Sturgeon's Law: "Nothing is always absolutely so" - huh?

According to wikipedia there are 2 versions of Sturgeon’s Law; the well-known and easily understood “90% of everything is crap”, and the lesser-known and (to me) confusing statement, “Nothing is always absolutely so”.

I don’t really know what to make of that second one. How do you even parse that sentence? What does it mean?

Dopers, shed some light!

I read it as “nothing can be described perfectly, since things (a) change and (b) have more than one facet.”

“There are no absolutes” - for example, if I say, “every Buick is a heap of junk” someone is bound to come along with a Buick that’s done 650,000 miles.

I don’t think they’re supposed to be versions of the same law. They’re obviously different Sturgeon’s Laws. Therre must be a third one somewhere, because “Laws Come in Sets of Three”.
That’s known as CalMeacham’s Third Law.

So what are CalMeacham’s 1st & 2nd Laws?

They will be made known in time. But they must exist, by CalMeacham’s Third Law.

Isn’t that Opal’s Law?

No, Opal was making a comment about the propriety of making lists with fewer than three items. She wasn’t making a meta-law about laws. My formulation (which I’ve been using for years, although calling it by my real name, rather than my nom de SDMB, results from years of observing that Great Men have Laws in Sets of Three – Newton’s Three Laws, Kepler’s Three Laws, The Three Laws of Thermodynamics, Euler’s Three Laws, Clarke’s Three Laws, and so on.

“Nothing is always absolutely so”.

There’s no wiggle room on always or absolutely. I have looked at “Nothing is … so” from several angles and hammered on it a bit, and I can see two meanings. One of these is useless, and the other is cynical.

The state of not being anything will forever, without variation, be just that. (in which so substitutes for the earlier nothing.)

No thing will ever be completely true. (where so means true.) The law applies to itself, so it is not always completely true.

But, if it is itself not always completely true, then doesn’t that make it always completely true?

Now, listen carefully, Norman: I am lying.

I like Meacham’s Third Law a lot, and I plan to quote it often. :slight_smile:

So now I have three laws that I quote often: Murphy’s, Sturgeon’s, and now Meacham’s. Strange and wonderful, how that turned out so well. :wink:

What’s Thermodynamics first name? And don’t you know there are at least four laws, the zeroth, the first, the second and the third?

Hiram. Hiram Thermodynamics. And the Zeroth doesn’t count, because its number is zero, and zero added to three is still three.

You are perhaps of the body!

His first name is Ed.
And I forgot Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

Dude, you just blew my mind!

Wow, I never noticed my hands were so big…

The first one is:

“You don’t talk about Robotics.”

Arthur C. Clarke, of course, did actually promulgate three laws – though the first two are obverse and reverse of the same broad concept.

I. If a distinguished elderly scientist states without equivocation that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.

II. If a distinguished elderly scientist states without equivocation that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.

III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I mentioned Clarke’s laws in my earlier post #8:

Larry Niven has twenty.

And as S.M. Stirling wrote: