A Son of the Rock

One of the famous SF writer Arthur C Clarke‘s well known sayings was, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Demonstrate, for instance, a Star Trek communicator (or, better, a modern day mobile phone; because effectively that’s what those communicators were, minus the photo and internet functions) to a hitherto isolated tribe in the deep remote somewhere and its working principles would be impossible for them to comprehend. The same would be true of us confronted with some really advanced piece of hardware.

But it’s always seemed to me that the reverse of Clarke’s saying could equally be true and that any sufficiently effective magic would be indistinguishable from advanced technology. Certainly it could be explicable as such. “I do this with this and that happens.”