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INTRODUCTION
The Three-Cornered Wheel

 

NOTE OF LEITMOTIF

Anybody not a scientific illiterate knew it was impossible to get power from the atomic nucleus. Then uranium fission came along.

It was easy to show that energy projectors—the "ray guns" of popular fiction—must necessarily be hotter at the source than at the target, and thus were altogether impractical. Then someone invented the laser.

Obviously spaceships must expel mass to gain velocity, and their crews must undergo acceleration pressure at all times when they were not in free fall, and must never demean themselves with daydreams about maneuvers akin to those of a water boat or an aircraft. Then people were iconoclastic enough to discover how to generate artificial positive and negative gravity fields.

The stars were plainly out of reach, unless one was willing to plod along slower than light. Einstein's equations proved it beyond the ghost of a doubt. Then the quantum hyperjump was found, and suddenly faster-than-light ships were swarming across this arm of the galaxy.

One after another, the demonstrated impossibilities have evaporated, the most basic laws of nature have turned out to possess clauses in fine print, the prison bars of our capabilities have gone down before irreverent hacksaws. He would be rash indeed who claimed that there is any absolutely certain knowledge or any forever unattainable goal.

I am just that kind of fool. I hereby state, flatly and unequivocally, that some facts of life are eternal. They are human facts, to be sure. Mutatis mutandis, they probably apply to each intelligent race on each inhabited planet in the universe; but I do not insist on that point. What I do declare is that man, the child of Earth, lives by certain principles which are immutable.

They include:

  1. Parkinson's Laws: (First) Work increases to occupy all organization available to do it. (Second) Expenditures rise with income.
  2. Sturgeon's Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
  3. Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will.
  4. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: Everything takes longer and costs more.

My assertion is not so unguarded as may appear, because characteristics like these form part of my definition of man.

—Vance Hall
Commentaries on the Philosophy
of Noah Arkwright

 

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Framed