The Albatross is now coming along nicely, with the first molt, which will give it bright new feathers, scheduled for late October. However, I am having trouble tracking down one quote: the famous quote by science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that has become known as”Clarke’s Third Law.” Clarke is supposed to have said this:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The one above is the most famous of the three “laws,” and you’ve probably seen it used as arguments against the coherence of any “god” concept. If, for example, Jesus returned to Chicago on the wings of supportive angels, walked over to the University hospital and proceeded to cure all the patients, including the eyeless and limbless, and then ascended to heaven as the skies opened and trumpets sounded, the petulant atheist would claim, “Well, that could only be a magic trick played on us by space aliens with unfathomable technological abilities.” Any supposed evidence for god can always be dismissed in this way using Clarke’s Third Law. I deal with this issue in The Albatross, but you’ll have to wait until it comes out. Right now I need help.
I’m sure you know the quote, and perhaps also that it’s one of Clarke’s three laws, with the other two given here. That’s Wikipedia, which gives the source of the quote, one that coincides with other reports. And that source is supposed to be a chapter called “Hazards of prophecy: the failure of imagination”, pp. 12-21 in the 1962 edition of Clarke’s science book Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (Harper and Row, New York). Well, I did what all good researchers do: tried to verify the quote.
I schlepped over to the library in 90• (F) heat, and got the book. Reading quickly through that chapter, I didn’t find the quote. True, the chapter was about exactly that topic: how some advances in technology would have completely mystified earlier scientists, who would regard them as almost magical (nuclear fusion reactors are one example). But the quote wasn’t there. Another source says it’s in the 1973 revised edition, but the library doesn’t have that one.
So, if you have that book, or can absolutely give the source of the quote, please post it below or drop me a line. Remember, I need accuracy (including complete chapter pagination and the page containing the quote), for the faithful will be gunning for me, and they will glom on to any mistake in an attempt to discredit a nonbeliever.
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Plus, I prefer a different formulation of the law: any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced….
b&
Which is just the contrapositive.
Perhaps, but it also comes with an imperative call to action. Never mind the Jetsons Jetpack; where’s my Ali Baba flying carpet, damnit!?
b&
Scientists develop ‘magic carpet’ technology 😉
http://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-develop-magic-carpet-technology/
That’s not magic, obviously.
Feynman was once asked if he thought we would invent an antigravity machine. He said its right here, pointing to the table holding a cup on it.
Scientists can see into the table and recognize a table truly is an antigravity machine, just not the one I am sure the journalist was requesting.
Heh, I like the interpretation. No surprise that it came from Feynman.
But…but, if he looked like Jesus… 😺
I think even a petulant atheist might be willing to add: “Aliens with technology indistinguishable from magic should not be trifled with.”
As an petulant atheist I’m certain that space aliens trifling with magical technology, would be indistinguishable from my uncle Bob and his card tricks.
Sub
Jerry:
Wikiquote (which is supposed to only have sourced quotes) has this:
Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)
So, no page number, but perhaps the fact that the quote is in the revised edition of the book may help you out. I see that your library didn’t have that edition, but perhaps one of your readers does.
Indeed, you can see the quote in what appears to be a footnote in Google’s expansive book scanning:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OpxZAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=magic
There it says:
The French edition of this book rather surprised me by calling this Clarke’s Second Law. (See page 25 for the First, which is now rather well known.) I accept the label, and have also formulated a Third: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.
That is, this is an actual scan out of the actual 1973 edition of the book. I think that’s pretty good documentation.
Yes it is–many thanks!
This is from Page 21, Footnote 1,
Profiles of the future: an inquiry into the limits of the possible
Arthur Charles Clarke
Harper & Row, 1973
Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
attributes it to a letter to the editor by Clarke in the January 19th 1968 issue Science
But you’ll have to verify that with someone else’s help or on your own.
That seems to be it! I just looked up the 19 January issue of Science; it has a letter by Clarke, which says:
Clarke’s Third Law on UFO’s
I’m sure my good friend Ike Asimov will gladly waive the credit (?) attributed to him (Letters, 8 Dec.). Meanwhile, Clarke’s Third Law is even more appropriate to the UFO discussion: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I deal with the subject at some length in widely available references (1-3) so merely remark here that any really competent extrapolation shows interstellar travel to be a rather simple engineering accomplishment, to be expected within a mere two or three centuries of the control of thermonuclear fusion. The real mystery is the apparent absence of genuine UFO’s.
Arthur C. Clarke
47/5 Gregory’s Road,
Colombo 7, Celyon
References
1 Playboy (January 1968)
2 2001: A Space Odessey (Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, April 1968)
3. A.C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (Harper & Row, New York, 1968)
Asimov has a letter there too, stating that Isabel Garcia is wrong in attributing to him (Asimov) another quote.
If all else fails, there’s Alibris. (Which mostly has newer editions.)
I tried google books.
From Oxford dictionary of science fiction:
http://books.google.ie/books?id=iYzi8m8FbEsC&pg=PA22&dq=clarke+sufficiently+advanced+technology+is+indistinguishable+from+magic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rVz6U6D4CqfN7Aa0_YGoBQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=clarke%20sufficiently%20advanced%20technology%20is%20indistinguishable%20from%20magic&f=false
Gives the ref: A. Clarke Sci (let) Jan 19 )(255/2)
Searching for ‘magic’ in Profiles of Future doesn’t yield the exact quote, but does seem to give something similar in relation to a discussion on invisibility
http://books.google.ie/books?id=ch19NjEERFMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=arthur+clarke+profiles+of+future&hl=en&sa=X&ei=f136U4_QDMmp7Ab4i4CoCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=magic&f=false
The exact quote is in the Google Book scan at the link I give above. Start by searching for the 1973 book, then search for “magic” within the book. It’s in a footnote on p 21.
In this revised edition (1977), available at Scribd, the quote seems to be at page 34, in the chapter “Hazards of Prophecy: The failure of imagination” (should make it easier to find in other editions as well). At least that is what a text search returns. However, that particular page is not included in the free preview, and I do not have a Scribd account to double check.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/201125046/Profiles-of-the-Future-An-Inquiry-Into-the-Limits-of-the-Possible-by-Arthur-Clarke
Thanks!
Well there you go… when the Scribd link was pasted here the entire text became available.
Seems to be a new Word Press feature – we thought this was just images but presto it’s this too. Sweet.
I’d go with gluonspring above; it’s from the 1973 revised edition (I have only the UK paperback edition, and that’s in a box in the loft).
/@
This petulant atheist would proclaim, “hey Jesus, where’s my healing!? I got this sore shoulder over here!”
“Lord, I am afflicted with a bald spot!”
“Lord, I am afflicted with a lack of nubile strippers and beer volcanos!”
I think th5e FSM has those bases covered. Noodled. Something.
The most direct quote I could find lies here:
http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/news/2004/The-ESA-imagines-the-future-again-7391.php
and, if the above works
Author(s) Title Imprint Subject(s)
Martin, Jessica Indistinguishable from Magic: Tom Hunter, Arthur C. Clarke Awards, Interviewed SF Crowsnest [5 p.] March 10, 2008. (http://www.sfcrowsnest.com) HUNTER, TOM; CLARKE, ARTHUR C.; ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD;
I can’t speak for other petulant atheists, but to me the key distinguishing feature between “god” and “being with unfathomable powers” is essentially “should I worship them?” And since I consider the answer to be “no” to the latter, the best you could ever do is convince me there was a being that could do everything ascribed to a given deity (Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, or whoever) – I still wouldn’t worship such a being, so I still wouldn’t call them a god.
Star Trek’s Q is an excellent example – practically omnipotent, but not treated as a god because nobody worships him.
“Star Trek’s Q is an excellent example – practically omnipotent, but not treated as a god because nobody worships him.”
Maybe you don’t. 🙂
Actually, doesn’t Guinan or someone once point out that there’s a planet where Q is known as the god of lies?
Picard’s debates with Q are meant to show that even the above is a mistake, of course.
*phew* now that that has been sorted, it would be remiss of me to not add my favorite Agatha Hetrodyne’s quote:
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.
This idea reminds me of the cargo cults in the pacific after world war two.
Apologies in advance to Jerry for using these comments for my quote research!
Does anyone know the source of this quote? Unfortunately, internet searches have been fruitless.
“It is interesting to note that the properties and abilities of the God of sophisticated theology have steadily converged on those that are vague, obscure, unknowable, enigmatic, impenetrable, inscrutable, unreachable, untestable, imperceptible, and indefinable.
Strikingly similar, in fact, to the properties of something that doesn’t exist.”
“Well, that could only be a magic trick played on us by space aliens with unfathomable technological abilities.”
Exactly.
It may also be that the entire observable universe with all its laws and properties is part of a semester project of one of the alien students with “unfathomable technological abilities” living outside this “dummy universe” 🙂
It appears to be in the 1961 edition of –
Profiles of the Future. Don’t know on what page.
For what it’s worth, I discuss this in my e-book “Why is there anything?” which came out in 2013. In the Chapter entitled “Life” I say “To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced being is indistinguishable from God.” I liken a theologian trying to deduce a god’s properties to Scarlett O’Hara trying to deduce Margaret Mitchell’s properties. That is, it’s impossible and pointless.
I have a republication of the 1962 New York version in “Greetings, Carbon-Based Lifeforms”. I couldn’t find the quote. Since it was quoted in 1965, there are only a few editions that could contain the original. The 1964 paperback edition is likely.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DMAhAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Any+sufficiently+advanced+technology+is+indistinguishable+from+magic.%22+clarke&dq=%22Any+sufficiently+advanced+technology+is+indistinguishable+from+magic.%22+clarke&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8Ur7U-HzKsGC8QH-vIGYBw&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA
One quote site said it was from the 1973 revised edition of Profiles of the Future…
“”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The one above is the most famous of the three “laws,” and you’ve probably seen it used as arguments against the coherence of any “god” concept.”
I think I understood the problem with this argument a few years ago, and stated it at the time. The problem is that it is a philosophical argument that appear (to me) to make no empirical sense.
First, an empirical test is statistical, so usually single observations makes no difference and can be dismissed as outliers. E.g. if magic is non-natural, not obeying energy closure, a technology that appears to break it wouldn’t reject the mass of experiments that obey closure and that together can be used to observe “no magic”.
Second, and more fundamentally, if one would face such an advanced technology, the answer to the question if it breaks energy closure would likely be “I don’t know”, at least at first. That makes such an example unusable.
Perhaps ironically, it is an argument that is empirically incoherent. It seems Clarke knew how to produce deepities (and good scifi & technology).
Back to the Clarke quote, Google’s Ngram search of a zillion books comes up with
Profiles of the Future
Arthur Charles Clarke
Harper & Row, 1958 – 232 pages
P.21
It also finds previous uses of the phrase, usually comparing primitive religious practices that were “indistinguishable from magic” to True Religion(tm)/Yahwism.
My copy of Arthur C. Clarke ‘Profiles of the Future’, Second Revised and Re-Set Printing 1973, Pan, London, lists the Third Law as a footnote on p. 39, the end of the second chapter, which states: “…I … have formulated the Third: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.
I’ve owned this copy of the book, incidentally, since the late 1970s.
I have a copy of ‘Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (twenty-three conjectures on space by ‘the colossus of science fiction’)’ by Clarke, published by Corgi SF collector’s library. Chapter 14 p146-159. ‘Technology and the Future’ Quote on p147.