Template:First law of worker entropy

The JC’s first law of worker entropy (also known as the “meeting paradox”):

(i) The probability of a meeting starting on time can never be 100%;

(ii) As the number of scheduled participants increases, that probability tends to zero.

(iii) The more participants there are the more retarded the starting time (and content) of the meeting will be.

This is true of any meeting containing more than one person. (A single-person meeting, of course, ought not, in a sensible mind, count, at least since Otto Büchstein proved (“occursum ergo es”) that to be meaningful, a meeting must have no more than, but fewer than, two people.)

As a consequence of these axioms there is thus a lower and an upper bound on the number of people possible in a viable meeting of a given duration.