TIL about Clarke's three laws, the most famous of which is the third: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
TIL about Clarke's three laws, the most famous of which is the third: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The first two are:
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.
Arthur C. Clarke, the famed sci-fi author who penned these laws, is probably best known for co-authoring the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssee
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There are also two variations on the third law that I like. Not sure who coined them.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
And for those who love crunchy magic systems:
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.
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The last one there is my basic philosophy for real life. Magic is real, we just understand it really, really well
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It's new cool tech until my parents stop being afraid of it. By that time it's been corrupted by evil.
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Yeah, so we have this thing we call magnetism. It creates a field and charged particles try to follow the field. Now we rotate the particles against the field and we get electricity. It is totaly figured out!
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Aether sprites play in the ley lines and drag things along with them, got it.
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The Grey’s Law variant, “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice,” is how I interpret our current reality.
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I'd heard of that as Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Edit: Hanlon, not Hanson
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This is brilliant! The Hanlon-Clarke variant is a nicer name though
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"Magic is science you can't explain, and science is magic you can explain." - my daughter
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Hm, I don't care for that. Magic is flashy and fun because it's entertainment. But science doesn't look like they depict in movies and shows.
As a process, science looks more like that nerd with the clipboard taking notes on mushrooms or nuclei whatever for 20 years. Then they edit papers from other mushroom / nuclei nerds and go to a conference to give seminars and debate the others and ultimately publish more papers and eventually some books, and if we're lucky a documentary. They're exploring hidden worlds in a way that is very opposite of the showmanship and illusions we popularly call magic.
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Thats the fun of science
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Do you think Magicians reading through hundreds of old books is more exciting? Trying a thousand combinations of herbs to see if any one has any effects at all?
You are just being shown the end result for magic in the movies too. Real magic is nothing like it.
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According to Calvin's dad, bridges are built following Clarke's 2nd law:
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The third law has a nice ring to it, but it has extremely deep implications when you're writing science fiction, or fantasy that has magic. Thinking about the law is very useful to keep your technology technology (and not basically magic that happens to run on electricity) and magic magic (and not technilogy that happens to run on plot holes).