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
“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. <br class="br">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)
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.
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 12, “Power Breakfast” (p. 254)
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)
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
