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Clarke’s three laws, written by the British science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, are his observations on the nature of technology and discovery.

Clarke was renowned for his scientific knowledge, literary skill and uncannily accurate technological predictions. Best known for co-writing the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, he popularised the concept of space travel and predicted the use of satellites for telecommunications.

Three observations of his have come to be known as Clarke’s three laws.

The first two appeared in the essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, first published in Clarke’s 1962 book, .

The first, which he expressly designated as “Clarke’s law” in the essay, states: “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 very probably wrong.”

His definition of “elderly” was tongue-in-cheek: for those in physics, maths and astronautics, Clarke defined it as being over thirty. “As every researcher just out of college knows,” he wrote, “scientists over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and at all costs should be kept out of the laboratory!”

People later designated another observation Clarke made in the essay as his second law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

He had written this in the context of a list of inventions and discoveries that he had classified as either expected (including automobiles, telephones, robots, “flying machines”) or unexpected (x-rays, nuclear energy, photography, quantum mechanics).

But perhaps the best known of Clarke’s three laws is the third, which has inspired multiple variations. It appeared in a footnote in his 1973 revision of��Profiles of the Future: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there,” Clarke concluded.��Donna Lu��