Clarke's three laws

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke's three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited:

Clarke's first law was proposed by Clarke in the essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in Profiles of the Future (1962).

The second law is offered as a simple observation in the same essay. Its status as Clarke's second law was conferred by others. In a 1973 revision of Profiles of the Future, Clarke acknowledged the second law and proposed the third. "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there".

The third law is the best known and most widely cited, and appears in Clarke's 1973 revision of his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination." It echoes a statement in a 1942 story by Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned". An earlier example of this sentiment may be found in Wild Talents (1932) by Charles Fort: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic."

Clarke gave an example of the third law when he said that while he "would have believed anyone who told him back in 1962 that there would one day exist a book-sized object capable of holding the content of an entire library, he would never have accepted that the same device could find a page or word in a second and then convert it into any typeface and size from Albertus Extra Bold to Zurich Calligraphic", referring to his memory of "seeing and hearing Lynotype machines which slowly converted ‘molten lead into front pages that required two men to lift them’".

A fourth law has been proposed for the canon, despite Clarke's declared intention of not going one better than Newton. Geoff Holder quotes: "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert," which is part of American economist Thomas Sowell's "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact", from his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed.

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