 | Engineering - 1974 - 520 pages
...and predict the future can succeed. Clarke has summed the matter up quite well in the Clarke's Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Note: "elderly" today in physics, mathematics, and astronautics means anyone over thirty, according... | |
 | James Everett Katz - Political Science - 1985 - 236 pages
...here is an example of Arthur C. Clarke's first law of prophecy: "When a distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." There will come a time in the not-too-distant... | |
 | David R. Hall - Religion - 1990 - 178 pages
...believe that they can define what is impossible. They can fail to take note of Arthur C. Clarke's law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 24 Take, for example, the attitude of some eighteenth-century scientists to reports that meteorites... | |
 | Hozumi Tanaka - Computers - 1991 - 1024 pages
...reminisent of the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke's "first law". This says something like :"when a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong". Elderly, distinguished scientists become very conscious of difficulties, and so it is often the ignorant... | |
 | Alan L. Mackay - Science - 1991 - 312 pages
...Lecture on the growth of TV. In London Review of Hooks 1984 6 no 1, p 5 Arthur Charles Clarke 191778 When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (Clarke's First Law.) Time 15 February 1971 79 How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when clearly... | |
 | Marvin Cetron, Owen Davies - Technology & Engineering - 1997 - 326 pages
...(Harper & Row, 1963), in a chapter discussing failures of the imagination, he promulgated Clarke's Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Lest anyone misunderstand, he added, "Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics,... | |
 | Jeff Hecht, Dick Teresi - Science - 1998 - 292 pages
...the phenomenon known as Clarke's First Law, after science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." (For the purposes of discussion in his book Profiles of the Future, Clarke defined an "elderly" physicist... | |
 | Arthur C. Clarke - Reference - 2001 - 596 pages
...can clog the wheels of imagination. I have tried to embody this fact of observation in Clarke's law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective elderly requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means... | |
 | David Hatcher Childress - Body, Mind & Spirit - 1999 - 284 pages
...REGULATOR VIBRATION-MOTION ATTENUATOR • FATE -AN,;K i ;:NKNOWN January 1990 9. Patents & Diagrams When a distinguished but elderly scientist states...When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. — Arthur C. Clarke Everything that can be invented has been invented. —Charles... | |
| |
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. 
