In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done but here I rise through the air I listen to voices in America I see men flying – but how it's done I can't even begin to wonder. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open and was shot smoothly upwards. Even earlier examples of this sentiment may be found in Wild Talents (1932) by Charles Fort: '…a performance that may someday be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic,' and in the short story The Hound of Death (1933) by Agatha Christie: 'The supernatural is only the nature of which the laws are not yet understood.' Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography explicitly compares advanced technology to magic: an uninformed public tends to confuse scholarship with magicians.' It also echoes a statement in a 1942 story by Leigh Brackett: 'Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned'. In 1952, Isaac Asimov in his book Foundation and Empire (part 1.1 Search for Magicians) wrote down a similar phrase '. It was published in a 1968 letter to Science magazine and eventually added to the 1973 revision of the 'Hazards of Prophecy' essay. The third law is the best known and most widely cited. It was also here that Clarke wrote about the third law in these words: 'As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there'. It was initially a derivative of the first law and formally became Clarke's second law where the author proposed the third law in the 1973 revision of Profiles of the Future, which included an acknowledgement. The second law is offered as a simple observation in the same essay but its status as Clarke's second law was conferred by others. Clarke's first law was proposed in the 1962 edition of the essay, as 'Clarke's Law' in Profiles of the Future. However, they were not all published at the same time. All three laws appear in Clarke's essay 'Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination', first published in Profiles of the Future (1962). One account claimed that Clarke's 'laws' were developed after the editor of his works in French started numbering the author's assertions. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.

Words of wonder level 255