Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka aged 90. Science has lost not just one of its great popularisers but also one of its great minds.
As well as his immensely popular books, Clarke came up with ideas that have had a profound influence on our lives – such as geo-stationary satellites – and introduced his readers others that may yet be just as influential – such as the space elevator.
Nature had the honour of Clarke writing the first science fiction story to be published in our journal. Improving the neighbourhood details another species’ relief at the destruction of humanity, whose history contains “countless episodes of violence, against their own species and the numerous others”.
It also notes: “It is quite surprising what they were able to achieve, as massive individual entities exchanging information at a pitiably low data rate — often by very short-range vibrations in their atmosphere!”
The Earth has now lost one of our most thoughtful ‘individual entities’ and the information he exchanged with us will be sorely missed.
Nature’s podcast team put together an item for his 90th birthday last year, which we are making available again today as a celebration of his life.
Much more below the fold
“I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.”
-Clarke (via AFP)
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:
1. 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.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
“He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 – and he was right.”
-Patrick Moore, astronomer and friend (various, eg The Guardian, ITN).
A radar pioneer in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Clarke wrote a 1945 article in Wireless World magazine in which he outlined a worldwide communications network based on fixed satellites orbiting Earth at an altitude of 22,300 miles — an orbital area now often referred to as the Clarke Orbit.
Clarke’s seminal article, for which he received $40, was published two decades before Syncom II became the world’s first communications satellite put into geosynchronous orbit in 1963.
“I did not get a patent because I never thought it will happen in my lifetime.”
– Clarke (AFP).
“I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.
T-shirt worn by Clarke when the – Times of India met him in 2006.
The paradox of Clarke’s fiction is that the writer most associated in the public mind with accurate ‘hard sf’ predictions, based upon existing and potential technology and grounded in ‘real’ science, returns again and again to themes of an almost mystical or metaphysical sort, in which advanced cultures, often benevolent, allow humanity to transcend its Earth-bound beginnings.
These were expressed in Clarke’s laws, of which the best-known was his dictum that ‘any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic’.