Clarke's Third Law

Behold my propane-powered fire magics!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
—Arthur C. Clarke

Within many works, the separation between science and magic can be blurred to deceive a bystander. In some cases, one may masquerade as the other. An important justification for many forms of Applied Phlebotinum.

Trope Namer for these Corollaries: Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and Sufficiently Advanced Alien.

Compare:

In case you're wondering, here are all three laws. The first law is partially covered by In Theory and the second by Beyond the Impossible.

Examples of Clarke's Third Law include:

Anime and Manga

  • Mahou Sensei Negima has one arc where thousands of students are given magic to wield. Then they fight off baddies with it. The catch? They are told it's just highly advanced computerized effect technology and that it's just a game, in order to keep up The Masquerade.
    • Electricity can also be used to power magic, as the magic community is quite fine with Magitek. It's even appears to be pretty efficient at it. However, most mages don't seem to have the technical expertise to really take advantage of this, and obviously most people don't know enough about magic to work it from their side either. Chao and Hakase (and by extension Chachamaru) on the other hand...
  • Outlaw Star featured as a important plot point the Caster Guns that fire unique shells that are incredibly powerful. The main theories as to their origin is that they are either a piece of lost advanced technology or magical in nature. It turns out to be a little of both.
  • Full Metal Panic! has Kurz Lampshade the Lambda Driver shortly before its first appearance.

Kurz: If this was a regular battle, they'd be even. But that silver AS... it's got some kind of hidden trick going for it. It bounced my cannonball right back at me and toasted my M9! I wonder what magic he's using?
Kaname: Magic, huh? No, I'm afraid it isn't that. This guy isn't using magic but rather... technology... The enemy has it, and it's an integral part of his mecha's defenses.

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion tends to blur the lines between the scientific, esoteric/metaphysical and divine/spiritual.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha uses this to describe their technology. The title includes the word "magic", and everyone there in the anime is running on Magitek.
  • In The Familiar of Zero there are a number of old artifacts in the magical world that the protagonist was dumped in, including a family's heirloom book that can seduce men, a weapon called the “Staff of Destruction”, and a tale about a dragon, whose blood was collected. The objects are a porn magazine, a rocket launcher, and a plane respectively. The 'blood' was actually gasoline.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, the people of Lior view alchemy as being a type of miracle. Since more skilled alchemists can perform alchemy just by thinking about it, it's easy for the audience to write it off as magic, too.
  • Ichika quotes this in episode 8 of Asobi Ni Iku Yo to explain her "magic" scrolls.

Comic Books

  • The Scarlet Witch is this trope personified. Her power is actually to affect probability in order to make wildly improbable events happen. This has drifted to become a general ability to warp reality. Thus, despite her name and the description of her power as including "hex bolts," she is not actually magical.
    • It was explicitly magical for awhile, but that's since been retconned.
    • The Ultimate Universe actually tried to ground her abilities a bit more, since they tried to explain that in order to make said improbable events happen she had to "do the math" of how likely the events would be before she could actually cause them.
  • Abra Kadabra, a member of The Flash's rogues gallery, takes advantage of this. His entire schtick is coming from the 64th century, where the technology is so advanced that he passes as a magician in the 20/21st century.
  • Although Superman´s enemy Mr. Mxyzptlk has vast powers traditionally attributed to magic, many recent interpretations of the character suggest it's due to his access to very advanced technology and the physical advantage that living on the fifth dimension confers over tridimensional beings like Superman.
  • The Green Lantern rings and by extension the other Corps' power rings use light in order to form physical constructs. It's supposedly advanced technology, but because light isn't normally physical, for all intents and purposes the power rings are magic.

Film

  • In The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard fakes the all-powerful wizard role using a machine.
  • In the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes Lord Blackwood's plan is to fool England that he has Functional Magic to take over the England through fear.
  • Outlander: Kainan a soldier from another world is mistaken for a servant of the Gods by his wife-to-be Freya when he smashed the beacon so he cannot be rescued from Earth.
  • In Hocus Pocus this is played with as the witches return to Salem after 300 years
    • When Max uses his lighter they believe he makes fire with his hands
  • The Kalahari bushmen in The Gods Must Be Crazy discover a never before seen artifact which has fallen from the sky and conclude it must be a gift from the Gods. Hilarity Ensues. Eventually, they decide it would be best for all concerned if it were returned to the Gods and cast off the edge of the world. Somewhat subverted in that the artifact (a Coke bottle) doesn't actually do anything magical except exist in a world where it should not.
  • The villain of George of the Jungle tried to do this with a Polaroid camera to impress his native guides. They suggested a more classic camera for the resolution improvements, then mentioned they had the equipment on them to clean a smudge on his optics.
  • In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Clarke's Third Law is actively discussed in Thor, where Thor states that magic and science are one and the same. There's also a mention in Captain America: The First Avenger when a Nazi agent calls Red Skull's technology magic. Plus, elements in multiple films imply that Iron Man's state-of-the-art Arc Reactor is based on the Tesseract, a powerful Asgardian artifact.
  • The aliens in Cowboys and Aliens are never called as such. They're most often called demons and the cast never thinks of them as being technologically advanced. Ella, another alien, says that she came from beyond the stars, giving the impression of an angel.

Literature

  • Excellently demonstrated in Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke himself. The alien Overlords possess technology so far beyond human understanding that they might as well be gods. Humans for the most part accept that it is in fact some form of technology, but characters within the story observe that from the human perspective, Overlord technology might as well be magic.
  • Repeatedly Lampshaded in the Animorphs series, in which humans gain the ability to absorb foreign DNA through their skin and replicate it at warp speeds until their entire body transforms (usually into an animal of some sort, though other humans/sentient beings are used for stealth purposes once in a while). Oh, and this power is obtained by touching a wholly unremarkable blue box.
  • In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, during a brief period at the outset of the era, as the Empire begins to crumble and local systems begin to lose the scientific expertise necessary for an interstellar society to function, the Foundation dresses up their technological know how in mystical trappings in order to spread their influence and culture while maintaining tight control over the actual technologies and science. "Monks" from planets all over are sent to learn the ways of the Foundation and bring the technological practices back to their homeworlds as "missionaries" of the Foundation.
  • Most of the organizations in the Dune series can fall into this group, but most of them also need spice melange at some point.
    • Even if each group doesn't, cannot or elects not to understand the deepest inner workings of another group's near-magical technology, they accept that there's a rational, scientific basis underlying it.
      • In-universe, anyway. They might as well be magic for how possible they would be in the real world.
    • Subverted, in this universe, by the Ixians - who DO emphasize pure technology, to the point where they electronically duplicate the Guild Navigators' future-path-mapping abilities and in the process nearly bring about the extinction of humankind.
      • Mostly because some particularly bright idiot chose to weaponise it, though the prequels and sequels seem to have done a major retcon job on this interpretation.
    • Herbert's Wor Ship series, in which the ship's computer becomes self-aware and, with its vast surveillance network and predictive processing, effectively omniscient. Whether it has actually become a god is a question asked by the characters and left open to the readers.
  • Harry Turtledove strongly disagreed with Clarke and wrote the short story "Death in Vesunna" as a rebuttal, in which a retired Roman soldier working as a police investigator figures out on his own that the perpetrator of an inexplicable murder was not a god or a demon, but a time traveller.
    • He inverts the law in several stories, where industrialized magic has replaced or mimicked technology. The best examples being his Darkness series, where magic has replaced all the technology of World War II, and The Case Of The Toxic Spelldump a pun-laden comedy novel filled with Virtuous Reality, Djinnetic Engineering, and similar magi-tek.
  • Inverted in Discworld where sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology... for example, when Rincewind first sees a picture box, he surmises it must work by use of photosensitive materials capturing the light off the target.. right up until the magical imp inside complains that he's out of paint.

"'Advanced' here is usually taken to mean 'shown to us by aliens or people from the future' - like television shown to Neanderthals. But we should realise that television is magic to nearly everyone who uses it now."

"Sufficiently advanced technology, my ass."

  • Lord of Light is a Hugo-award winning sci-fi novel by Roger Zelazny where some characters develop psionic powers through genetic engineering and centuries of practice. They become strong enough that they are mistaken for gods. They then take advantage of this by adopting the appearance and persona of Hindu gods, and ruling the populace via existing Hindu temples.
  • Artemis Fowl both embraces and averts the trope. To an outside observer, most (if not all) Fairy technology would seem to be magical. The story, however, is also told from the Fairy point-of-view, where it's shown that technology and magic are very distinguishable, and it's someone's job to distinguish them further.
  • Played with in the Harry Potter series, where sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from magic. For almost every technological advance non-magical people have made, wizards have a magical equivalent. Many wizards are completely stumped by Muggle technology, despite being surrounded with it, so they're generally told that A Scientist Did It.
    • A good number grow up in muggle families, so you should try not to think about this ignorance very much.
      • It was implied that sheer virtue of growing up in a muggle family was enough to make Hermione more qualified to teach the "Muggle Studies" course than the unnamed professor and that she explicitly said she was taking the course For the Lulz.
    • The whole trope is deconstructed in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which demonstrates that some magical artifacts and effects, such as Animagus transformations and Time Turners, just blatantly violate not only the physical laws of science but the deeper laws of mathematics. For example, time travel exists but time cannot be changed, making history not Turing Computable and thereby ruling out any kind of logic we would understand as the fundamental basis of the Potterverse. Sufficiently non-mundane magic doesn't have to make sense.
    • Happens in The Silmarillion with the Elves in Valinor.
  • John Ringo's Council Wars series eats, breathes and defecates this trope. Elves, orcs, dragons etc that are the result of genetic engineering combined with nanotech, "spells" based on high energy manipulation of quantum physics, you name it.
    • Also the Mentats from his Posleen War series - Teleportation, 'conjuring up' or modifying items with resources pulled from the surroundings (or seemingly, thin air). Oh, and the battle of wills at the end of The Honor of the Clan.
  • In David Weber's Safehold, Langhorne and Bédard used their technology to turn the last survivors of humanity into their own personal cult. Later, when Cayleb gets his first true glimpse at the technology that was kept from them, he comments that he'd always thought Ridiculously Human Robot Merlin was clearly magical, whatever Merlin said to the contrary. He feels a bit less ignorant when Merlin quotes Clarke's Law for him.
  • The main character of Dean Koontz's The Taking recalls this law at the end and inverts it, noting that to a cynical society magic would appear to be highly advanced technology.
  • Taken to its absurdist extreme in The Flying Sorcerers by David Gerrold and Larry Niven. A planetary scout gets stranded on a primitive world, and has to enlist the help of the natives to get to a place he can summon help. Said natives have to be taught production technology and how to create certain things in order to do this...which makes them regard him as a high-powered magician The story is also told from the perspective of one of the natives, for added humor. The Other Wiki even has a page on the story.
  • Enchantress From the Stars: The Andrecians view Imperial technology as magic wands that turn people to stone (stunners), dragons (rock-chewer), monsters with no faces (Imperials in suits) and the examples in the summary. Also, telepathy and psychokinesis among the Federal field agents are stand-ins for advanced technologies humankind can't think of yet.
  • Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky duology is set in an Alternate History, where Jesus Christ was replaced by a mortal man, known as the Redeemer, who was granted a single divine power, the Word (ability to instantenously transport inanimate matter to and from another dimension known as "the Cold"), to prove that he was God's Stepson. Lukyanenko is primarily known as a rather "hard" SF writer, so his Word falls well within the "too advanced technology" category, and he has a lot of morbid fun subtly playing with the way humans either elevate what they don't understand to the divine status or downgrade it to Mundane Utility.
  • In H. Rider Haggard's She, She Who Must Be Obeyed uses magic that she explains is simply knowledge and technology that are completely unknown to the main characters.
  • In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the main characters success relies on the 6th Century folks mistaking his 19th century tech as wizardry.
  • In Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series, the inhabitants of the planet Gramarye interpreted abilities like telekinesis as "magic" due to their ancestors' decision to adopt a low-tech pseudo-medieval culture and the passage of centuries without contact from any other planets. Beings such as fairies, trolls and whatnot, according to the main character, were the result of a combination of psychic powers, a psi-sensitive local plant called "witchmoss" and a lot of fairy tales.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road points out that the difference is often a matter of terminology as it is:

 I mean "magic." How many times have savages concluded "magic" when a "civilized" man came along with something the savage couldn't understand?
 How often is some tag, such as "television," accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when "magic" would be the honest word?

  • An earlier Heinlein work, Sixth Column (republished briefly in the 1970s under the title The Day After Tomorrow) explicitly invokes this with the "Priests of Mota" -- actually undercover US military who have disguised a radical new technology as priestly "magic" in order to work under the noses of invaders who have taken over the United States.

Live-Action TV

  • Stargate SG-1: Most of the technology of the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens is taken as magic by the majority of the less advanced civilizations in the galaxy. To be fair, however, most of those civilizations are human-based and far less advanced than our current level of civilization.
    • Also, in one episode in later seasons, Daniel tries to tell a village that there is no such thing as magic; it is, however, ineffective because no sooner has he finished saying this than he and the rest of his team are beamed away in a flash of light, leaving the villagers baffled. Daniel hangs his head and complains at the timing.
  • This law is directly quoted, word for word, in Season 2 Episode 9 of Stargate Universe, by Eli.
  • Doctor Who.
    • While this is a recurring theme, there are two instances in which he plays with it. In one, he gives a primitive companion a yo-yo, and gives her the impression that she needs to play with it to keep the TARDIS working. Later on he comments "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo".
    • A much later episode has him dealing with an alternate universe loosely based on Arthurian myth. After wandering through what looks like a futuristic tomb, Ace is surprised that this is supposed to be magic. The Doctor responds, "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
    • The new series uses this quite a lot as well. An episode with Shakespeare has the Monster of the Week be three crones who appear to be witches that cast spells through incantations. When they use a spell to kill a man, the Doctor warns Martha to keep quiet, otherwise the townsfolk will think it's witchcraft. It turns out that the witches were actually aliens called Carrionites, who use science based on the power of words. Another episode had girls seemingly being turned into vampires, with sharp teeth, burns from sunlight, and no reflections. It was revealed that the girls were actually turned into fish-aliens with sharp teeth and a sensitivity to sunlight. Their holographic illusions (which let them appear human) couldn't provide reflections.
    • Time Lord technology in general is this trope.
      • Time Lord founders Rassilon and Omega seem to have been particularly inclined towards this trope. Most of their inventions are outwardly non-technological in design and could easily be taken for magical artifacts.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: The season 4 episode "Devil's Due" has the crew trying to discredit a technological con artist who claims to be the devil of not only the planet of the week, but every planet.
    • In "Who Watches The Watchers", Picard deliberately invokes this trope in an attempt to convince the natives that he is not a god.
      • He almost fails.
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow states that "Magic works off physics" and is often seen messing with the 'mechanics' of spells.
    • Conversely, material outside of the series itself classified superscience (for example, Warren building completely humanoid androids) as a form of magic in and of itself. That is, people like Warren were only able to create such high tech devices because of a latent magical ability that functioned in this way, which may inadvertently explain why Willow was the only one able to repair the Buffybot.
  • Played for laughs by the Observers from Mystery Science Theater 3000, who are an omnipotent race of morons. Show writer Kevin Murphy wrote that, "The only thing Mr. Clarke doesn't take into account is how incredibly stupid any creature might be, no matter how advanced."
  • Babylon 5 has fun with this one. The Vorlons have used their technology for millennia to manipulate younger races into reacting favorably to them, passing off as "magical" beings of light. It is only at the "Dawn of the Third Age" that we finally see who they are, and "They are not Gods." Then there are the Technomages, who use technology to give the appearance of magic, and this famous discussion:

Elric: Do you believe in Magic, Captain?
Sheridan: ... If we went back a thousand years, they could only understand this place in terms of magic.
Elric: Then maybe it is. The magic of the human heart, made manifest through technology

  • Quoted outright by Mad Scientist Walter Bishop on Fringe, attributing it to "an old friend" of his.
  • The 1960s series The Time Tunnel had a shout out to this trope one episode:

"We live in the 20th century. We don't believe in magic."
"The 20th century, the very heyday of magic! And you don't believe!"

  • Mentioned by Siroc on Young Blades: when a child questions him about science and magic in the episode "Enchanted," Siroc suggests that "maybe magic's just another word for what we don't understand."
  • In Warehouse 13, this seems to held as the mentality of the Warehouse agency with regards to the artifacts they collect, or at least by Artie as he claimed in the first episode:

""If a radio landed in the hands of Thomas Jefferson, do you know what Jefferson would do? He would just lock it up, until he figured out it wasn't going to kill him. That's exactly what we do here. We take the unexplained... and we safely tuck it away."

Tabletop Games

  • Played with in Warhammer 40,000 - While the technology of every major power in the grim dark future is amazing to some degree, it's hard to tell where the tech ends and the magic begins. For example, the Imperium seems to believe, by and large, that their machines are given life by "Machine Spirits" and are somehow enchanted. They might be right, or maybe they're deluding themselves. Then there's the orks, whose technology, cobbled together from junk, logically shouldn't even work half the time, and yet it does, apparently because the orks think it should. It's not always clear whether the weapons and machines of this setting work because they actually follow established natural laws, or because "a psyker did it."
    • Adeptus Mechanicus Priests rever machines as holy relics, in turn ensuring that whatever they build, they will not skimp on the cost, using the absolute best. Their maintenance of it also treats each individual machine as a holy spirit. While this seems outwardly weird by our standards, this means that they will not cut corners on maintenance and will always do a precise job, keeping the machine at top efficiency until the end of it's life. Played straight by the Ecclesiarchy however, especially in Dawn of War Soulstorm, as somehow a relic (which is usually old bones) blessed by a saint confers invulnerablility, with no other explanation given otherwise.
    • The 40K universe is as much an inversion, as it is playing it straight. By the time 40k rolls around, Humanity had suffered a civilizational collapse some 15,000 years previously where the only technology maintained was either practical and necessary, or picked up by the Mechanicus which developed into a cult as the original source material for development and maintenance degraded and they needed a way to maintain the technology without losing the how to do it. Since their lives depended heavily on keeping their systems working...
    • The Necrons, due to their nature, can't access the Warp and thusly don't have the Psychic Powers that other races do. Instead, they turn to their hyper-advanced science, which is more than comparable in effectiveness; combat scientists called "Crypteks" actually take the place that combat psykers do in other races, and their various scientific disciplines are even named like disciplines of magic. Psychomancy includes blasting an opponent's mind with fear or despair so they die or go insane and teleporting through clouds of darkness. Plasmancy controls Pure Energy, but also can control fire and light. Chronomancy is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Ethermancy is the control of air and lightning. Geomancy, despite the name, is actually more about alchemy than about direct earth control; Crypteks following this discipline are known as Harbingers of Transmogrification.
  • Inverted in the Hollow World D&D setting, where the Blacklore elves' "advanced technology" is secretly powered by magic. This allows the Immortals who oversee the Hollow World to preserve the high-tech culture of the Blacklore elves (who've forgotten how their own machines work and can't tell the difference), while ensuring that actual technology won't spread to other parts of the HW setting and disrupt other preserved cultures.
  • Inverted in the Eberron setting where mundane technology is all but discarded because magic has reached the point where it could be called a technology in and of itself.

Video Games

  • Eternal Champions: Xavier Pendragon was burned at the stake for being a warlock despite the manual saying that his abilities were based in science.
  • Phantasy Star seems to run on this trope, particularly Phantasy Star Universe in which the spells are equipped as programs for weapons.
    • In Phantasy Star IV, for example, the main character can shoot lasers/holy light out of his hands, his partner can summon fire out of nowhere, and a companion that joins early on can freeze his enemies, etc. Your basic fantasy game magic, right? Well, not too far into the story, the characters are joined by a robed character, who (during a cutscene) blasts away some rocks with some sort of fire. The rest of the characters go, "Whoa, was that * MAGIC* ? I thought that the art of magic was lost centuries ago!" Cue the confused player thinking, "wait, you mean the * other* fire spell that the other player can cast ISN'T magic?" It's not really explained what the difference is, but the game has androids ("An droid, the droid, WHATEVER" -Raja, Phantasy Star IV) and spaceships, and such. The trope is varied, though, because the characters seem to be able to distinguish easily between magic and tech, it's just the player that's confused.
      • "Techniques" from Phantasy Star II tend to be described as science (or at least Techno Babble). The manual explains how some techniques do what they do; for instance, Foi "compresses the oxygen in the air until it ignites." The likely explanation is that they're a form of Psychic Powers developed by Mother Brain, and that magic has more or less died off in the age of modern science. Still, Phantasy Star II in general has a lot of Sufficiently Advanced vibes anyway, so you never know.
  • Quoted by Virgilia in Umineko no Naku Koro ni.
  • Invoked in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, when Otacon gives a theoretical explanation of Vamp's 'superpowers':

Snake: So it's technology then, not magic?
Otacon: With technology this advanced, who can tell the difference?

    • Also invoked in a couple of the optional Codec calls in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Otacon compares Snake's artillery to everyone else's unique methods of attack when Ganondorf is concerned, and Mei Ling even directly goes into a spiel about how technology is simply another kind of magic when Zelda's around.
  • Assassin's Creed features Those Who Came Before, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that created humanity then posed as gods. The technology that they left behind is the driving force behind the plot.
  • Septerra Core does this big time. Both technological equipment and magical abilities are powered by radiation from the Core, a gigantic friggin' biocomputer! Essentially, anything done by a living thing is magic, and anything done by a machine is technology. Then again, the line between lifeforms and machines is blurred too, with the game having both sentient robots and biotechnology (see Living Ship).
  • Biotics in Mass Effect run the whole gamut of Psychic Powers and could easily be mistaken for magic. In fact, biotic characters fill the "mage" role of the game's Fighter, Mage, Thief dynamic. However, given the game's extreme levels of Shown Their Work and hard sci-fi, it's plausibly explained as the result of Element Zero in the body stimulated by electrical currents generated in the person's nervous system.
  • In BlazBlue, there is a clear distinction between science and magic, however the "magic" used by most characters is called Ars Magus, which is in actuality a middle ground between the two. Pure magic is defined as much more powerful, and currently the only known character to wield it is Phantom.
  • Bascially the main source of the advanced tech from Asura's Wrath comes from this law, though with a more Hindu and Buddhist Twist.

Web Animation

Strong Bad: The word technology... means... magic. It's basically anything that's really cool that you don't know how it works. And if it breaks, you have to buy a new one.

Web Comics

It is not magic — and, for Heaven's sake, don't call it that in front of Albia. Everything she does is subject to the laws of nature. Hers is a science so advanced it merely seems like—

Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.

Western Animation

  • Parodied in The Simpsons when in the future Marge points out how much easier things are since scientists invented magic.
  • The Scooby Doo cartoons tend to be about seemingly paranormal events caused by scientists or technicians with enough know-how to be able to fake such incidences using advanced technology.
  • Galaxy Rangers loved this one, and often blurred the lined between the two. A great example was the Heart of Tarkon, which the natives assumed was magic, but the Rangers saw as a massive and advanced planetary computer. The truth was that they were both right. The Heart was a vast computer, but required Life Energy to run it. Niko also dismissed another character's explanation of her Psychic Powers as magic, saying they were just "powers of the mind...asleep in most people, but awake in me."
  • Both inverted and played straight in the Young Justice episode "Denial". Kid Flash denies the existence of magic, insisting that there is a scientific explanation for everything. He dismisses Dr. Fate's 'magic' as technical tricks. Understandable because of his experience with the Flash villain Abra Kadabra. Played straight by the villain Abra Kadabra, who uses his technology to simulate magic.

Real Life

  • Several classical civilizations, such as the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, used and kept closely guarded technology used in temples to trick worshipers into thinking it was the gods doing.
    • One of the numerous theories as to the purpose of the mysterious "Baghdad Battery" is that it was used to power a statue of a god, which would shock the people who touched it. Being that this was long before anyone was well-accquainted with the concept of electricity, this would be interpreted as the god's answer to a question.
  • Combined with Religion Is Magic in Eric von Daniken's paleocontact hypothesis, and descendants such as the Raelian movement, where primitive humans allegedly worshipped visiting aliens as gods because of their technology.
  • Cargo Cult
  • In an interview on Apple's webpage, a member of the design team for the newly unveiled iPad invokes/discusses the trope, repeatedly mentioning that the feature set may seem like the result of magic. Memetic Mutation ensued.
  • French magician Robert-Houdin was able to help the French government avoid a war with Algeria by using a magic trick that convinced the Algerian people he could take away a man's strength. The trick was performed by asking the strongest man in the audience to pick up a small box that was light enough for a child to lift. The man lifted the box easily on the first attempt but on the second attempt Houdin "commanded the man to lose his strength" and he suddenly could not lift the box. The real magic behind the trick was an electromagnet hidden in the box. Look here for the full story.
  • Any technology of the 21st century when compared to even a few decades ago. We have robots, lasers, and we're working on holograms and energy shields.
    • Remember those plasma balls from the 80s? That was a proof of concept that energy shielding was actually technologically possible. The only hangup, even today, is the prohibitive energy cost to make it worthwhile. The energy required to shield something has to be equal to or greater than the energy released against the shield, and has to maintain that at a constant output.
    • Working holograms are there, just expensive due to inense memory and power requirements. In other words, not something that will be available at Best Buy any time soon.
      • Volumetric holograms at least. They require a data for a third dimension, which instead of the square of how many pixels you need, you now have the cube of the volumetric equivalent. So a 128x128 raw image needs at least 16KB. A 128x128x128 volumetric hologram needs somewhere along the lines of 2MB.
      • Otherwise we can go with those crazy 2D holograms where the subject actually rotates when you look at it from a different angle, if you don't mind the trippy colors. Or Hatsune Miku.
  • A common tactic among European explorers in Africa during the 19th Century was to use technology to convince natives that they were magicians or gods. Cameras trapped people's souls, tinderboxes or matches summoned the Sun into the palm of one's hand, etc.
    • The first might be true, but are we really to believe that a society known for its metalsmithing abilities wouldn't know how to start a fire?
  • Played as a joke with anyone who works with electronics. A lot of times, when electronics are overloaded to the point of catastrophic failure, they burn and release smoke. This smoke is referred to as "magic smoke". And the reason why electronics stop working is "once the magic smoke leaves, it doesn't come back."
    • This is rather reminiscent to the concept of phlogiston, a hypothetical matter used to explain burning prior to the discovery of oxygen.
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
—Gehm's corollary
  1. ↑ wild spoilers
  2. ↑ minor, but shocking spoilers
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