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Comment by jasoncrawford | Hacker News Reader

Arthur C. Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

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Thanks. I think Clark overstates things a bit (unless you take a very extreme form of what "impossible" means), so I prefer my version. It also seems possible that engineers are more likely to hedge their bets by calling things "unworkable" or "impractical" because what actually is and isn't possible in theory is more of the realm of the researcher than the practitioner.

A lot of the impossibilites are relative to the current state of the art.

"X is impossible with current metalurgy". "Y is impossible with current best integer factorization algorithms".

Absolute impossibilities do exist too, but you basically need to prove that that particular thing goes against laws of physics/maths.

An example of this:

Andy Grove in 1992: "The idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is "a pipe dream driven by greed."

This is a truly weird claim to have made at least 85 years after the idea entered the public sphere and at least 19 years after a phone that was intended to be carried by a person not a car was demoed by Motorola.

Did he also poopoo the idea of a public internet and wait until the 80s to do so?

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