The idea has probably already crossed your mind, so let me dispel it. Imagine a time traveller going back to the eighth century of Europe with a couple of modern gadgets. The Ellison-version has it that soon that unfortunate will get burnt at the stake for witchcraft, because as Clarke wrongly put it: any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. For now let us turn the tables on ourselves, and have some time traveller from our own future arrive with wonders from that time. No matter how such an adventurer might wow us with effects, we would belligerently refuse to believe her when she insisted, over and over, that her feats were all of magic, not science, not technology. No matter how hard she tried, we would see her violations of the Law of the Conservation of Energy (and so forth) and insist to her face with medieval self-confidence that obviously the technology of the future has discovered some as yet hitherto unknown, deeper fact about the cosmos. So we see in this the "law" that Arthur C. Clarke got wrong: rather, that any magic sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 19:33:19 +0000
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