# Yesterday’s Impossibilities Can Become Everyday Life by Clifford Pickover > “Today's conjectures mutate, new theories evolve, and yesterday's impossibilities become part of everyday life.” > **— Clifford Pickover**, *2004 Edge Annual Question, response passage* ## Sources and Context - **Direct publication and locator:** [Pickover 's Law of Mutating Conjectures — Clifford Pickover](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10287) — 2004 Annual Question response, contiguous sentence(s) within the representative extract. - **Exact original excerpt:** “I am having difficulty formulating a law to give you. Through the millennia, even the most brilliant minds rarely generated great and profound "laws." Probably every "law" ever made had been broken or will crumble after a time. Perhaps Edge is asking the wrong question. Knowledge moves in an ever-expanding, upward-pointing funnel. From the rim, we look down and see previous knowledge from a new perspective as new theories are formed. Today's conjectures mutate, new theories evolve, and yesterday's impossibilities become part of everyday life.” - **Context and editing:** Pickover’s sentence follows his warning that scientific laws may crumble; the poster keeps his possibility-oriented, historical claim rather than treating current conjectures as settled. No editorial words were inserted. - **Local Edge archive:** [[research/Edge 2004 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2004 Full Quotation Curation]], response EDGE2004-089. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] - **Article:** [[articles/Information Persistence in Complex Systems|Information Persistence in Complex Systems]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Greatest Transformation in Human History|The Greatest Transformation in Human History]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Science Ecosystem|Science Ecosystem]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Science Ecosystem|Science Ecosystem]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Today's conjectures mutate, new theories evolve, and yesterday's impossibilities become part of everyday life.” — Clifford Pickover, 2004 Edge Annual Question, response passage https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-clifford-pickover-yesterdays-impossibilities-become-everyday-life ```