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The first law has always pissed me off: why are you wasting that elderly scientist's time when you already know in advance what answer you want to hear and will only accept that response as being true?
I never actually read it as a dig at "elderly" scientists but I think you're right haha
Tbf I think it's supposed to be understood more conceptually as seeing how many things we take for granted as being outside the realms of possibility have just not yet been tackled the right way.
It's a corollary of the other famous expression that science advances one funeral at a time. This came from Max Planck and predates Clarke:
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97