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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7055512" data-attributes="member: 4937">First of all, that's argument from authority.  Second of all, I haven not in fact 'trashed him'.  He is in fact a Grand Master of science fiction, but what I have been discussing here is not what he ought to be judged on as an author of fiction, which is the quality and skill of his story telling.  I have in other forums given his story-telling high praise.  But the high praise with which we honor his story telling has nothing to do with what I'm discussing now.  "He's a super-honored story teller so his observation is true", doesn't cut it.I think you may be again the one misunderstanding what I'm getting at.  What you miss is that this is a story that the medieval Alchemists were sufficiently literate to actually understand and recognize as science as they understood it.   In other words, if they saw you transforming lead into gold, they would be able to investigate it sufficiently to recognize that it was not magic, and would be able to - if they were able to query you regarding how it was done - recognize it as advanced science rather than magic.   For example, you would be able to explain to them the structure of an atom - something that they had no idea existed even though some of them suspected that atoms existed, they defined them as indivisible and assumed all things they observed were chemical compounds.  But this answer you gave would in fact be recognizably scientific, and give them an explanation that would be immediately revelatory regarding why their own methodology was failing.  They then might inquire of you how you went about moving or adding bits of an element to a different element, and your explanation would then explain why you did or didn't bother doing it depending on how expensive your technology made energy.Neither science nor magic are completely nebulous ideas, and even the medieval alchemists weren't completely naive regarding them.What actually is true though is that had you BS'd the medieval alchemists with a magical explanation or a pseudo-scientific explanation, they would have had no way of recognizing that they were being BS'd, and would have taken your explanation as 'scientific' in so far as they understood it.   And if they had suspected they were being BS'd, they'd have no good way to actually guess regarding how, and would have likely gone off on tangents based on their own false understanding.   So there is a sense in which Clarke is speaking to a real and universal ignorance - how do we tell pseudo-science from science if sufficiently advanced science might as well be gibberish to us?   But there is also certain features that a magical explanation will have that scientific explanations will not have.So even that might be a transient situation that depends on the medieval alchemists in their own understanding not having yet separated to the two concepts.  It's possible that the more advanced the society gets, the less indistinguishable science and magic become.  Yes, but here is where Clarke is wrong - things don't work like that.   Clarke makes the unwarranted assumption that if technology advances sufficiently, anything becomes possibly in the same way that with magic anything becomes possible.   And this assumption is unsupported by science and veers off into magical thinking.   Science in no way guarantees that man will be uplifted to some future imagined god-like state where anything is possible.   Or if you would like, it's possible that for a given sufficiently advanced society, no more advanced society is possible.  Moreover, that hard limit is not guaranteed to be remotely in the future.How familiar are you with Clarke's canon, since you've evidenced admiration for him?   Can I start discussing stories without fearing I'm giving unwarranted spoilers?Why?  There are lots of good reasons to believe no level of technology will ever allow lightsabers in the form they are presented, and more to the point, the explanation given for how they work is a magical one - postulating the existence of Unobtainium, that is a material which we have every reason to believe is impossible given the observed natural laws.It's not an error.  While the story may be nominally set in the past, if only because it adopts the language of a 'fairy tale' to begin it, the tropes and technologies on display like interstellar travel, advanced AI, and energy weapons are - if they are possible at all - in our own future.  It's thus reasonable to discuss things like lightsabers in the context of "sufficiently advanced" technology, rather than some sort of primitive technology of some past era.To pull this even remotely back on topic, it is an error to assume that if technology advances sufficiently, anything we imagined was true becomes possible.  For example, it is an error to assume - as so much of 1950's and 1960's era science fiction assumed - that eventually sufficient science would show that psychic claims were real and could be harnessed.   I like Clarke's three laws for striking a suitable note of skepticism, but we ought to be skeptical of them as well.  There are things that we can now say with reasonable certainty to be impossible, and if we are going to speculate as to how the impossible might be accomplished, we can recognize if such claims are based on magic or on science.   Science and magic are not indistinguishable, even if science and gibberish sometimes are.  But unless you actually believe magic is real, you can assume that any real explanation - even if it sounds like gibberish - won't sound like magic.</blockquote>

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