Clarke's Third Law - Television Tropes & Idioms

Mahou Sensei Negima has one arc where thousands of students are given magic to wield. Then they fight of 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.
Full Metal Panic has Kurz lampshade the Lambda Driver shortly before it's 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.

In The Wizard Of Oz, the wizard that the movie is named after fakes the all powerful wizard role using a machine.

In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, the Foundation uses their technological know how to mimic the effects of magic and divinity to control the superstitious masses on other planets.
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.
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 traveler.
- Which just means that the time travel technology was not sufficently advanced.
- Or that it's a law with exceptions and not meant to be taken literally, every time?
- Or that the character in the story was improperly portrayed and was able to come to conclusions that he would not have possibly made in real Rome? Is there some reason why time travel can't be magic? Or that the machine itself isn't a magical machine?
- He inverts the law in several stories, where industrialized magic has replaced or mimiced 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.
Disputed by Harry Dresden.
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.
  - although the only examples we really see are Mr Weasley and a few others, and magical folk who are from muggle families tend to be visibly more enlightened.
  - 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.
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 Cargo 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.

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.
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."
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.
Played for laughs by the Observers from Mystery Science Theater 3000, who are, basically, 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
Averted, or perhaps subverted, in Smallville with Jor-El. Much of what Jor-El does in that show clearly follows a magical or supernatural logic, not a natural or scientific one. There is, for example, no conceivable scientific principle at work in the idea that a man might be brought back from dead through the sacrifice of a person close to him at some point in the near future, but the idea of trading one life for another does make poetic, and thus magical sense, and, indeed, has a precedent in ancient legends and myths.

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.

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.

Girl Genius gives us this little gem, where Agatha pimps up a magic wand.
Order Of The Stick had a gag that any sufficiently advanced and reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
In El Goonish Shive it's unclear, even to Tedd, if Tedd's TFG is technology or magic.
As seen in the page picture Florence from Freefall manages to expand on this.

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.
- Speaking of the Greeks, "Greek Fire" (fire which burns underwater) is sort of a Real Life example of Playing With A Trope. Technology itself has advanced magnificently since that time, but we have never (re)discovered how Greek Fire is supposed to have worked.
  - Greek fire was not made by the Greeks. It was an invention by a Syrian alchemist in the service of the Roman Empire, circa 7th century.
  - By the 7th century, the Roman Empire was the Byzantine Empire, meaning the Greek Empire; the Emperor was Greek, the language of the court was Greek, and the heart of the empire was eastern Anatolia—which had been Greek since the time of Alexander—and, well, Greece.
  - We haven't figured out the exact ingredients used for Greek Fire. The general concept, a flammable oil-based substance that floats on (not under) water, thus making it difficult to extinguish, is easily created and understood.
  - Hey, look at things like flares - they work underwater...
  - The big thing about Greek Fire isn't that it floats on water, but that it is ignited by water.
  - I've never seen anything like that in any illustration, it's usually ignited at the point that it is fired.
  - *cough* Napalm.
  - You can add some alkali metal to the mixture and it would then be ignited by contact with water.
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.

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