“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

— Larry Niven

Anonymous saying, this is an inversion of the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It has been attributed to Niven, and even called "Niven's Law" by some, and to Terry Pratchett by others, but without any citation of an original source in either case, and the earliest occurrence yet located is in Keystone Folklore (1984) by the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.
Misattributed

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." by Larry Niven?

Larry Niven 138

American writer 1938

Related quotes

“Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)
On Clarke's Laws
Source: Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

“Any sufficiently advanced form of magick will appear indistinguishable from science.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: PsyberMagick (1995), p. 15

“Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

“Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.”

Gregory Benford book Foundation's Fear

This is derived from the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There are other variants which had inverted this including one known as Gehm's corollary http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/l/law.htm, published several years earlier : "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." The earliest variant seems to be "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." It has been called "Niven's Law" and attributed to Larry Niven by some, and to Terry Pratchett by others, but without any citation of an original source in either case — the earliest occurrence yet located is an anonymous one in Keystone Folklore (1984) by the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.
Foundation's Fear (1997)

“There are certain truths that, in themselves, are as dangerous as any advanced technology.”

Alastair Reynolds book Pushing Ice

Source: Pushing Ice (2005), Chapter 30 (p. 435)

“The principal applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been—and will continue to be—applications created by that technology.”

Herbert Kroemer (1928) Nobel laureate in physics

in his Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/kroemer-lecture.html, Quasi-Electric Fields and Band Offsets: Teaching Electrons New Tricks, 8 December 2000, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University.

“Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to…well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 12, “Power Breakfast” (p. 254)

“The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological — technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

From Hawking's article A Brief History of Relativity http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993018-6,00.html, in Time magazine (31 December 1999)

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Larry Niven 138

Related quotes

Related topics