By the definition I’m using, magic implies something additional to a mere lack of understanding. Think of all the famous wizards from works of fiction. One thing they have in common is that there’s something that makes them special. Only a select few have the powers to cast spells. If anyone can do it it’s not magic. That’s a big part of the reason I think that law as described by Clarke doesn’t hold true.
this reminds me of a medicine ad I forget what it was for but the narration was "its not entirely understood how the medicine actually works so it may not have the same effect for you "
Hell, that sentence applies to aspirin.
It’s a bit humbling just how many medicines work for reasons that are less than fully understood.
I agree. Many people who see a UFO up close will say, “It’s probably an advanced secret Air Force test craft.” We’ve come to expect new and amazing technology on a regular basis. Nothing surprises us any more.
While a natural phenomenon may have properties that we cannot understand, and call magic, the law is specifically about technology, which means that someone made it, which means that someone, at some point (even if they are now long dead), did understand it.
As far as SCP goes, the entire point of that repository is to come up with ideas that no one can understand, only hope to contain.
We know all this based on our current understanding of physics. So, if they do show up in an FTL ship that runs on limitless energy from nothing, then that would be magic, as far as we are concerned.
That’s kinda the whole point of the law, in that it talks about things that defy our expectations based on our knowledge of the universe.
What if one person understood what he was doing when he made part of it to accomplish Goal A, and another understood what she was doing when she made a different part to accomplish Goal B — and neither confides in the other about the details of what each has done, and so neither of them actually understands why the combination works the way it does — but, so long as they each keep contributing what’s like unto a secret recipe apiece, they can keep cranking out more to accomplish Goal C?
I think that the “sufficiently advanced” part comes into play.
I did some computer programming back in high school, and for some of it, we worked in groups. One person would do one part, and others would do other parts. I didn’t understand what the other person was doing, and they didn’t understand what I was doing, but I could have, and I knew that they were operating within the confines of the language at play. So, simply not understanding of knowing exactly what they did does not rise to the level of sufficient.
Not understanding even the basic physics behind what someone is doing is different. If I build an overunity power supply, and you use that to power your FTL engine, then we are getting more into the realm of what Clarke was talking about. My tech may be magic to you, and yours may be magic to me, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use them for mutual purposes.
And the whole thing would be magic to us seeing these FTL ships appear in orbit around Earth and landing near the seats of government for the world powers.
As @BigT mentioned, this is a two way street. If Magic/Tech become indistinguishable, nothing is really magic anymore, it’s all just tech we don’t understand.
Person appears out of nowhere, it’s tech.
Change water to wine, tech.
Traverse the universe instantly, tech.
Exclaim “let there be light” and create an entire universe from nothing… tech.
Merlin is not a magical being tapping into supernatural sources of power, he’s just some dude with better toys than we have.
I appear in your kitchen and turn your water into wine. You say, “How did you do that?” I say, “Magic.” What argument can you make to contradict that?
I’m not sure.
I thought the point was more like this: say there’s a story where other characters figure that Merlin is a magical being who taps into supernatural sources of power or whatever — and, when it got written, the author was thinking in terms of magic, and wasn’t thinking in terms of tech.
I kind of took the point to be that, in that story, something happens in Merlin’s vicinity that impresses the heck out of the locals — and this is where Clarke would be glad to say, you know, if you wanted to rewrite this story as science fiction, those same effects could get chalked up to tech instead of magic. It’s your call all the way: if you want to tweak the scene so the character is just a dude with better tech, I could help you slap together a sci-fi explanation; but if you want the narrator to flatly state that, no, Merlin in fact is a magical being who taps into supernatural sources of power, well, you could write it that way, too.
Clarke might well have been messing with us from both directions - in his early fiction he also posited “No machine may contain any moving parts” which was heady stuff to this then 13-year old engineer wanna-be when I first read it. No machine may contain any moving parts. | Pechorin's Journal
I can’t, because it’s been established that I don’t know how it all works. Presumably you know how this stuff works, can you prove it’s magic instead of technology?
If you can, I’m willing to change my mind.
We’re going around in circles. Clarke’s argument wasn’t about the product; it was about the observers and their belief system.
Everybody here apparently has a belief system in which science explains everything, is the source of all technology, has rules absolutely which cannot be flouted, and negates any possibility of supernatural action. That’s fine. I believe that. Clarke certainly believed that.
What he remembered and most posters have not is that many people in the world - in all probability most people in the world - do not believe that. They accept science and technology from the evidence of their own eyes and they also accept evidence of the supernatural also from the evidence of their own eyes.
If something happens that appears to be supernatural, if somebody insists that it is indeed supernatural, you standing up there and sputtering “but… but… but… it has to be science” will get you absolutely nowhere. “Because” is not a convincing answer without evidence or proof. You cannot distinguish between science and the supernatural if you believe in both and have no understanding or conception of the principles involved in a particular application.
Clarke’s Third Law is an immensely subtle look at human psychology, unlike his first two laws, which are mere cynicism (and only Rules of Thumb, not actual laws). Belief systems are exceptionally powerful. Mere assertion can’t overturn them. Carl Sagan later expressed the same with “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Science has needed two centuries just to get to the point where most people bow to it, but that belief is still fragile. Just one “miracle” could overthrow it. Given two indistinguishable answers, people will always turn to the one that is most comforting.
“In ten thousand years of human history, every single time someone did something and claimed it was magic, it turned out to be science in a hat and sunglasses. Why should I believe you’re any different?”
I don’t follow. Sure, since I know how it works, it’s not advanced to me, and is not magic to me.
However, you don’t have a clue how it works, and so is indistinguishable to magic to you. My job would be to teach you all that you need to know, starting with dismissing your silly ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, in order to convince you that it’s not magic, not the other way around.
OTOH, if I say it’s magic, then you are utterly unable to prove me wrong with your elementary and flawed understanding of the universe.
I’m really not sure what the argument is here. It seems as though some are misreading the law and leaving out the “indistinguishable from” part, and are reading it as “any sufficiently advanced technology is magic.”
“In ten thousand years of human history, the sun has always risen in the east. Today, I have made it rise in the west. Use your science to explain that.”
So… when you told me it was magic, you could have said “it’s sufficiently advanced technology” instead of lying about it.
I think the quote is backwards, and the real take away is that there is nothing in the universe that can be done, which isn’t ultimately explainable by science and technology. It doesn’t matter how well it fits into our preexisting concept of magic, it’s just technology that looks like magic.
There is something that distinguishes magic from technology. Magic is fictional, and technology isn’t.
So, you reversed the way the Earth rotates? That’s awesome!
Show me the device that does it for you! C’mon, please?
Sure, but the point isn’t my honesty, it’s your ability to call me out on it. From your perspective, you are not able to distinguish what I can do from magic. You may not believe that it’s magic, and I may not even claim that it’s magic, but, based on your simplistic and laughable understanding of the universe, you would have no way to tell that it’s not.
I think that’s what the quote means in the first place. It specifically says that it’s technology at work here, just that to the perception of us ignorant fools who think that the Schrödinger equation is the bee’s knee’s, there is no difference between a sufficiently advanced form of technology and magic.
The technology that is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic is fictional as well, until it’s not.
And that’s more or less the entire point of the quote. If we see something that we think is magic, then it’s actually most likely an advanced technology we don’t understand. We are not able to distinguish it, using our tools and knowledge, from magic. That quote is specifically to give strength to the very skepticism that you are demonstrating in this thread.
Sure, I just waved my arm in a clockwise direction while saying “Gnj’shorp th’ylic fweæ╙”. Now you try.
Oh, and I didn’t reverse the way the Earth rotates. I just made the sun rise in the west.
I was able to do so after concentrating hard for a moment. I also flipped the arrow of time and changed all matter to antimatter (and vice versa). It’s true that you will still think the sun rises in the east, but what you call east is really west in this new universe. I flipped the whole thing around.