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?
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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It sounds more like he's pointing out a literary trope to me.
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:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
I've had so many people use the third law there in shitty arguments and acting like it's an irrefutable scientific fact it's soured that quote for me.
Maxim 24 of the The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries
I came here for the Schlock, I'm leaving satisfied.
The Grey’s Law variant, “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice,” is how I interpret our current reality.
I'd heard of that as Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Edit: Hanlon, not Hanson
Don’t know why this has to be a binary choice. People can be stupid and mean.
I usually agree with this, which is why i hated the r/theyknew subreddit, where people claimed everything ever was on purpose and never thought anyone could simply make a mistake however obvious it could be.
however not only does this not apply to politics, it's almost certainly reversed every time, even if stupidity is involved. for example Republicans are stupid, but they don't do what they do because they're stupid; they do it because they're demons.
Politics and money. If a "mistake" financially benefits a company, there's a 99% chance it was actually malice/greed.
And it is used as a blank check by malicious politicians around the world since decades, if not centuries.
That's Hanlon.
Said stupidity in this case shall be applied to your autocorrect.
Haha, thanks, and yes I'm pretty sure it was autocorrect.
Mmm
This is brilliant! The Hanlon-Clarke variant is a nicer name though
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).
According to Calvin's dad, bridges are built following Clarke's 2nd law:
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.
That last one fits most of Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems.
This is pretty much what I see in Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" universe.
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!
Aether sprites play in the ley lines and drag things along with them, got it.
It's new cool tech until my parents stop being afraid of it. By that time it's been corrupted by evil.
The last one there is my basic philosophy for real life. Magic is real, we just understand it really, really well
Well we did trap lightning in rocks and teach them to think https://jakec007.github.io/2020-06-28-how-we-trick-rocks-to-think/
"Magic is science you can't explain, and science is magic you can explain." - my daughter
What is your daughter, some kind of uneducated child? That's not true at all.
Thank you, Sheldon.
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.
I don't really think of magic as entertainment.
That's like saying that technology is entertainment, because smartphones are routinely used for entertainment. Yet technology is not all about entertainment.
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.
You're going to have to define "real magic" here, otherwise this makes no sense IMO
Testing herbs for effects sounds like folk medicine or alchemy at best, but those have been replaced by more rigorous fields like chemistry and pharmacology.
Thats the fun of science