Speaking of dubious and oft-cited “Laws”, I’ve run into a number of citations of “Clarke’s Laws” recently. Of course, these were apparently subliminal mentions, because I can’t seem to locate any of them again, but it put the subject in my mind, which is partly why I was primed to be annoyed by the subject of the previous post.
Anyway, “Clarke’s Laws” are statements by the noted science fiction writer (and, no doubt, personal friend and mentor of Jonathan Vos Post, which I really don’t want to hear about in comments) Arthur C. Clarke:
- 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.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
These are frequently cited by SF fans as if they’re some sort of fundamental principle of nature, when in fact they really say more about the psychology of SF authors and fans than they do about science. In fact, I have big problems with two of them.
The second “law” is semantically empty piffle, and almost never cited, but the other two get brought up a lot, and I’m not really happy with either of them. Take the first “Law,” for example, which really contains two statements:
These both sound good, but what’s really striking about them is how frequently they’re wrong. The problem with the second is trivially obvious: look at Bob Park. He’s certainly elderly, and definitely distingushed, and spends a great deal of his time saying that various forms of crank science are impossible. And he’s always right.
(His article on the signs of bogus science is absolutely essential reading, and his book, Voodoo Science is pretty darn good.)
Of course, the first sub-statement is also pretty ridiculous. In fact, there’s a long tradition (sadly pronounced among physicists) of elderly and distinguished scientists going a bit barmy, and proclaiming the possibility of all sorts of ludicrous things. Some of them (Kary Mullis, Brian Josephson, I’m looking at you) don’t even have the decency to wait until they’re elderly. Even some of the very best fall into this– Einstein spent the last twenty or thirty years of his life chasing scientific dead ends, and Niels Bohr said some really goofy things in his later years.
I’m also not terribly fond of the third “Law,” the oft-cited:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Here, though, I think the problem has a lot to do with misunderstanding the nature of magic. Magic is, in every conception of it that I know of, capricious and contingent. It works for some people, some of the time, and doesn’t work for others. Past performance does not guarantee future results– even in the technologized modern forms of magic (“ESP” or whatever they’re calling it these days), this is generally accepted by even sincere believers in magical phenomena. If you do the exact same thing on two different days, it won’t necessarily work the same way both times.
This is in stark opposition to the nature of technology, which is that it works on basic scientific principles. Anything technological will necessarily have consistent rules governing its behavior, and those rules can be deduced by experiment. The rules might be fairly complicated, and you might not understand the principle by which the effects are obtained, but they’ll be there, and repeatable. This means that, at least in principle, any technology ought to be distinguishable from magic, in that technology is consistent, and magic is capricious.
(Of course, on days when I find myself using Office a lot, I sometimes begin to question this conviction…)
In the end, as I said, I think these “Laws” are primarily statements about the worldview of SF fans and writers, or at least a subset thereof. They reflect a positive bias, and a belief in the infinite possibility of progress– statements that things are possible are good, statements that things are impossible are bad. The fact that our technology can’t do magical things is just an indication that it is insufficiently advanced, not a reflection of inflexible laws of physics.
In the end, “Clarke’s Laws” are really just a geekier version of the oft-cited and frequently derided poster from The X-Files, proclaiming that “I Want to Believe.” They’re a reflection of a desire to have magic in the future, or at least in stories about the future, and an attempt to provide a scientific-sounding justification for the belief that there will be magic someday. If we all just believe hard enough, we’ll find a way to beat Special Relativity and Conservation of Energy.
This also probably explains the observation (either at a convention panel or in conversation with an editor, and I no longer remember the context, so I’ll be vague) that people who buy a lot of hard science fiction are also big consumers of the most dreadful woo-woo crap imaginable– aliens and Bigfoot and loopy conspiracy stuff…