem in roughly the same elapsed time, useful scaled speedup can grow almost linearly despite a nonparallel fraction.LAW 055Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Incentives
Law of Diminishing Returns
Holding at least one productive input fixed, adding more of another input will eventually increase output by progressively smaller amounts, even while total output may continue to rise.LAW 056Flagship
Culture & Communication / Media Effects
Streisand Effect
An attempt to suppress public information can sometimes make that information more visible by creating news value, curiosity, documentation, and coordinated redistribution.LAW 057Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Snell's Law
When a ray crosses a uniform boundary between two optical media, its incident and refracted angles are linked by the media's refractive indices.LAW 058Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Faraday's Law of Induction
A changing magnetic flux through a circuit produces an electromotive force around that circuit; its direction opposes the change that produced it.LAW 059Flagship
Systems & Complexity / Feedback Loops
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety
A regulator can reliably constrain a system only if its effective response variety is sufficient to counter the variety of disturbances that matter at the controlled outcome.LAW 060Flagship
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Markov's Inequality
For any nonnegative random variable, the probability of exceeding a positive threshold cannot be greater than the mean divided by that threshold.LAW 061Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Perception
Mere-Exposure Effect
Repeated, unreinforced exposure to a stimulus can increase average liking or positive evaluation, especially when the stimulus is initially unfamiliar and exposure remains moderate.LAW 062Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Ideal Gas Law
For a dilute equilibrium gas with negligible molecular volume and interactions, pressure, volume, amount, and absolute temperature are linked by one equation of state.LAW 063Flagship
Nature & Cosmos / Chemistry
Le Chatelier's Principle
When an equilibrium system is disturbed, its composition shifts in the direction that partially counteracts the imposed change under the new constraints.LAW 064Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Jevons Paradox
Efficiency improvements can reduce the effective cost of a resource service enough that demand growth offsets, or even exceeds, the resource saved per unit of service.LAW 065Flagship
Economics & Organizations / Metrics
Campbell's Law
The more a quantitative social indicator is used for consequential decision-making, the more pressure it faces to be manipulated and to distort the activity it was intended to monitor.LAW 066Flagship
Mind & Behavior / Social Behavior
Ringelmann Effect
As a group becomes larger, average individual output on a collective task can decline because of coordination losses, reduced identifiability, and motivational changes.LAW 067Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Media Effects
Godwin's Law
As an online discussion continues, the chance that someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis tends to rise, because more turns create more opportunities for an extreme historical analogy.LAW 068Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Language
Linguistic Relativity
The categories and habitual distinctions encoded by a language can influence attention, memory, and judgment in some tasks without rigidly determining what its speakers can perceive or think.LAW 069Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Feedback Loops
Good Regulator Theorem
Every effective and sufficiently simple regulator of a system must embody a model of that system in the sense required to produce successful regulation.LAW 070Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Risk & Failure
Normal Accident Theory
In systems that combine complex interactions with tight coupling, some accidents become difficult to foresee and difficult to stop because unexpected failures propagate faster than operators can understand or isolate them.LAW 071Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Platforms
Postel's Law
Protocol implementations were advised to send strictly conforming output while accepting a wider range of input, improving early interoperability but also creating ambiguity, ossification, and security risks.LAW 072Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Information Theory
Kerckhoffs's Principle
A cryptosystem should remain secure even when everything about the system except the secret key is public knowledge.LAW 073Complete guide
Nature & Cosmos / Physics
Stefan-Boltzmann Law
The total electromagnetic power emitted per unit area by an ideal blackbody rises with the fourth power of its absolute temperature.LAW 074Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Cognitive Biases
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
Without retrieval or relearning, accessible memory often falls rapidly after learning and then declines more slowly.LAW 075Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Cognitive Biases
Peak-End Rule
Retrospective evaluations of an episode can be disproportionately influenced by its most intense moment and its ending.LAW 076Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Social Behavior
Bystander Effect
The presence of other observers can reduce an individual's likelihood or speed of helping when responsibility and interpretation are ambiguous.LAW 077Complete guide
Mind & Behavior / Social Behavior
Pygmalion Effect
Expectations held by teachers, leaders, or evaluators can alter opportunities and feedback, contributing to later performance differences.LAW 078Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Emergence
Butterfly Effect
In some nonlinear systems, arbitrarily close initial states can evolve into macroscopically different trajectories, limiting long-range prediction.LAW 079Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Emergence
Tragedy of the Commons
When users receive concentrated benefits from extraction while sharing depletion costs, individually reasonable choices can degrade a common resource.LAW 080Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Risk & Failure
Swiss Cheese Model
Accidents can pass through multiple defensive layers when their active failures and latent weaknesses align.LAW 081Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Feedback Loops
Bottleneck Principle
The sustainable throughput of a serial flow system cannot exceed the capacity of its active constraint.LAW 082Complete guide
Systems & Complexity / Networks
Robust-Yet-Fragile Principle
Systems optimized to tolerate a known range of frequent disturbances can become unusually vulnerable to rare, unmodeled, or targeted disruptions.LAW 083Complete guide
Economics & Organizations / Incentives
Cobra Effect
A policy can worsen the problem it targets when rewards make producing, hiding, or reclassifying the measured problem profitable.LAW 084Complete guide
Economics & Organizations / Management
Peter Principle
Hierarchies that promote people mainly for performance in their current role can move them into jobs requiring different abilities, eventually reducing fit.LAW 085Complete guide
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Baumol's Cost Disease
Labor-intensive services with slow measured productivity growth can become relatively more expensive when wages rise with high-productivity sectors.LAW 086Complete guide
Economics & Organizations / Markets
Winner's Curse
In a common-value auction, the highest bidder is disproportionately likely to have received an overly optimistic signal unless the bid adjusts for winning.LAW 087Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Chebyshev's Inequality
For any distribution with finite variance, the probability of being at least k standard deviations from the mean is no greater than 1/k squared.LAW 088Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Statistics
Regression to the Mean
When two measurements are imperfectly correlated, units selected for an extreme first value tend to be less extreme on a subsequent measurement.LAW 089Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Statistics
Simpson's Paradox
A trend that appears within every relevant group can weaken, disappear, or reverse after the groups are combined with different weights.LAW 090Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Probability
Monty Hall Problem
With three doors, a prize placed uniformly, and a host who always reveals a goat behind an unchosen door, switching wins with probability two thirds.LAW 091Complete guide
Mathematics & Probability / Game Theory
Condorcet Jury Theorem
If voters independently choose between two alternatives and each is more likely than not to be correct, majority accuracy approaches one as the group grows.LAW 092Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Software Engineering
Wirth's Law
Software can become slower and more resource-hungry faster than hardware becomes faster, erasing gains users expected from improved machines.LAW 093Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Platforms
End-to-End Principle
Functions that require application-level correctness often cannot be completely implemented inside the network and must be checked at the communicating endpoints.LAW 094Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Computing
No Free Lunch Theorem
Averaged uniformly over all possible objective functions, any two non-revisiting optimization algorithms have identical performance.LAW 095Complete guide
Technology & Computation / Software Engineering
Linus's Law
Given enough appropriately motivated and capable reviewers, many defects become easier to identify and characterize--but visibility alone does not supply review.LAW 096Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Media Effects
Betteridge's Law of Headlines
A headline phrased as a yes-or-no question can often be answered "no," especially when the evidence is too weak to support the stronger declarative claim.LAW 097Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Media Effects
Poe's Law
Without a clear signal of intent, an extreme parody can be indistinguishable from a sincere extreme position to at least some readers.LAW 098Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Collective Belief
Cunningham's Law
Posting a wrong answer can attract corrections faster than asking an open question because error gives knowledgeable readers a specific target.LAW 099Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Collective Belief
Illusory Truth Effect
Repeated statements are, on average, more likely to be judged true than comparable novel statements, partly because familiarity makes processing feel easier.LAW 100Complete guide
Culture & Communication / Collective Belief
Information Cascade
In a sequence of public decisions, early actions can reveal enough apparent consensus that later people rationally ignore their own private signals and follow the crowd.NO MATCH
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READING THE LABELS
Not everything called a “law” makes the same claim.
The directory keeps scientific status visible. A physical relationship, statistical pattern, historical trend, and design aphorism should not be read as equivalent kinds of evidence.
Mathematical
A formal or statistical regularity derived from mathematical structure.
Empirical
A persistent observed pattern whose future form is not logically guaranteed.
Heuristic
A practical rule for reasoning or design, not a universal law of nature.
DOMAIN INDEX
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Each domain has a defined scope and subcategory map, so new laws have a stable place as the library grows.
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Nature & Cosmos
Physics / Chemistry / Cosmos / Earth Systems / Life & Evolution
Mind & Behavior
Perception / Cognitive Biases / Decision Making / Social Behavior
Systems & Complexity
Risk & Failure / Feedback Loops / Networks / Emergence
Economics & Organizations
Incentives / Markets / Management / Metrics
Mathematics & Probability
Probability / Statistics / Distributions / Game Theory
Technology & Computation
Computing / Software Engineering / Information Theory / Platforms
Culture & Communication
Language / Media Effects / Memes / Collective Belief