Clarke's Three Laws

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.

Clarke's Law, later the first of the three laws, was proposed by Arthur C. 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 on it by others. In a revised edition of Profiles of the Future (1973), Clarke acknowledged the Second Law and proposed the Third in order to round out the numbers, adding "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there."

Other writers have since proposed corollaries to Clarke's laws:

;Isaac Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law (not actually a corollary, strictly speaking):When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion — the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

;Gregory Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law:Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

; Sometimes referred to as one of Clarke's Laws is Amara's law that "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." which was put forth by Roy Amara of The Institute for the Future

Unrelated topics

• Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

External link

• The origins of the Three Laws

Referenced By