[4] The phrase is often attributed to the British scientist C. P. Snow, who apparently was credited by his students for using it to help learn the laws of thermodynamics in the 1950s.
A semblance of the phrase appears to have been first printed in a 1953 issue of the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction, whose editor, John Wood Campbell Jr., referenced acoustic engineer and professor Dwight Wayne Batteau of Harvard University:[5] "I suggest that there are some laws of ethics that are not human, but Universal.
Wayne Batteau and his Speculative Society group at Harvard sent me one little pair of statements that are decidedly revealing in that respect.
It was later presented in the literary magazine The Kenyon Review in a 1960 short story titled "Entropy" from widely-regarded novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was still then an engineering physics undergraduate at Cornell University:[7] "Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they're going to get better."
Science writer Isaac Asimov stated at least the first two laws in an 1970 article, and was being credited with the paraphrased version by the end of the decade.
Though the song was formally released in 1979 as part of a musical soundtrack album, it was originally written and copyrighted by Smalls in 1974.
Notably, the book's acknowledgements mention Conrad Schneiker, who had written about Ginsberg's theorem in The CoEvolution Quarterly just two years prior in 1975.
The theorem may have also been relayed to Bloch in conversation with his acquaintance Harris Freeman, who he knew from University of California, Santa Cruz, and who had found a collection of "laws", including Murphy's Law, Ginsberg's Theorem, and many others, somewhere on the ARPANET (a precursor of the Internet) in the mid 1970s while working as a systems administrator for ILLIAC IV (the world's first massively parallel computer) at the NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California.