Clarke's Three Laws - Technology Quotes

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke's three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Origins

Clarke's first law was proposed by Clarke in the essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in Profiles of the Future (1962).

The second law is offered as a simple observation in the same essay. Its status as Clarke's second law was conferred by others. In a 1973 revision of Profiles of the Future, Clarke acknowledged the second law and proposed the third. "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there".

The third law is the best known and most widely cited, and appears in Clarke's 1973 revision of his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination." It echoes a statement in a 1942 story by Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned". An earlier example of this sentiment may be found in Wild Talents (1932) by Charles Fort: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic."

Clarke gave an example of the third law when he said that while he "would have believed anyone who told him back in 1962 that there would one day exist a book-sized object capable of holding the content of an entire library, he would never have accepted that the same device could find a page or word in a second and then convert it into any typeface and size from Albertus Extra Bold to Zurich Calligraphic", referring to his memory of "seeing and hearing Lynotype machines which slowly converted ‘molten lead into front pages that required two men to lift them’".

Proposed fourth law

A fourth law has been proposed for the canon, despite Clarke's declared intention of not going one better than Newton. Geoff Holder quotes: "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert."

Variants of the third law

The third law has inspired many snowclones and other variations:

• Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. (Shermer's last law)
• Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence (referring to artificial intelligence).
• The following two variants are very similar, and combine the third law with Hanlon's razor

• Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice (Clark's law).
• Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (Grey's law).

• Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook (Poe's law).
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
• Any sufficiently advanced idea is distinguishable from mere magical incantation provided the former is presented as a mathematical proof, verifiable by sufficiently competent mathematicians.

A contrapositive of the third law is

• Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (Gehm's corollary)

The third law has been:

• reversed for fictional universes involving magic: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!"
• expanded for fictional universes focusing on science fiction: "Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it."
• used to refer to unexplained archaeological finds and reconstructions of folk mysticism: "Any sufficiently ancient recovered wisdom or artifact is also indistinguishable from magic."