If they didn't attribute that, they totally ripped off Arthur C. Clarke's first law:
> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Thank you for the citation. I don’t remember if the source was cited or if it was shared as received wisdom.
Ps ripped off is quite harsh. Much of what I learned as a doctoral student was the biases absorbed and transmitted by my advisor, it was only specific academic contributions that he claimed as original.
Maybe that was the lesson to be learned all along? When a distinguished but elderly scientist is almost certainly right, he probably heard it somewhere else first.
> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Thre...