Nivens Laws
Niven’s laws were named after science fiction author Larry Niven, who has periodically published them as “how the Universe works” as far as he can tell. Most recently rewritten on January 29, 2002 (and published in Analog Magazine in the November 2002 issue), the rules are:
- Never throw shit at an armed man.
- Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.
- to be paralleled with this quote by Robert A. Heinlein who wrote: “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” Beyond This Horizon (1942)
- Never fire a laser at a mirror.
- Giving up freedom for security is beginning to look naïve. (Note: this originally read “F × S = k“, signifying that the product of freedom and security is a constant.)
- Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
- It is easier to destroy than to create.
- Any damn fool can predict the past.
- Ethics change with technology.
- There is a time and a place for tact.
- The ways of being human are bounded but infinite.
- When your life starts to look like a soap opera, it’s time to change the channel.
- The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.
- Niven’s Corollary: The gene-tampered turkey you’re talking to isn’t necessarily one of them.
- Never waste calories.
- There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
- No technique works if it isn’t used.
- Not responsible for advice not taken.
- Think before you make the coward’s choice. Old age is not for sissies.
- Never let a waiter escape.
Niven’s Law (re: Time travel)
A different law is given this name in Niven’s essay “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel”:
Niven’s Law: If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
Hans Moravec glosses this version of Niven’s Law as follows:
There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will “alter” the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some “equilibrium” is reached–the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus act to erase itself (an idea Larry Niven fans will recognize as “Niven’s Law”).
