British science fiction writer, inventor and brilliant futurist 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. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future. These so-called laws are:

  1. 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.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

All three laws appear in Clarke’s essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, published in 1962.

He sadly passed in 2008 at the age of 90, but not before entertaining and challenging millions of readers with his various visions of the future, in both the science fact and fiction genres.