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Originally Posted by ctol
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Yeah, I've always hated these laws.
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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 probably wrong.
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Maybe in fiction, but not in the real world (where I'm not sure you can find many scientists saying that something is impossible, as far as that goes). There are countless examples of distinguished but elderly scientists quite correctly saying that something is impossible and being quite right. FTL travel, for example. Or cold fusion. Intelligent design. Perpetual motion machines. Etc.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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Well, first of all, this is a tautology, with "sufficiently" being the weasel word. Making the sentence read "Any technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic is indistinguishable from magic."
But even if we reformulate it to say something like "A really really advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," it's still not true. It's not true because rationalist, technological societies fundamentally understand how technology works and will consider very advanced technology to be...very advanced technology. Something that can be explained by science, not by magic, even though they might not understand the science.
Of course, if you show a more superstitious society a piece of advanced technology, they may well believe that it is magic. Although they may also believe that magic makes the rain come, or keeps a dragon from eating the sun during a total eclipse, since they don't understand those mechanisms, either.
So maybe it should be rewritten as "People who are inclined to explain things that they don't understand as magic will explain tech that they don't understand as magic." Not as exciting a quote, of course.
I suppose I don't have a particular issue with
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The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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Although I think it's also much less known than the other rules.