Sir Arthur C. Clarke Dies
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died Wednesday at age 90, an associate confirmed. Clarke died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. "He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit," Chase said.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... larke.html
Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps best known for his three laws of prediction. These laws may not have been perfectly planned, and the second one was added by his readers; it simply appeared in the same essay as the first. The third was added by Clarke 11 years later, making an even set. The laws state: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.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
These are simple words, but in them exists a very singular hope: science can do anything that strong and able minds ask it to, and that a faith in science doesn't remove one from a sense of wonder. This is still an important message, that science doesn't mean magic doesn't exist, it just means that magic is something that takes discipline and time to learn and wield. Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at the age of 90 but, in these simple laws, he gave something we'll never lose: a blueprint for dreaming.
RIP, Sir Arthur. We'll miss you.
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