Mental Models: Laws

This section is a collection of well-known laws that have shaped our understanding of various aspects of life, science, and society. These laws, ranging from the quirky to the profound, offer insights into phenomena as diverse as human behavior, physical processes, and cosmic events.

Parkinson’s Law

Illustration of the Pareto's Law showing a pie chart sliced into an 80% and a 20% chunk for efforts, and an arrow showing that 20% of the effort yields 80% of the results displayed in another pie chart.

Parkinson's Law illustrated by a woman sitting at a desk surrounded by a clutter of papers, feeling stressed while the sand is running out in a hourglass in front of her. Time is slipping away as she now feels the consequences of having expanded the workload to fill the available time allotted to her task.

Murphy's Law is a popular adage that states, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." The term is attributed to Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an American aerospace engineer who coined the phrase in the late 1940s. It is often used humorously or as a cautionary reminder to be prepared for unexpected events or failures. Read on to learn more.

Law of Diminishing Returns

Law of Large Numbers

Conquest’s Law

Illustration of a graph that shows how the the Law of Diminishing Returns plays out over time as more resources are added. At first you get an increase in marginal returns. As more resources are added, you get diminishing marginal returns. As even more resources are added, you start getting negative marginal returns.

The Law of Large Numbers illustrated with a dartboard. In the short term, a dart player may hit the bullseye a lot or miss the board altogether. However, in the long run, the dart player's accuracy will converge to the average accuracy of all dart players.

Illustration of political debate within a cross-border organization, showing various well-dressed stakeholders at a wide table with various country flags in background, and a massive chandelier hanging from the roof.

Benford’s Law

Goddard’s Law

Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion

A bar chart illustrating Benford's Law by showing a distribution of first digits. Each bar represents a digit, and the height of the bar is the percentage of numbers that start with that digit. For instance 1 occur as the first digit 30% of the time, while 9 only 4% of the time.

Illustration of Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion

Newton’s Law of Motion

Laws of Thermodynamics

Universal Law of Gravitation

Hubble’s Law of Cosmic Expansion

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