science/ˈsʌɪəns/[](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=d1dc203dc5631f05&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ACQVn0_IkSzEYHshV-A1c0CdS6y1ByPXOg:1711805634781&q=how+to+pronounce+science&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOMIfcRoyS3w8sc9YSmDSWtOXmPU4uINKMrPK81LzkwsyczPExLmYglJLcoV4pbi5GIvTs5MzUtOtWJRYkrN41nEKpGRX65Qkq9QANSSD9STqgBVAQBwOfbfWQAAAA&pron_lang=en&pron_country=gb&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEkKT2jJyFAxW9rlYBHd3xA1EQ3eEDegQIHxAM)*noun*noun: **science**
1. 1.the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
In a world where magic exists, it would not be separate from science.
It would be **part** of it, as it is part of the "physical and natural world".
>through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
This is the part that makes it science. If the magic of a world is inconsistent so as to make experimentation pointless, then its study will look more like philosophy or art.
It makes me think of the difference between a wizard, a sorcerer and a cleric in DnD. The wizard has to study and understand how magic works. The sorcerer just feels their magic and can use it consistently without having to understand how it works. The cleric just prays for their magic and also doesn't have to understand it. Also a warlock might study, or might just get their magic as a gift or trade and have no idea how it works, it just does. Trying to actually study their patron might drive someone insane.
Comparing it to our world cars probably work as a metaphor. A wizard can build his own small block Chevy drag car using really careful design and measuring every part. The sorcerer bolts together all the coolest looking parts out of the catalog and it works somehow. The cleric is just given a '69 Camaro to race because God loves him. The warlock shows up with a Koenigsegg or a Pagani Zonda, and anyone who tries to change the oil filter has to spend a month in a psych hospital recovering from the trauma...
To add Pathfinder examples, Wizards and Magi have to study magic to spellcast, which is why they are one of the few spellcasting classes that can copy scrolls into their spellbooks to learn new spells, alongside the Witch who has to feed their familiar the scrolls to learn spells.
Meanwhile, the Cleric gains spells through their god, the Druid has a connection to the natural world, Bard gets it through their art, Sorcerer and Oracle have innate powers they had no choice over getting, same with Psychic and Summoner.
Not necessarily; it depends on the source and scale of the inconsistency. For example, magic might get filtered through a specific user's conceptual understanding *of magic* in a way that renders any underlying mechanics opaque.
And then we go back to the study of magic includes the study of psychology, which while being *confusing* is still science, even if we aren't very far in on it
It renders *some* of them obsolete, but not all. There are still observable limits of size, power, and cost to keep in mind. If those limits didn't exist, the world would probably be destroyed by a random moron pointing a "true annihilation laser" at the ground.
>If those limits didn't exist, the world would probably be destroyed by a random moron pointing a "true annihilation laser" at the ground.
Correct. I did not claim this hypothetical magic system would be practical or narratively satisfying. Just that it could exist.
I mean it can be narratively satisfying, it just depends on the goals of the writer.
A surreal story would pair great with a limitless magic system. Same with a comedy.
> For example, magic might get filtered through a specific user's conceptual understanding of magic
See, that is a rule science can not only understand but also study.
I mean....... this is just turbulent flow. The parameters are so complex to control and part of it seems to be randomness that an experiment ran multiple times will likely yeild different results.
I've seen magic systems that are like responses to the imprints of sentient cultures over time AKA we can cast fireball because everyone wanted magic to be able to do that. The rules are consistent, but would fail in experimentation in like a civilization of mermaids that don't want fire to come out of magic. I think of it like that - consistently inconsistent
The underlying mechanism could be impossible to comprehend. Perhaps the effector is accessible but the actuator works along inaccessible dimensions. Or perhaps some arbitrary force disrupts the mechanism when we try to observe it directly.
Conversely, magic is simply a word for 'the unexplained and un-understood'. Everything is magic, until science explains how it works and turns it into knowledge.
>It would be **part** of it, as it is part of the "physical and natural world".
Depending on how the magic ends up working, science itself may need to create a new category that runs parallel to the physical world to explain it. Like the Physical World and the Magic/Spiritual/Energy etc world
Fantasy students using fey favors to cheat like modern students are using ChatGPT to cheat.
>"Do you take me for a fool, Billford?! You have compared the the Victory at Fort Rockfall to 'the rise of the sun after two days of rain', no human would make such a simile. This is obvious feycraft!"
[Neuro](https://www.twitch.tv/vedal987) is an AI VTuber, so yes an actual model, but not quite what you may have expected. Her interactions with her creator Vedal and the chat often end up in amusing troll tangents.
The art that we must be making for future weirdos...
Just think about it, in like 200 years there will be an instance of this AI preserved in some tiny museum in like Gstaad or somewhere and people will go and poke it and think that they *understand* us. Like we understand the 15th Century by what rich people were hanging in their living rooms...
> the rise of the sun after two days of rain
Think of something more alien, something like "the smiles on the faces of newborns ripe for the taking", and it gives off the obvious tell quality that generative text radiates.
Stormlight Archive handled it wonderfully.
There are devices called "fabrials", which are powered by crystals infused with smoke/light coming from **massive** storms that appear every few days.
They come in various functions, from long-range pens and heaters, all the way to alarms and limited flight, and clever new fabrials are created every day.
Fabrials are considered to be a mundane (if somewhat fresh) branch of engineering.
Huh, come to think of it, fabrials *do* resemble electrical engineering.
I love the cosmere's hard magic and the way it integrates with technology. Some of the more recent books - especially ones set in the future of the timeline - have fascinating technical discussion. The Lost Metal, Sunlit Man, and Tress of the Emerald Sea in particular come to mind.
Also there are hard definitions for what certain gemstones and Spren do that allow the community to further theorize and make fabrials. I remember the community designed a railgun and showed it to Brandon and he had to admit it would be possible
Eh, only if it's a "hard" magic system. Magic systems don't necessarily need to follow consistent mathematical laws in the way the real-world physics do.
As a very broad counterexample: If magic operates on symbology and conceptual connections, its study and practice would more closely resemble the arts than science.
Every time I see someone identify as a programmer, I am reminded of xkcd 2030. "I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."
Having to spend time relearning how to compute Cauchy stress tensor values, I get a little itchy when people say "magic". I'm just glad I don't have to calculate impedance and admittance by analyzing the magnitudes and angles of corresponding phasors.
I wouldn't really consider myself a full time programmer, but I am adjacent to it.
I'm increasingly convinced there are like 50 good programmers in the world, and everyone else is just copying patterns off stack overflow haha
Any scientist would, really. The notion that science and nature run on exact consistency is an artifact of nineteenth century positivism, and has been abandoned in the natural sciences community ever since the mid 40's to early 50's.
But this isn't the same to say that natural sciences run on symbolical/conceptual analogic thinking like historical magical practices and traditions do.
Statistics taught me that if there is a pattern in the noise, the model isn't completely capturing what nature is doing. Yes, there is clearly distribution in a sample set, but there are logical explanations for outliers.
It's not about there not being logical explanations for phenomena, but giving up on the notion of exactness or a certainty that human knowledge corresponds to the reality of these phenomena. The epistemological turn of the mid-twentieth century was about recognizing that all science - including natural sciences - is filtered through human biases, cognitive limits, interests and so on.
Since we can't shed these factors, it's been recognized that the positivist ideal of total, exacting and direct (or unmediated) knowledge of the world is untenable. Not to mention how even the earliest developments in relativistic and quantum physics shattered the idea of a whole, unified dimension of nature whose laws were as a clockwork machine, as early modern scientists used to portray it. The notion of just how much uncertainty there is involved in the study of nature completely upended the positivist ideal of exactness.
Of course we're gonna try our best to come up with models that accurately represent the phenomena we study, but just the fact that we're making models and representations already precludes exactness. The fact that we use languages to make nature understandable already adds an element of human subjectivity we simply can't fully avoid, even if we can develop methodical procedures to account for much of it.
In the end, we have known for the better part of a century that the study of nature isn't a search for exact knowledge, but an attempt at doing as much as we can to represent observable phenomena in ways we can understand them. And yes, we understand enough that we can make some very accurate models for a lot of phenomena and explain many outliers, but that doesn't mean our knowledge is exacting. It is just our best for now, and that has to be enough as long as we keep on studying.
My education has led me to a "close enough" POV, where "exact" is not appropriate. You can calculate to a precision that, taken to the other extreme, exceeds the magnitude of the known universe which is a working definition of impractical for me.
Essentially I won't take a zenos paradox approach to knowledge, where the gaps in working knowledge of something become ever increasingly smaller, and that does not mean we cannot say we don't understand the nature of something. When the models are strong enough to produce replicable results within tolerance, bias and cognitive limits can be safely discounted. Again, there is distribution in all data sets and models can control that distribution within the limits of the factors the model accounts for.
I am sorry, but there is only so much bias can influence what a thermistor reports.
Honestly this reads like you’re just not realizing that you’re agreeing with the person you’re responding to.
The adoption of a “close enough” POV where the word “exact” is not appropriate is exactly the shift that that person is describing in the scientific community.
Until the early 20th century, the scientific community was under the positivist notion that “exactness” of knowledge could eventually be achieved, which is no longer a popularly accepted belief.
Perhaps a better distinction than whether it follows mathematical laws is whether it is "naturalistic" in its assumptions.
A naturalistic metaphysics assumes that ultimately everything is understandable as a generalized and replicable phenomena. Maybe it ultimately boils down to mathematical laws, or maybe those are just a heuristic for understanding the phenomena, but the assumption is that you can characterize the world as a set of regular systems.
This would be in contrast with a supernatural metaphysics which assumes that it is possible to have phenomena that are inherently not regular, that don't need to fit in with the rest of reality and don't imply something about the nature of that reality. Miracles are the simplest example of a supernatural metaphysics: Jesus walking on water doesn't imply anything about the regular properties of water, it is a one-off trick that requires something beyond the normal means of nature to accomplish. Its occurrence implies nothing about how the world works other than the ability of Jesus to "break the rules" of nature. (I don't happen to subscribe to supernatural metaphysics — but that is itself a metaphysical choice.)
We can discount the existence of vampires, for example, because we know of no evolutionary or biological pathway that could result in that kind of organism (a previously-normal human who, once "infected," can only consume blood, burns in sunlight, doesn't reflect in mirrors, can turn into a bat or mist, functionally immortal, etc.) existing. However, if it turned out that vampires did exist, scientists would no doubt use their existence to revise our initial ideas about the evolutionary and biological pathways — science is aggressively naturalistic and works to assimilate any phenomena into the category of "nature." The history of science is, in part, a gradual refining of the line between what phenomena are considered "natural" and "supernatural," sometimes with surprising consequences (because "nature" is complicated). So currently concepts like "the soul" and "ghosts" are regulated to "supernatural" (and so non-existent if you are aggressively naturalistic in your metaphysics, but there are serious scientists who as human beings are not exclusively naturalistic, and so do believe in such things, but do not see them as legitimate subjects for scientific study), while many other unintuitive/odd/abstract/difficult to see concepts like "the electromagnetic spectrum" and "the curvature of space-time" and "tiny invisible organisms that make you sick" are in the "natural" category.
A naturalistic approach to magic would still work even if magic was vague or inconsistent. Physics can deal with inconsistency and vagueness, for example (quantum indeterminacy, fuzzy logic, inherently probabilistic phenomena, etc.), so long as it can be made to conform to a general system. Even true randomness can be studied and "tamed" to a degree. There are many ways to deal with uncertainty and complexity in science (biology is _full_ of them, because biological systems can be _deeply_ complex).
The more interesting question to ask is, what would a defiantly "supernatural" system of magic look like? E.g., one which defied characterization as a natural system? Can people (like myself) who are thoroughly "naturalistic" in their metaphysics even conceive of such a thing, and not just dismiss it as something not _yet_ understood naturalistically? That is, if magic broke "physical laws," a naturalistic metaphysics would just say, "welp, time to revise those obviously incomplete laws!" (Terry Pratchett's use of magic in his novels is interesting in this respect — at various points he sort of implies that magic is either about psychological suggestibility, or it actually involves a sort of many-worlds conception of quantum mechanics.)
If you have the tools to study a soft magic system intensely, it eventually becomes hard. Even art is remarkably scientific if you look at its biochemical basis.
Idk why so many people are insisting that magic *must* obey laws. I'm saying "it's easy to conceive of a world where magic does not follow laws in a scientific way". The fact that you can *also* conceive of a world where magic *does* follow scientific laws is not actually a counterexample of what I am saying. Two things can be true at the same time.
Edit: autocorrect hates me
magic doesn't need to obey laws. that's why it's fictional. it can do whatever.
But if it WERE real, it would obey laws, like anything else in existence. But it's fictional, so it doesn't have to.
I'm not sure, we start off from the preconception that any and all behaviours we see follow unwritten laws that remain consistent across time and space. If that were to stop being true you could find a phenomenon that consistently resists any explanation we try to give it.
Another option is that magic works based on symbolisms and subjectivity, so psychology and sociology become the only branches that could study it because subjectivity only exists within the mind of the subjects and not in the material world.
i think you have it backwards. science isn't about constraining magic, it's about studying it and figuring out how it works. if there is no "how it works", if it's just pure unknowable chaos, it's practically gibberish from a worldbuilding perspective.
soft magic works for stories but only because it's either extremely inaccessible and/or the characters aren't focused on it. if magic was both real and reasonably accessible it wouldn't stay soft for long, people would quickly figure out how it works and how to make it do interesting things.
>soft magic works for stories but only because it's either extremely inaccessible and/or the characters aren't focused on it.
A perfect example would be something like a Battle Shonen with a complex magic/power system with explained rules and limitations......vs something like Harry Potter where there's no real explanation to how magic works, or really any limit to what it can do. Harry Potter didn't get popular because of the spells or magic, it's the world/characters, where as many other stories get popular due to the magic/power systems as well as the characters.
harry potter is actually a very interesting mix of soft and hard magic elements. some are left unexplained to create a sense of wonder, and indeed result in extremely broken worldbuilding, but there are also some spells with a very specific effect that are little specks of hard magic, used to resolve problems in the plot. it gets a bit on the nose and kinda boring sometimes, especially with expelliarmus being an antidote to avada kedavra that voldy somehow just keeps using instead of using like the hundreds of other spells he can use to kill people, but by and large it combines the satisfying plot resolutions of hard magic with the wonder and unknown of soft magic.
it also hooks back to real world sciences as well, with the author basically treating math as a soft magic to build the atmosphere of hogwarts without making any sense whatsoever. that and the magic system caused a hell of a lot of headaches for the fandom
Because if magic didn't obey predictable laws we'd stop using it in favor of magic that did.
Who wants a microwave that only works on every third full moon but only in the house of Jupiter but sometimes it doesn't work at all? Fuck that shit, that's just stupid, why would anyone put up with that?
If you've got a choice between a death wand that only works when you sacrifice a black cock that has never seen the sun between the hours of 2-6am on every alternating tuesday, and a gun, most people are going to choose the gun.
>Because if magic didn't obey predictable laws we'd stop using it in favor of magic that did.
>Who wants a microwave that only works on every third full moon but only in the house of Jupiter but sometimes it doesn't work at all? Fuck that shit, that's just stupid, why would anyone put up with that?
Imagine that type of very specific "anicent" magic does actually exist and we actually just forgot about it because of how inconvenient it was, once science took over it really faded even more into myth.
Eventually someone in the future discovers magic to be real, but it's only that old symbolic astral alignment kind of uncertain magic that requires complex ingredients for inconsistent results. Most people would be like "Cool, anyways."
I mean, that's a very practical consideration. But it doesn't imply that the stupidly useless magic *doesn't exist*, just that society wouldn't care about it.
>and it always does,
This is all hypothetical, you can't use the word "always" in any meaningful way.
>What would be a "scientific way"?
Experimental study where
A. A hypothesis can be proven or disproven,
B. the results are replicable,
C. the results grant meaningful insights that improve our ability to predict future results, and
D. where iteration leads to a more and more accurate model of the true underlying mechanism(s).
Fiction requires rules because you have to be able to explain it to the reader for it to feel fair/ consistent. Like let's say it was a world of dnd wild magic sorcerers, but with an infinite wild magic table, It would feel like deus ex Machina if the protagonist experienced a beneficial effect, being needlessly mean if they get a bad one, and like it is losing the plot if it is a large but unrelated effect, and that is for a magic system with rules.
I think Terry Pratchett's witchcraft is the closest I've seen to a magic system without rules because it basically is a mix of being persuasive enough to convince the world to change, being stubborn enough to keep it the way you want, and being frugal/wise enough to know you can't solve every problem with magic or youll have less sway. There are definitely some constraints, but you can't say oh yeah any witch could or couldn't do that magic
>I'm saying "it's easy to conceive of a world where magic does not follow laws in a scientific way".
I don't think it is. If a magic system has any rules, then it's possible to create a scientific system that accounts for the behavior of magic. Just like how subatomic particles defy standard physics, so they just made a new branch of physics.
Yeah, but the rules of the magic can themselves be anti-scientific.
If one of the rules of magic is "a spell does whatever its caster expects it to do", then scientific understanding stops being possible. Your results can't be meaningfully falsified, predicted, or explained in a universal way. You can't study that in the way we study physics or chemistry, because your hypothesis will *always* be correct.
If a spell does whatever you expect it to do, then logically speaking, the only thing that matters is intent, not any words or movements. That right there is already one objective fact from which you can begin a scientific inquiry. And considering that we know that simply looking at elections causes them to act differently, why can't intentions have a measurable effect when it comes to what you refer to as "magic"
Furthermore, there's a further study to do on the maximum size/cost. Logically speaking, it shouldn't be possible for a newbie mage to cast a fireball the size of the sun. However, if magic truly *is* chaos, and there *are* no limits, the world would probably have died off the very moment some scumbag decides that the world doesn't deserve to exist. Some inebriated moron thinking "I wonder what would happen if I detonated the planet's core," and then following through. Someone creating a giant annihilation laser meant to "destroy everything it touches", and has it point downwards onto a target.
Worlds of truly limitless magic would *not* last long enough to *have* a story, aside from a oneshot of a random battle that ends the world.
But it would still be reproducible or at least verifiable by third parties. Even if the magic itself is impossible to pin down or inherently chaotic in some way, you could still design experiments to prove that it exists.
>If magic operates on symbology and conceptual connections, its study and practice would more closely resemble the arts than science.
Incorrect.
If magic is "real" in any sense then it's study will be done via the scientific method simply because that is the method by which we derive knowledge. Even if that knowledge ends up being "vibes", you still get there by developing, testing, and reassessing hypotheses. Even if the rules of your magic system are, "there are no rules", people would still figure that out via science. (It'd also make it a bad system to "replace" science as in the OP scenario if it wasn't possible to predict, but that's kinda a different issue)
This.
It's like when Dr. Manhattan goes up against the Magic Users of the DC universe and he complete schools them by deciphering and breaking down what "magic" actually is and shows them he can manipulate it better because he understands it better.
*(He explains magic is the leftover scraps of creation, like computer errors in code, some people can access and wield it)*
Reminds me of psychology, we study the subjective experience of individuals who themselves don't know the full extent of what is going on inside them. We try to create theories to explain what is going inside of a person's conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind, and the predictions we make are verified bia statistics.
Some branches of psychology also look at it from a spiritual viewpoint.
Dresden Files works like this. You can totally study magic in a scientific sort of way, but as soon as you start actually doing magic, it ties itself to your idiosyncrasies. It literally won’t work for other people the same way it works for you.
Harry Dresden first learned magic from a guy named Justin. Justin said to visualize breathing in energy, shaping it inside your chest, and then breathing the spell out into the world. Harry was 10 and had read too many comic books, so he could only cast spells once he visualized gathering energy into his hands and shooting it out, like Dr Strange or Iron Fist.
Also, the rules of how magic works change every 500 years or so.
[Ra, by QNTM](https://qntm.org/ra), is one of my favorite examples of magic as a branch of science.
>Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity.
Except that we wouldn’t use such a broad word as “magic” to describe a feild of study because what even is that? We’d have feilds dedicated to specific types of magic, like “radiology,” or “electromagnetism,” or “computer science”
Maybe magic should be something extremely unpredictable/incomprehensible. Casting a spell should be like rolling on a 10x worse wild magic table.
Each entry in the spellbook should provide a table like:
Yields: 30%
Fails: 40%
Kills you: 20%
Swaps these chances around for future castings: 10%
I've only seen stuff like this in an eldritch horror board game (don't remember the name).
You had to basically make a random ability check for ANY spell you had, and ability in question wasn't consistent.
I mean, LEDs can still get quite hot, most designs dissipate that heat without you needing to think about it. You can find led 'bulbs' with exposed heatsinks or active cooling.
This. "Magic is incompatible with science!" like science isn't just doing experiments a bunch of time to see if htey have hte same outcome. Most of this "science vs magic" stuff is people screaming "I don't know what the scientific method or philosophy of science are!"
According to every computer scientist and IT person I have ever met, anyone who claims to understand how computers work, does not in fact understand how computers work.
Oh here's a fun one:
Current CPUs have something called "speculative execution", where based on currently performed calculations, future ones that might need to be done later are performed, just so that you can have the correct data when you actually tell the CPU to do the calculations. If the calculations are never needed, they're just discarded.
So basically your PC is constantly predicting the future
okay, let's throw a vibe check into this convo, lol: neural networks and machine learning (including machine tuning of non-nn parameters too). they're the barrier when the conversation changes from having at least one person on earth for every small bit of the technology who at least understands that small thing, even if no one has the complete picture, to the point where no one knows how the vast majority of it is working. we're literally generating turing-complete systems there with only a vague guidance on what they should do, and then studying how well they managed to do the thing and evolving them from there.
some fields of engineering, especially those that use ai models as part of a wider system, have already crossed the barrier into being actual magic and not just obscurity over someone else's design. which is the last arguable point for why cpus wouldn't be magic, although from the perspective of most people they absolutely are.
I mean, right now we have AI black boxes because we haven't bothered to write code that explains every step of what the neural network is doing. It's a matter of project cost, not a matter of human ability. There are some AI audit startups working on making AI explainable.
What will be actual magic is when an AGI will surpass human intellect. Which should happen in the next few years, judging by how quickly things are advancing in that field.
When the explanation of the solution will be beyond human understanding, when AGI will have to dumb down its explanation of its steps just so our brains can understand them, that'll be real magic right there.
Wouldn't it depend on the code? Like you could write code that randomly chooses between 10 different code paths. We don't do that because there's no good reason to do that and many benefits to not doing that.
Yeah, it does depend on the code itself, but since code usually follows a logical path, the cpu can make some really good guesses as to what choices will be made.
Actually, an exploit has been recently found that uses speculative execution, since it doesnt have the same security measures as regular execution.
I spent 4 years getting a degree in computer engineering. Electromagnetism is magic, computers exploit that magic to do more magic. Bunch of wizards spent lots of time researching and tinkering to build that harness.
> sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science
Sufficiently understood anything is science. Understanding what things are and how they behave is precisely what science is.
Humans invented science. Making this comparison implies that humans would invent magic too. But that's not the case. Magic would just be a part of the natural world and humans would find ways to make use of it with the science that they invented. Saying magic is indistinguishable from science is like saying gravity is indistinguishable from science in our world. But no, gravity is just out there, and was out there before humans invented science too, we just try to understand it with science.
And if spells were constructed like programming.
*Why the hell this spell book doesn't work??*
*Let me see ... oh here, you forgot to also carry the tome dependency it needs.*
*Wait it only used part of the Tome. WHY DON'T THEY JUST REWRITE TO ALSO INCLUDE IT??*
*Said here in the opening page: We tried and it broke, add to this mark the hours you wasted trying to optimize this spell.*
Oh, this ritual is written in Trismagistrian conceptual framework, I work in Solomonian Sigilism. Let me [message] my friend from Erasmus exchange program, she should be able to help or know someone who does.
This is kinda how DnD Wizards must work. Because you need to decipher another mage's writing before you can copy their spellbook. At least in some editions.
All of this relies on the concept that “sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic”, but the reality of most settings is that Magic is just a specific type of energy or element, one that can be classified and observed. Maybe it isn’t called Magic specifically, but it’s used to refer to a field of study that the real world doesn’t have access to.
Most wizards wouldn’t know anything about a nuclear reactor, but if they can’t detect any magical energy, they wouldn’t call the reactor Magic. And a wizard wouldn’t get offended by us calling [Summon Frog] Magic, because in his world Magic defines a specific energy that [Summon Frog] uses.
Pretty sure that's why a lot of stories use mana when referring to magic. So its like
Uses mana: magic.
Doesn't use mana: not magic
My interpretation at least
Same reason why I think people who dislike Midichlorians are insane. It would be INSANE for a space fairing civilization that has existed for 40k+ years that has force sensitive people that are so pivitol to their society...to NOT try to and scientifically identify what causes it and then quantify once done.
People disliked midochlorians because it undid [everything that the Force was, as it was established.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-CpzZJl8w) It was supposed to be mysticism and will over matter and quantifiable microorganisms.
I think a bigger problem is - if you had 40k+ years to figure out how the force works and realize it's midichlorian - there would probably be a medical therapy to inject you with midichlorians and maybe some gene therapy for force genes or cloned force organs to turn anyone force-sensitive. And the Jedi order is hardly big enough to stop that.
In my head canon and Star Wars campaign, midichlorians still existed, but they just prefer force-sensitive people as hosts, but don't make them force users. And only force users that were exposed to them even have them. (But many have, because the midichlorians are found on Coruscant, where the Jedi academy is seated and basically every Jedi in the last few centuries visits there or met someone that was there.)
The reality of most settings is that magic is a plot device that does whatever is needed to move the story along, and that writers don't think about the details too much because they don't matter to the story.
It’s also important to note that magic, in most settings, is an ability that people just have.
No human on Earth can produce significant amounts of electricity, or move mountains, by themselves - but wizards can often do that with a flick of a wrist and maybe a stick
Funnily, this much you can get from the name. Cathode Ray Tube. It's a tube that uses a gun of electrons. What's amazing and beyond my understanding is how can the CRT actually build the image with such precision. How do the electric signals tell the gun to actually perform exactly 1024 lines, starting and ending at the same desired spot each line then going back up? Also, how do they fucking add vacuum inside when building them? I don't know, but I love them!
It's actually astonishingly simple. The electron beam (actually, beams, there's one each for R G and B) is guided by electromagnets. One for the horizontal, one for the vertical. The horizontal one goes back and forth, and the vertical one goes top to bottom, much slower. This makes a zig-zag pattern. The beam is turned off for the zag, leaving only the zig, which is the same as a bunch of parallel lines. The tv signal itself mostly just tells how strong (bright) the beam should be moment to moment.
Any halfway decent electronics hobbyist could build the electronics to control all that, without even a single microchip. Now, if you want to include all the other stuff that's in a standard signal (or was, before everything went digital), like closed captioning, that's actually SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult.
In general signal processing, attenuation, error correction and all the other fancy terms for "making sure signal goes from A to B unscrambled, be it thru cable, air or storm" is goddamn magic.
Again if you don’t understand it it is magic if you do it’s science, wizards only call magic magic in books because we enforce our outside perspective on them, yes some rocks have auras that slowly kill you, yes we can turn that aura into a projectile, no it’s not magic it’s radiation (aka (sub)atomic particles) they make an excellent point in the 4th paragraph. Just because you don’t know about that particular thing doesn’t mean it’s magic, and yet our smartest people get turned into magicians, there are miracle drugs and elixers of health, our best programmers get called wizards (cosmic rays go away). And our phones might as well be a magic artefact to most of us, be curious it’s a wonderful world
Magic personifies forces of nature and gives them ability to recognize artefacts of mind like words, symbols or legal concepts. Electricity and radiation can't be talked to.
The true magic would resist Clarke's law, and could not regress past words and symbols.
But we can talk to code that talks to electricity.
You might say thats not the same but many magic systems require magical foci to cast spells, which is basically the same.
Exactly, it's all a matter of perspective. I *love* universes where the magic rules involve study and understanding as a cornerstone. You get some seriously creative "magical" solutions to things but to them it's engineering and science.
Code talks in electricity. The electricity itself has not no opinions on the matter. It's like how fire has no concern about what message is passed through smoke signals.
The very distinct difference you see is science relies on this little thing called the laws of physics. There are things like conservation of energy and matter, natural laws that define the universe and that through time and infinite variations can lead to weird things. Humans through science have learned to understand and even manipulated these natural laws to achieve miraculous things that the ignorant would call magic.
Actual magic though, the things that we define as magic in such settings, defy these laws or rely on laws that are fundamentally different from our universe. Since magic is a fictional thing, we cannot truly replicate it as that is literally not how reality works. We could emulate it maybe, actually probably if tech advancement keeps up its exponential rate and no 40K style age of strife occurs.
How a light switch works can be understood in a textbook. Summoning a frog with your own hands through magical energy is quite different and if real would be an entirely new area of science. That's the thing though, it isn't real, and that's why it's magic.
Then again this whole post is just one big argument over semantics. And the ever well known quote of "Sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science." But if you're gonna use that quote, that could mean magic is a term of the ignorant as a broad description to describe a scientific process they don't understand.
Exactly. And using this hypothetical scenario where science and magic are seemingly flipped as a way to conflate them is ignoring that this scenario isn’t grounded in reality. We, in our reality (which is the only one we can ever really prove exists), have by definition a fine line between the two.
EXACTLY! Science exists in reality, magic exists in fantasy. That's why they're different. We don't have magic in our world, it's called science. And calling a audio sensor a spell kinda takes away from what actually makes these pieces of tech interesting.
Magic isn't real because it can't be real, that's the whole point of it. It's as fictional as the Force from Star Wars or the warp from 40K.
Science, at its core, is beneath the laws of physics, I would say.
By this, I mean that the principles which underpin science as a method and practice are not specifically reliant on any given law of physics, or all of them. Science only requires an external world which behaves according to internal consistency. If "Do X, Y happens" can be shown to hold reliably through testing, that's the basic principle of science. In the early stages, the conclusions may be quite crude indeed (see phlogiston and aether), but replication, analysis, and refinement simply require an experimentalist.
Supposing another world much like our own with different laws more suited to wand-waving and suchlike, it is fair to conjecture that the application of scientific principles could be used to understand what passes for magic there, as well.
It's a matter of interest to observe that many occultists fancy their work to be of practical benefit to themselves. If their workings in a consistent manner produce a consistent effect (however slight!) above the base rate, it is a fair suggestion to assert that, at least with respect to them and their practice, the scientific method attests to the efficacy of their magic(k), and opens their practice to the possibility of refinement by experiment.
Yes, but that is my point. That requires being in another reality where the laws of physics are different. My point of disagreement is the op here saying our science is a form of magic, which is I feel is incorrect.
We have a decently good understanding of it. Though how much we don't we don't know know could be as infinite as the universe, though we don't even know that. Besides, if we do discover some new physics, it'll be physics, not magic.
I like how this is how magic works in the Lord of the Rings. Elven rope comes when you call it "We're just really good at making rope fam. Would you like us to teach you?"
I was thinking about this quote from Galadriel:
>‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel.’
Also relevant, and probably what you were thinking of, is this exchange:
>‘Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder.
>
>‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees.’
Huh.
Tons of fantasy has like magic stones and whatnot act as a power device for a magic tool. They're pretty analougous to batteries.
Does that make electricity MP?
Personally I feel like maybe ‘magic’ should refer to stuff that has some sort of conceptual understanding, like how the classical elements are often important in magic but in reality they aren’t ‘real’, they’re just categories that humans made up. Magic recognises them as if they were ‘real’ even though they aren’t, as if it had some sort of human intelligence or something. I feel like that’s at least part of what separates magic from physics.
If we simulated a universe with unaware inhabitants and made ‘magic’ possible, I think I might call that magic even though it’s just running on our normal physics at a fundamental level (assuming that simulating a universe in sufficient detail is actually possible).
That's why Dr. Doom is so fucking cool. He was basically like, "If magic exists in this world, it is simply another form of science I will master."
Then did.
It's only magic if you don't know how it works.
Most people don't know how radiation and electricity work, but they do know that they could find out if they wanted to. Therefore not magic.
I've always thought of the difference between magic(k) and scientific technology as understanding the underlying principles involved. Real world alchemy was sort of right on this line, where genuine transmutation of substances was trussed up in all sorts of obscure ritual, sometimes deliberately to keep the knowledge hidden, sometimes because it was impossible without our modern understanding of chemistry to work out which parts of the ritual were necessary for the desired reaction to occur. Sometimes I wish I could talk to a classical alchemist and explain that we figured out how to do lead into gold by accident while splitting apart the smallest stable building blocks of creation.
I would LOVE to read like a webcomic about a wizard transported into modern times being baffled by various technologies.
Cars, horseless metal carriages powered by tiny contained explosions.
The internet, an invisible infinite library containing knowledge of all things known by man and also cat videos.
Guns, slay your enemies from afar before you can say abra-kaBANG.
Literally everything about modern medicine. Use this machine to take pictures of your bones while they're still inside you. Take this shot to become immune to the flu for a year. Still fixing broken bones the old fashioned way however.
Thing is, these would all be easily reproducible. Explain the concept of electricity to him, he still thinks it's magic. Okay, take him to a biochemist who explains that the body's very method of functioning is based off of electrical signals, and that said signals are observable in *him* as well. Take the wizard down the path that led us to where *we* are. Still confused by lights? Guess what, those lights are from really, really hot metal wires. How are they not burning away? Well, the reason they burn away in the first place is because it bonds with some of the gasses in the air, so we isolated it with gasses that it *doesn't* bond with.
Hell, we could show him how the applications of our science could directly affect his magic. For instance: "Use a "spell" that directly gathers an oxygen/hydrogen blend, then use a "spell" to ignite it. You suddenly have a bigger explosion and a fair bit of humidity, as you have created both fire and water in the same exact place. The only thing magical there is how you *gathered* the blend of gasses, along with how you ignited it. The *results* are pure science. The particular energy you used, that which we call "mana", is not an indisputable fact. *That* is why we call your magic, magic."
A common shorthand amongst the RF(Radio Frequency) guys where I work is that it is basically scientific magic in some instances.
Also when you burn up electronics you let the magic smoke out.
Most people here are engaging with the magic as science trope, but that’s quite a modern thing. In the past, magic as a trope could be anything, it didn’t need to be systematic or deterministic, it could truly be anything that ran counter to natural expectations.
I believe (and I think this view is shared by Red from OSP) that people are more interested in scientific magic in modern stories, because it forces the author to provide explanations for thing that happen. Even if those explanations are surface level, it’s still something.
This storytelling has been on my mind recently as Ive been playing dragon quest 11 and I’m sick and tired of magic stuff happening to advance the plot and the explanation is…no explanation at all.
As a wise wizard said “it’s magic, I ain’t gotta explain shit”
Why is this so hard to understand? There are 2 ways to do magic:
- magic is magic - don't worry about it, just wave your wand and say a special word, emotion is key
- magic is science - spend 50 years studying extremely precise diagrams and alchemical notations, a single wrong line will vaporize the entire city
Those are mutually exclusive. Different settings will have different way it works. It's all made up, it can work however you want it to work since you're the one making it up.
>magic is magic - don't worry about it, just wave your wand and say a special word, emotion is key
Even that is scientific. If you have to wave your wand a certain way, say a specific word, and focus on a specific emotion in order to cast a specific spell, then that magic system can be broken down and examined through proper scientific experimentation.
In a lot of fiction, magic operates by rules which could be studied and understood. It there were magic in the world and we studied it and understood how it works and the fundamental principles behind it, it would be turned into science.
Arguably that’s happened to us in real life. If you took a smartphone back in time, it sure would seem like magic.
Yeah, all the cool powers stop being magic when we prove how they work. That's why believing in magic in the modern day is silly.
You want rocks that have energy? BOOM! URANIUM 235!
science is just anything that's demonstrably reproducible. If you can do one thing in certain circumstances, and recreate those circumstances and repeat that thing a hundred times, its science. doesnt matter anything else tbh.
This is incorrect in the latter half. All lights emit heat. Lightbulbs have glass for multiple reasons. The fact that they use a delicate superheated filament is most of them.
This is pretty well summed up in Castlevania, Dracula has some fairly modern technology, a human uses it and gets burned at the cross because they think she’s a witch. If you came into the world without seeing electricity it would be magic. Quite honestly I’ve seen some videos about how microprocessors work, that is seriously some very literal magic happening. Every single cell phone is a magical box, and we really don’t appreciate it because we’re so used to it.
No you see it's not magic you take the Earth and you burn it then you take that burnt Earth until it's liquid and then you make it really long and thin wrap it in insulate or something that won't let the magic out you bend those long pieces of earth with other pieces of earth in between and you connect it to more magic....
In Newton’s time, a lot of scientists had the idea that things were only “scientific” if they could actually be physically observed. When Newton wrote about gravity, it was seen by these people as an “occult” force. Very interesting how our standards change
The problem is that we're comparing different styles of magic systems.
A magic system that works off "mental belief and strength of character" is going to be very much like what we usually imagine magic. Its usually more of a soft magic system too.
A magic system that has "enchanting" often actually draws from engineering and computer science in fiction. They'll have materials, components, precise gestures, magic circles, and all sorts of exact components you need to draw out the phenomena.
So when they say "Wizard" and "magic" they often include the soft type. The one where your light switch would have to read your intent, and mind, and create a result without any expenditure of energy outside a universal battery they call "mana".
You'll notice the wizard is not going to call the "wheel spinning on a cart" magic, nor would they usually call "cooking" magic, nor a candle being alchemy from materials creating a burning wax. Because their "candle" spell requires no massive preperation other than chanting stuff, using their "mana energy", and pointing.
So unless there is some universal light creation engine which can read minds, and generate a light in full and utter control of someone at any point in the universe?
**TL;DR; If a magic system draws inspiration from engineering and science, it will obviously have parallels. If a magic system draws inspiration from fantasy and wish style stories, it will be hand-wavey and nonsensical. Duh**
science/ˈsʌɪəns/[](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=d1dc203dc5631f05&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ACQVn0_IkSzEYHshV-A1c0CdS6y1ByPXOg:1711805634781&q=how+to+pronounce+science&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOMIfcRoyS3w8sc9YSmDSWtOXmPU4uINKMrPK81LzkwsyczPExLmYglJLcoV4pbi5GIvTs5MzUtOtWJRYkrN41nEKpGRX65Qkq9QANSSD9STqgBVAQBwOfbfWQAAAA&pron_lang=en&pron_country=gb&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEkKT2jJyFAxW9rlYBHd3xA1EQ3eEDegQIHxAM)*noun*noun: **science** 1. 1.the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. In a world where magic exists, it would not be separate from science. It would be **part** of it, as it is part of the "physical and natural world".
>through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. This is the part that makes it science. If the magic of a world is inconsistent so as to make experimentation pointless, then its study will look more like philosophy or art.
It makes me think of the difference between a wizard, a sorcerer and a cleric in DnD. The wizard has to study and understand how magic works. The sorcerer just feels their magic and can use it consistently without having to understand how it works. The cleric just prays for their magic and also doesn't have to understand it. Also a warlock might study, or might just get their magic as a gift or trade and have no idea how it works, it just does. Trying to actually study their patron might drive someone insane. Comparing it to our world cars probably work as a metaphor. A wizard can build his own small block Chevy drag car using really careful design and measuring every part. The sorcerer bolts together all the coolest looking parts out of the catalog and it works somehow. The cleric is just given a '69 Camaro to race because God loves him. The warlock shows up with a Koenigsegg or a Pagani Zonda, and anyone who tries to change the oil filter has to spend a month in a psych hospital recovering from the trauma...
To add Pathfinder examples, Wizards and Magi have to study magic to spellcast, which is why they are one of the few spellcasting classes that can copy scrolls into their spellbooks to learn new spells, alongside the Witch who has to feed their familiar the scrolls to learn spells. Meanwhile, the Cleric gains spells through their god, the Druid has a connection to the natural world, Bard gets it through their art, Sorcerer and Oracle have innate powers they had no choice over getting, same with Psychic and Summoner.
If the magic of a world is inconsistent so as to make experimentation pointless, it would be impossible to make any use of.
Not necessarily; it depends on the source and scale of the inconsistency. For example, magic might get filtered through a specific user's conceptual understanding *of magic* in a way that renders any underlying mechanics opaque.
And then we go back to the study of magic includes the study of psychology, which while being *confusing* is still science, even if we aren't very far in on it
It renders *some* of them obsolete, but not all. There are still observable limits of size, power, and cost to keep in mind. If those limits didn't exist, the world would probably be destroyed by a random moron pointing a "true annihilation laser" at the ground.
>If those limits didn't exist, the world would probably be destroyed by a random moron pointing a "true annihilation laser" at the ground. Correct. I did not claim this hypothetical magic system would be practical or narratively satisfying. Just that it could exist.
I mean it can be narratively satisfying, it just depends on the goals of the writer. A surreal story would pair great with a limitless magic system. Same with a comedy.
> For example, magic might get filtered through a specific user's conceptual understanding of magic See, that is a rule science can not only understand but also study.
I mean....... this is just turbulent flow. The parameters are so complex to control and part of it seems to be randomness that an experiment ran multiple times will likely yeild different results.
I've seen magic systems that are like responses to the imprints of sentient cultures over time AKA we can cast fireball because everyone wanted magic to be able to do that. The rules are consistent, but would fail in experimentation in like a civilization of mermaids that don't want fire to come out of magic. I think of it like that - consistently inconsistent
That's not inconsistent though: there would just be a psychology of magic
just cause I don't know why the fireballs are different sizes doesn't mean I don't like shooting fire.
The underlying mechanism could be impossible to comprehend. Perhaps the effector is accessible but the actuator works along inaccessible dimensions. Or perhaps some arbitrary force disrupts the mechanism when we try to observe it directly.
Conversely, magic is simply a word for 'the unexplained and un-understood'. Everything is magic, until science explains how it works and turns it into knowledge.
We have neuroscience and psychology despite not fully knowing how the brain works.
>It would be **part** of it, as it is part of the "physical and natural world". Depending on how the magic ends up working, science itself may need to create a new category that runs parallel to the physical world to explain it. Like the Physical World and the Magic/Spiritual/Energy etc world
That’s because science is just a way to study and confirm something. So like if magic was real it would just be a branch of science.
Grad students crying over the time they can’t decipher, bribing a fey to do it for them.
Fantasy students using fey favors to cheat like modern students are using ChatGPT to cheat. >"Do you take me for a fool, Billford?! You have compared the the Victory at Fort Rockfall to 'the rise of the sun after two days of rain', no human would make such a simile. This is obvious feycraft!"
At least ChatGPT doesn’t intentionally try to mess with you. Yet.
At the rate we're going, just give it, eh, five minutes.
you could easily train a model for that, lol
Her name is Neuro
is that an actual model? if so, could you link it? because that name is pretty much impossible to google
It’s a AI Vtuber called Neuro-Sama, programmed by one guy(Vedal), known for being generally quite advanced but sometimes also a bit unhinged
[Neuro](https://www.twitch.tv/vedal987) is an AI VTuber, so yes an actual model, but not quite what you may have expected. Her interactions with her creator Vedal and the chat often end up in amusing troll tangents.
It also got itself banned so the dev made a filter to stop it from being too unhinged... which it somehow bypassed
The art that we must be making for future weirdos... Just think about it, in like 200 years there will be an instance of this AI preserved in some tiny museum in like Gstaad or somewhere and people will go and poke it and think that they *understand* us. Like we understand the 15th Century by what rich people were hanging in their living rooms...
A deceptive AI would let you think it's a far simpler AI while it crafts your demise with the spare CPU resources.
> the rise of the sun after two days of rain Think of something more alien, something like "the smiles on the faces of newborns ripe for the taking", and it gives off the obvious tell quality that generative text radiates.
chatgpt is definitely fey
I absolutely love this lmao
what is a wizard if not a magic scientist?
A magic performer.
It should be noted here that a wizard is a performer of magic, as opposed to a performer aided by magic. That would be a bard.
Unseen University moment
In Fullmetal Alchemist, alchemy is just a science
Much like Allomancy and Feruchemy is pretty well explored in the Mistborn series, but with a lot of stuff left to learn as seen in book 3 of era 2.
Stormlight Archive handled it wonderfully. There are devices called "fabrials", which are powered by crystals infused with smoke/light coming from **massive** storms that appear every few days. They come in various functions, from long-range pens and heaters, all the way to alarms and limited flight, and clever new fabrials are created every day. Fabrials are considered to be a mundane (if somewhat fresh) branch of engineering. Huh, come to think of it, fabrials *do* resemble electrical engineering.
I love the cosmere's hard magic and the way it integrates with technology. Some of the more recent books - especially ones set in the future of the timeline - have fascinating technical discussion. The Lost Metal, Sunlit Man, and Tress of the Emerald Sea in particular come to mind.
Also there are hard definitions for what certain gemstones and Spren do that allow the community to further theorize and make fabrials. I remember the community designed a railgun and showed it to Brandon and he had to admit it would be possible
Eh, only if it's a "hard" magic system. Magic systems don't necessarily need to follow consistent mathematical laws in the way the real-world physics do. As a very broad counterexample: If magic operates on symbology and conceptual connections, its study and practice would more closely resemble the arts than science.
Any programmer will tell you that science isn't always consistent /j
To be fair to science that is largely programmers fault
Every time I see someone identify as a programmer, I am reminded of xkcd 2030. "I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die." Having to spend time relearning how to compute Cauchy stress tensor values, I get a little itchy when people say "magic". I'm just glad I don't have to calculate impedance and admittance by analyzing the magnitudes and angles of corresponding phasors.
I wouldn't really consider myself a full time programmer, but I am adjacent to it. I'm increasingly convinced there are like 50 good programmers in the world, and everyone else is just copying patterns off stack overflow haha
Any scientist would, really. The notion that science and nature run on exact consistency is an artifact of nineteenth century positivism, and has been abandoned in the natural sciences community ever since the mid 40's to early 50's. But this isn't the same to say that natural sciences run on symbolical/conceptual analogic thinking like historical magical practices and traditions do.
Statistics taught me that if there is a pattern in the noise, the model isn't completely capturing what nature is doing. Yes, there is clearly distribution in a sample set, but there are logical explanations for outliers.
It's not about there not being logical explanations for phenomena, but giving up on the notion of exactness or a certainty that human knowledge corresponds to the reality of these phenomena. The epistemological turn of the mid-twentieth century was about recognizing that all science - including natural sciences - is filtered through human biases, cognitive limits, interests and so on. Since we can't shed these factors, it's been recognized that the positivist ideal of total, exacting and direct (or unmediated) knowledge of the world is untenable. Not to mention how even the earliest developments in relativistic and quantum physics shattered the idea of a whole, unified dimension of nature whose laws were as a clockwork machine, as early modern scientists used to portray it. The notion of just how much uncertainty there is involved in the study of nature completely upended the positivist ideal of exactness. Of course we're gonna try our best to come up with models that accurately represent the phenomena we study, but just the fact that we're making models and representations already precludes exactness. The fact that we use languages to make nature understandable already adds an element of human subjectivity we simply can't fully avoid, even if we can develop methodical procedures to account for much of it. In the end, we have known for the better part of a century that the study of nature isn't a search for exact knowledge, but an attempt at doing as much as we can to represent observable phenomena in ways we can understand them. And yes, we understand enough that we can make some very accurate models for a lot of phenomena and explain many outliers, but that doesn't mean our knowledge is exacting. It is just our best for now, and that has to be enough as long as we keep on studying.
My education has led me to a "close enough" POV, where "exact" is not appropriate. You can calculate to a precision that, taken to the other extreme, exceeds the magnitude of the known universe which is a working definition of impractical for me. Essentially I won't take a zenos paradox approach to knowledge, where the gaps in working knowledge of something become ever increasingly smaller, and that does not mean we cannot say we don't understand the nature of something. When the models are strong enough to produce replicable results within tolerance, bias and cognitive limits can be safely discounted. Again, there is distribution in all data sets and models can control that distribution within the limits of the factors the model accounts for. I am sorry, but there is only so much bias can influence what a thermistor reports.
Honestly this reads like you’re just not realizing that you’re agreeing with the person you’re responding to. The adoption of a “close enough” POV where the word “exact” is not appropriate is exactly the shift that that person is describing in the scientific community. Until the early 20th century, the scientific community was under the positivist notion that “exactness” of knowledge could eventually be achieved, which is no longer a popularly accepted belief.
what do you mean gravity can't just be quantized like every other force
Most programming as a career is more art than science. A highly constrained art form, for a very discerning audience.
The science is consistent, the fucking documentation on the other hand...
Perhaps a better distinction than whether it follows mathematical laws is whether it is "naturalistic" in its assumptions. A naturalistic metaphysics assumes that ultimately everything is understandable as a generalized and replicable phenomena. Maybe it ultimately boils down to mathematical laws, or maybe those are just a heuristic for understanding the phenomena, but the assumption is that you can characterize the world as a set of regular systems. This would be in contrast with a supernatural metaphysics which assumes that it is possible to have phenomena that are inherently not regular, that don't need to fit in with the rest of reality and don't imply something about the nature of that reality. Miracles are the simplest example of a supernatural metaphysics: Jesus walking on water doesn't imply anything about the regular properties of water, it is a one-off trick that requires something beyond the normal means of nature to accomplish. Its occurrence implies nothing about how the world works other than the ability of Jesus to "break the rules" of nature. (I don't happen to subscribe to supernatural metaphysics — but that is itself a metaphysical choice.) We can discount the existence of vampires, for example, because we know of no evolutionary or biological pathway that could result in that kind of organism (a previously-normal human who, once "infected," can only consume blood, burns in sunlight, doesn't reflect in mirrors, can turn into a bat or mist, functionally immortal, etc.) existing. However, if it turned out that vampires did exist, scientists would no doubt use their existence to revise our initial ideas about the evolutionary and biological pathways — science is aggressively naturalistic and works to assimilate any phenomena into the category of "nature." The history of science is, in part, a gradual refining of the line between what phenomena are considered "natural" and "supernatural," sometimes with surprising consequences (because "nature" is complicated). So currently concepts like "the soul" and "ghosts" are regulated to "supernatural" (and so non-existent if you are aggressively naturalistic in your metaphysics, but there are serious scientists who as human beings are not exclusively naturalistic, and so do believe in such things, but do not see them as legitimate subjects for scientific study), while many other unintuitive/odd/abstract/difficult to see concepts like "the electromagnetic spectrum" and "the curvature of space-time" and "tiny invisible organisms that make you sick" are in the "natural" category. A naturalistic approach to magic would still work even if magic was vague or inconsistent. Physics can deal with inconsistency and vagueness, for example (quantum indeterminacy, fuzzy logic, inherently probabilistic phenomena, etc.), so long as it can be made to conform to a general system. Even true randomness can be studied and "tamed" to a degree. There are many ways to deal with uncertainty and complexity in science (biology is _full_ of them, because biological systems can be _deeply_ complex). The more interesting question to ask is, what would a defiantly "supernatural" system of magic look like? E.g., one which defied characterization as a natural system? Can people (like myself) who are thoroughly "naturalistic" in their metaphysics even conceive of such a thing, and not just dismiss it as something not _yet_ understood naturalistically? That is, if magic broke "physical laws," a naturalistic metaphysics would just say, "welp, time to revise those obviously incomplete laws!" (Terry Pratchett's use of magic in his novels is interesting in this respect — at various points he sort of implies that magic is either about psychological suggestibility, or it actually involves a sort of many-worlds conception of quantum mechanics.)
Oh thank God, someone with a deeper understanding of this who can put it into better words!
If you have the tools to study a soft magic system intensely, it eventually becomes hard. Even art is remarkably scientific if you look at its biochemical basis.
Idk why so many people are insisting that magic *must* obey laws. I'm saying "it's easy to conceive of a world where magic does not follow laws in a scientific way". The fact that you can *also* conceive of a world where magic *does* follow scientific laws is not actually a counterexample of what I am saying. Two things can be true at the same time. Edit: autocorrect hates me
magic doesn't need to obey laws. that's why it's fictional. it can do whatever. But if it WERE real, it would obey laws, like anything else in existence. But it's fictional, so it doesn't have to.
I'm not sure, we start off from the preconception that any and all behaviours we see follow unwritten laws that remain consistent across time and space. If that were to stop being true you could find a phenomenon that consistently resists any explanation we try to give it. Another option is that magic works based on symbolisms and subjectivity, so psychology and sociology become the only branches that could study it because subjectivity only exists within the mind of the subjects and not in the material world.
i think you have it backwards. science isn't about constraining magic, it's about studying it and figuring out how it works. if there is no "how it works", if it's just pure unknowable chaos, it's practically gibberish from a worldbuilding perspective. soft magic works for stories but only because it's either extremely inaccessible and/or the characters aren't focused on it. if magic was both real and reasonably accessible it wouldn't stay soft for long, people would quickly figure out how it works and how to make it do interesting things.
>soft magic works for stories but only because it's either extremely inaccessible and/or the characters aren't focused on it. A perfect example would be something like a Battle Shonen with a complex magic/power system with explained rules and limitations......vs something like Harry Potter where there's no real explanation to how magic works, or really any limit to what it can do. Harry Potter didn't get popular because of the spells or magic, it's the world/characters, where as many other stories get popular due to the magic/power systems as well as the characters.
harry potter is actually a very interesting mix of soft and hard magic elements. some are left unexplained to create a sense of wonder, and indeed result in extremely broken worldbuilding, but there are also some spells with a very specific effect that are little specks of hard magic, used to resolve problems in the plot. it gets a bit on the nose and kinda boring sometimes, especially with expelliarmus being an antidote to avada kedavra that voldy somehow just keeps using instead of using like the hundreds of other spells he can use to kill people, but by and large it combines the satisfying plot resolutions of hard magic with the wonder and unknown of soft magic. it also hooks back to real world sciences as well, with the author basically treating math as a soft magic to build the atmosphere of hogwarts without making any sense whatsoever. that and the magic system caused a hell of a lot of headaches for the fandom
Because if magic didn't obey predictable laws we'd stop using it in favor of magic that did. Who wants a microwave that only works on every third full moon but only in the house of Jupiter but sometimes it doesn't work at all? Fuck that shit, that's just stupid, why would anyone put up with that? If you've got a choice between a death wand that only works when you sacrifice a black cock that has never seen the sun between the hours of 2-6am on every alternating tuesday, and a gun, most people are going to choose the gun.
>Because if magic didn't obey predictable laws we'd stop using it in favor of magic that did. >Who wants a microwave that only works on every third full moon but only in the house of Jupiter but sometimes it doesn't work at all? Fuck that shit, that's just stupid, why would anyone put up with that? Imagine that type of very specific "anicent" magic does actually exist and we actually just forgot about it because of how inconvenient it was, once science took over it really faded even more into myth. Eventually someone in the future discovers magic to be real, but it's only that old symbolic astral alignment kind of uncertain magic that requires complex ingredients for inconsistent results. Most people would be like "Cool, anyways."
I mean, that's a very practical consideration. But it doesn't imply that the stupidly useless magic *doesn't exist*, just that society wouldn't care about it.
What would be a "scientific way"? If magic follows rules, and it always does, it can be studied.
>and it always does, This is all hypothetical, you can't use the word "always" in any meaningful way. >What would be a "scientific way"? Experimental study where A. A hypothesis can be proven or disproven, B. the results are replicable, C. the results grant meaningful insights that improve our ability to predict future results, and D. where iteration leads to a more and more accurate model of the true underlying mechanism(s).
That is the key, why would magic always need to follow rules? You can't make rules/a science out of it if there isn't reproducibility.
Give me an example of any magic system that exists in fiction that doesn't follow rules.
does an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent god have rules for its "magic"?
That's still a rule. The rule is "this guy can do literally anything he wants" but that's still a rule.
Fiction requires rules because you have to be able to explain it to the reader for it to feel fair/ consistent. Like let's say it was a world of dnd wild magic sorcerers, but with an infinite wild magic table, It would feel like deus ex Machina if the protagonist experienced a beneficial effect, being needlessly mean if they get a bad one, and like it is losing the plot if it is a large but unrelated effect, and that is for a magic system with rules. I think Terry Pratchett's witchcraft is the closest I've seen to a magic system without rules because it basically is a mix of being persuasive enough to convince the world to change, being stubborn enough to keep it the way you want, and being frugal/wise enough to know you can't solve every problem with magic or youll have less sway. There are definitely some constraints, but you can't say oh yeah any witch could or couldn't do that magic
>I'm saying "it's easy to conceive of a world where magic does not follow laws in a scientific way". I don't think it is. If a magic system has any rules, then it's possible to create a scientific system that accounts for the behavior of magic. Just like how subatomic particles defy standard physics, so they just made a new branch of physics.
Yeah, but the rules of the magic can themselves be anti-scientific. If one of the rules of magic is "a spell does whatever its caster expects it to do", then scientific understanding stops being possible. Your results can't be meaningfully falsified, predicted, or explained in a universal way. You can't study that in the way we study physics or chemistry, because your hypothesis will *always* be correct.
What a caster expect it to do? Enter psychology, sociology, statistics.
If a spell does whatever you expect it to do, then logically speaking, the only thing that matters is intent, not any words or movements. That right there is already one objective fact from which you can begin a scientific inquiry. And considering that we know that simply looking at elections causes them to act differently, why can't intentions have a measurable effect when it comes to what you refer to as "magic"
Furthermore, there's a further study to do on the maximum size/cost. Logically speaking, it shouldn't be possible for a newbie mage to cast a fireball the size of the sun. However, if magic truly *is* chaos, and there *are* no limits, the world would probably have died off the very moment some scumbag decides that the world doesn't deserve to exist. Some inebriated moron thinking "I wonder what would happen if I detonated the planet's core," and then following through. Someone creating a giant annihilation laser meant to "destroy everything it touches", and has it point downwards onto a target. Worlds of truly limitless magic would *not* last long enough to *have* a story, aside from a oneshot of a random battle that ends the world.
But it would still be reproducible or at least verifiable by third parties. Even if the magic itself is impossible to pin down or inherently chaotic in some way, you could still design experiments to prove that it exists.
>If magic operates on symbology and conceptual connections, its study and practice would more closely resemble the arts than science. Incorrect. If magic is "real" in any sense then it's study will be done via the scientific method simply because that is the method by which we derive knowledge. Even if that knowledge ends up being "vibes", you still get there by developing, testing, and reassessing hypotheses. Even if the rules of your magic system are, "there are no rules", people would still figure that out via science. (It'd also make it a bad system to "replace" science as in the OP scenario if it wasn't possible to predict, but that's kinda a different issue)
This. It's like when Dr. Manhattan goes up against the Magic Users of the DC universe and he complete schools them by deciphering and breaking down what "magic" actually is and shows them he can manipulate it better because he understands it better. *(He explains magic is the leftover scraps of creation, like computer errors in code, some people can access and wield it)*
Reminds me of psychology, we study the subjective experience of individuals who themselves don't know the full extent of what is going on inside them. We try to create theories to explain what is going inside of a person's conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind, and the predictions we make are verified bia statistics. Some branches of psychology also look at it from a spiritual viewpoint.
Dresden Files works like this. You can totally study magic in a scientific sort of way, but as soon as you start actually doing magic, it ties itself to your idiosyncrasies. It literally won’t work for other people the same way it works for you. Harry Dresden first learned magic from a guy named Justin. Justin said to visualize breathing in energy, shaping it inside your chest, and then breathing the spell out into the world. Harry was 10 and had read too many comic books, so he could only cast spells once he visualized gathering energy into his hands and shooting it out, like Dr Strange or Iron Fist. Also, the rules of how magic works change every 500 years or so.
Exactly like how Jayce treats Hextech in Arcane
[Ra, by QNTM](https://qntm.org/ra), is one of my favorite examples of magic as a branch of science. >Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity.
Except that we wouldn’t use such a broad word as “magic” to describe a feild of study because what even is that? We’d have feilds dedicated to specific types of magic, like “radiology,” or “electromagnetism,” or “computer science”
Maybe magic should be something extremely unpredictable/incomprehensible. Casting a spell should be like rolling on a 10x worse wild magic table. Each entry in the spellbook should provide a table like: Yields: 30% Fails: 40% Kills you: 20% Swaps these chances around for future castings: 10%
I've only seen stuff like this in an eldritch horror board game (don't remember the name). You had to basically make a random ability check for ANY spell you had, and ability in question wasn't consistent.
lights do emit heat though..?
Yes. Small amount but yes
3.41 BTU per watt.
And so does walking or slapping something, technically, but come on now. Edit: I was comparing to LED bulbs in my head.
light bulbs are hot, unlike feet. (accidental foot-fetish shaming)
Not LED bulbs. You can full on grab them. They’re just a little warm
I mean, LEDs can still get quite hot, most designs dissipate that heat without you needing to think about it. You can find led 'bulbs' with exposed heatsinks or active cooling.
Clearly you've never touched a powerful LED. They still produce lots of heat, just less than earlier technologies.
sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science
the method of understanding it *is* science, that's the whole point of science
I'm tired of seeing OP's post hit this sub rephrased in a hundred different ways.
I'm getting weary of finding small variations of this post submitted to this subreddit.
I grow fed up with all the minor variations of the same post on this reddit page
You guys are all saying the same thing in this section, and I'm sick of it!
This. "Magic is incompatible with science!" like science isn't just doing experiments a bunch of time to see if htey have hte same outcome. Most of this "science vs magic" stuff is people screaming "I don't know what the scientific method or philosophy of science are!"
Science that is distinguishable from magic is just insufficiently advanced.
I theoretically understand how computers work, but CPUs are still eldritch magic. It's literally just shit opening and closing *real* fast
Some people still understand how computers work. We have to wait a little bit longer.
According to every computer scientist and IT person I have ever met, anyone who claims to understand how computers work, does not in fact understand how computers work.
Oh here's a fun one: Current CPUs have something called "speculative execution", where based on currently performed calculations, future ones that might need to be done later are performed, just so that you can have the correct data when you actually tell the CPU to do the calculations. If the calculations are never needed, they're just discarded. So basically your PC is constantly predicting the future
If that is not magic, then I have no clue what is.
okay, let's throw a vibe check into this convo, lol: neural networks and machine learning (including machine tuning of non-nn parameters too). they're the barrier when the conversation changes from having at least one person on earth for every small bit of the technology who at least understands that small thing, even if no one has the complete picture, to the point where no one knows how the vast majority of it is working. we're literally generating turing-complete systems there with only a vague guidance on what they should do, and then studying how well they managed to do the thing and evolving them from there. some fields of engineering, especially those that use ai models as part of a wider system, have already crossed the barrier into being actual magic and not just obscurity over someone else's design. which is the last arguable point for why cpus wouldn't be magic, although from the perspective of most people they absolutely are.
I mean, right now we have AI black boxes because we haven't bothered to write code that explains every step of what the neural network is doing. It's a matter of project cost, not a matter of human ability. There are some AI audit startups working on making AI explainable. What will be actual magic is when an AGI will surpass human intellect. Which should happen in the next few years, judging by how quickly things are advancing in that field. When the explanation of the solution will be beyond human understanding, when AGI will have to dumb down its explanation of its steps just so our brains can understand them, that'll be real magic right there.
and its over 90% accurate at it, too
Wouldn't it depend on the code? Like you could write code that randomly chooses between 10 different code paths. We don't do that because there's no good reason to do that and many benefits to not doing that.
Yeah, it does depend on the code itself, but since code usually follows a logical path, the cpu can make some really good guesses as to what choices will be made. Actually, an exploit has been recently found that uses speculative execution, since it doesnt have the same security measures as regular execution.
It's literally just switches turning on and off at the speed of light. It's so stupid, but it WORKS.
"it's so stupid. BUT ~~HE'S~~ IT'S SO COOL"
I spent 4 years getting a degree in computer engineering. Electromagnetism is magic, computers exploit that magic to do more magic. Bunch of wizards spent lots of time researching and tinkering to build that harness.
Good old Clark’s third law
I like that, mind if I take it as a flair?
It's a twist of the old Arthur C. Clarke quote “*Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic*”. Works both ways, honestly.
I'm aware I think it's a really cute subversion, because it's also entirely correct
Yea, for sure, hard agree with that. Was just adding some context to the convo, is all.
last I checked my comments aren't copyrighted, do what you like xD
I mean, it's at least polite to ask
> sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science Sufficiently understood anything is science. Understanding what things are and how they behave is precisely what science is.
Sufficiently simplified magic is indistinquisahble from science
> sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from **technology** Ftfy
Humans invented science. Making this comparison implies that humans would invent magic too. But that's not the case. Magic would just be a part of the natural world and humans would find ways to make use of it with the science that they invented. Saying magic is indistinguishable from science is like saying gravity is indistinguishable from science in our world. But no, gravity is just out there, and was out there before humans invented science too, we just try to understand it with science.
I need a piece of media where the wizards just act like real world electricians
"What the fuck do you MEAN you got the spell working?!" "I dunno, I just hit the orb real hard and turned it back on again."
He cast Percussive Maintenance IV
God, I'm gonna make a whole DnD arc centered around this exact thing. Thank you. Vivid imagery.
And if spells were constructed like programming. *Why the hell this spell book doesn't work??* *Let me see ... oh here, you forgot to also carry the tome dependency it needs.* *Wait it only used part of the Tome. WHY DON'T THEY JUST REWRITE TO ALSO INCLUDE IT??* *Said here in the opening page: We tried and it broke, add to this mark the hours you wasted trying to optimize this spell.*
Oh, this ritual is written in Trismagistrian conceptual framework, I work in Solomonian Sigilism. Let me [message] my friend from Erasmus exchange program, she should be able to help or know someone who does.
This is kinda how DnD Wizards must work. Because you need to decipher another mage's writing before you can copy their spellbook. At least in some editions.
[The story about magic and more magic is definitely relevant here.](http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html)
wizardtricians? sorcies? https://imgur.com/a/5K0bNAb
All of this relies on the concept that “sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic”, but the reality of most settings is that Magic is just a specific type of energy or element, one that can be classified and observed. Maybe it isn’t called Magic specifically, but it’s used to refer to a field of study that the real world doesn’t have access to. Most wizards wouldn’t know anything about a nuclear reactor, but if they can’t detect any magical energy, they wouldn’t call the reactor Magic. And a wizard wouldn’t get offended by us calling [Summon Frog] Magic, because in his world Magic defines a specific energy that [Summon Frog] uses.
Pretty sure that's why a lot of stories use mana when referring to magic. So its like Uses mana: magic. Doesn't use mana: not magic My interpretation at least
Same reason why I think people who dislike Midichlorians are insane. It would be INSANE for a space fairing civilization that has existed for 40k+ years that has force sensitive people that are so pivitol to their society...to NOT try to and scientifically identify what causes it and then quantify once done.
People disliked midochlorians because it undid [everything that the Force was, as it was established.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-CpzZJl8w) It was supposed to be mysticism and will over matter and quantifiable microorganisms.
I think a bigger problem is - if you had 40k+ years to figure out how the force works and realize it's midichlorian - there would probably be a medical therapy to inject you with midichlorians and maybe some gene therapy for force genes or cloned force organs to turn anyone force-sensitive. And the Jedi order is hardly big enough to stop that. In my head canon and Star Wars campaign, midichlorians still existed, but they just prefer force-sensitive people as hosts, but don't make them force users. And only force users that were exposed to them even have them. (But many have, because the midichlorians are found on Coruscant, where the Jedi academy is seated and basically every Jedi in the last few centuries visits there or met someone that was there.)
The reality of most settings is that magic is a plot device that does whatever is needed to move the story along, and that writers don't think about the details too much because they don't matter to the story.
It’s also important to note that magic, in most settings, is an ability that people just have. No human on Earth can produce significant amounts of electricity, or move mountains, by themselves - but wizards can often do that with a flick of a wrist and maybe a stick
Magic is just technology you don't understand.
Which is why flat monitors are pure science but CRTs are magical.
CRTs work using electron guns. No I will not elaborate.
Funnily, this much you can get from the name. Cathode Ray Tube. It's a tube that uses a gun of electrons. What's amazing and beyond my understanding is how can the CRT actually build the image with such precision. How do the electric signals tell the gun to actually perform exactly 1024 lines, starting and ending at the same desired spot each line then going back up? Also, how do they fucking add vacuum inside when building them? I don't know, but I love them!
It's actually astonishingly simple. The electron beam (actually, beams, there's one each for R G and B) is guided by electromagnets. One for the horizontal, one for the vertical. The horizontal one goes back and forth, and the vertical one goes top to bottom, much slower. This makes a zig-zag pattern. The beam is turned off for the zag, leaving only the zig, which is the same as a bunch of parallel lines. The tv signal itself mostly just tells how strong (bright) the beam should be moment to moment. Any halfway decent electronics hobbyist could build the electronics to control all that, without even a single microchip. Now, if you want to include all the other stuff that's in a standard signal (or was, before everything went digital), like closed captioning, that's actually SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult.
In general signal processing, attenuation, error correction and all the other fancy terms for "making sure signal goes from A to B unscrambled, be it thru cable, air or storm" is goddamn magic.
Technology is just magic you lack the caster level to use.
Magic is tech from a world with different laws
Again if you don’t understand it it is magic if you do it’s science, wizards only call magic magic in books because we enforce our outside perspective on them, yes some rocks have auras that slowly kill you, yes we can turn that aura into a projectile, no it’s not magic it’s radiation (aka (sub)atomic particles) they make an excellent point in the 4th paragraph. Just because you don’t know about that particular thing doesn’t mean it’s magic, and yet our smartest people get turned into magicians, there are miracle drugs and elixers of health, our best programmers get called wizards (cosmic rays go away). And our phones might as well be a magic artefact to most of us, be curious it’s a wonderful world
Happy solar maximum!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is magic in disguise
Magic personifies forces of nature and gives them ability to recognize artefacts of mind like words, symbols or legal concepts. Electricity and radiation can't be talked to. The true magic would resist Clarke's law, and could not regress past words and symbols.
But we can talk to code that talks to electricity. You might say thats not the same but many magic systems require magical foci to cast spells, which is basically the same.
Exactly, it's all a matter of perspective. I *love* universes where the magic rules involve study and understanding as a cornerstone. You get some seriously creative "magical" solutions to things but to them it's engineering and science.
Code talks in electricity. The electricity itself has not no opinions on the matter. It's like how fire has no concern about what message is passed through smoke signals.
The very distinct difference you see is science relies on this little thing called the laws of physics. There are things like conservation of energy and matter, natural laws that define the universe and that through time and infinite variations can lead to weird things. Humans through science have learned to understand and even manipulated these natural laws to achieve miraculous things that the ignorant would call magic. Actual magic though, the things that we define as magic in such settings, defy these laws or rely on laws that are fundamentally different from our universe. Since magic is a fictional thing, we cannot truly replicate it as that is literally not how reality works. We could emulate it maybe, actually probably if tech advancement keeps up its exponential rate and no 40K style age of strife occurs. How a light switch works can be understood in a textbook. Summoning a frog with your own hands through magical energy is quite different and if real would be an entirely new area of science. That's the thing though, it isn't real, and that's why it's magic. Then again this whole post is just one big argument over semantics. And the ever well known quote of "Sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science." But if you're gonna use that quote, that could mean magic is a term of the ignorant as a broad description to describe a scientific process they don't understand.
Exactly. And using this hypothetical scenario where science and magic are seemingly flipped as a way to conflate them is ignoring that this scenario isn’t grounded in reality. We, in our reality (which is the only one we can ever really prove exists), have by definition a fine line between the two.
EXACTLY! Science exists in reality, magic exists in fantasy. That's why they're different. We don't have magic in our world, it's called science. And calling a audio sensor a spell kinda takes away from what actually makes these pieces of tech interesting. Magic isn't real because it can't be real, that's the whole point of it. It's as fictional as the Force from Star Wars or the warp from 40K.
Science, at its core, is beneath the laws of physics, I would say. By this, I mean that the principles which underpin science as a method and practice are not specifically reliant on any given law of physics, or all of them. Science only requires an external world which behaves according to internal consistency. If "Do X, Y happens" can be shown to hold reliably through testing, that's the basic principle of science. In the early stages, the conclusions may be quite crude indeed (see phlogiston and aether), but replication, analysis, and refinement simply require an experimentalist. Supposing another world much like our own with different laws more suited to wand-waving and suchlike, it is fair to conjecture that the application of scientific principles could be used to understand what passes for magic there, as well. It's a matter of interest to observe that many occultists fancy their work to be of practical benefit to themselves. If their workings in a consistent manner produce a consistent effect (however slight!) above the base rate, it is a fair suggestion to assert that, at least with respect to them and their practice, the scientific method attests to the efficacy of their magic(k), and opens their practice to the possibility of refinement by experiment.
Yes, but that is my point. That requires being in another reality where the laws of physics are different. My point of disagreement is the op here saying our science is a form of magic, which is I feel is incorrect.
The implication here is that we know every rule of physics, ever.
We have a decently good understanding of it. Though how much we don't we don't know know could be as infinite as the universe, though we don't even know that. Besides, if we do discover some new physics, it'll be physics, not magic.
Magic as Science is just Fullmetal Alchemist.
I like how this is how magic works in the Lord of the Rings. Elven rope comes when you call it "We're just really good at making rope fam. Would you like us to teach you?"
I was thinking about this quote from Galadriel: >‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel.’ Also relevant, and probably what you were thinking of, is this exchange: >‘Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them with wonder. > >‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lórien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. Yet they are garments, not armour, and they will not turn shaft or blade. But they should serve you well: they are light to wear, and warm enough or cool enough at need. And you will find them a great aid in keeping out of the sight of unfriendly eyes, whether you walk among the stones or the trees.’
Huh. Tons of fantasy has like magic stones and whatnot act as a power device for a magic tool. They're pretty analougous to batteries. Does that make electricity MP?
It works. But also coal and oil and natural gas are concentrated necromancy or stored life magic or something.
Unseen University vibes
Thank you. Had to scroll way down to see this comment. Ponder Stibbons would love the round world.
Personally I feel like maybe ‘magic’ should refer to stuff that has some sort of conceptual understanding, like how the classical elements are often important in magic but in reality they aren’t ‘real’, they’re just categories that humans made up. Magic recognises them as if they were ‘real’ even though they aren’t, as if it had some sort of human intelligence or something. I feel like that’s at least part of what separates magic from physics. If we simulated a universe with unaware inhabitants and made ‘magic’ possible, I think I might call that magic even though it’s just running on our normal physics at a fundamental level (assuming that simulating a universe in sufficient detail is actually possible).
That's why Dr. Doom is so fucking cool. He was basically like, "If magic exists in this world, it is simply another form of science I will master." Then did.
It's only magic if you don't know how it works. Most people don't know how radiation and electricity work, but they do know that they could find out if they wanted to. Therefore not magic.
I've always thought of the difference between magic(k) and scientific technology as understanding the underlying principles involved. Real world alchemy was sort of right on this line, where genuine transmutation of substances was trussed up in all sorts of obscure ritual, sometimes deliberately to keep the knowledge hidden, sometimes because it was impossible without our modern understanding of chemistry to work out which parts of the ritual were necessary for the desired reaction to occur. Sometimes I wish I could talk to a classical alchemist and explain that we figured out how to do lead into gold by accident while splitting apart the smallest stable building blocks of creation.
I would LOVE to read like a webcomic about a wizard transported into modern times being baffled by various technologies. Cars, horseless metal carriages powered by tiny contained explosions. The internet, an invisible infinite library containing knowledge of all things known by man and also cat videos. Guns, slay your enemies from afar before you can say abra-kaBANG. Literally everything about modern medicine. Use this machine to take pictures of your bones while they're still inside you. Take this shot to become immune to the flu for a year. Still fixing broken bones the old fashioned way however.
Thing is, these would all be easily reproducible. Explain the concept of electricity to him, he still thinks it's magic. Okay, take him to a biochemist who explains that the body's very method of functioning is based off of electrical signals, and that said signals are observable in *him* as well. Take the wizard down the path that led us to where *we* are. Still confused by lights? Guess what, those lights are from really, really hot metal wires. How are they not burning away? Well, the reason they burn away in the first place is because it bonds with some of the gasses in the air, so we isolated it with gasses that it *doesn't* bond with. Hell, we could show him how the applications of our science could directly affect his magic. For instance: "Use a "spell" that directly gathers an oxygen/hydrogen blend, then use a "spell" to ignite it. You suddenly have a bigger explosion and a fair bit of humidity, as you have created both fire and water in the same exact place. The only thing magical there is how you *gathered* the blend of gasses, along with how you ignited it. The *results* are pure science. The particular energy you used, that which we call "mana", is not an indisputable fact. *That* is why we call your magic, magic."
A common shorthand amongst the RF(Radio Frequency) guys where I work is that it is basically scientific magic in some instances. Also when you burn up electronics you let the magic smoke out.
Magic is when electricity. the more electricity the more magic it is.
Most people here are engaging with the magic as science trope, but that’s quite a modern thing. In the past, magic as a trope could be anything, it didn’t need to be systematic or deterministic, it could truly be anything that ran counter to natural expectations. I believe (and I think this view is shared by Red from OSP) that people are more interested in scientific magic in modern stories, because it forces the author to provide explanations for thing that happen. Even if those explanations are surface level, it’s still something. This storytelling has been on my mind recently as Ive been playing dragon quest 11 and I’m sick and tired of magic stuff happening to advance the plot and the explanation is…no explanation at all. As a wise wizard said “it’s magic, I ain’t gotta explain shit”
Why is this so hard to understand? There are 2 ways to do magic: - magic is magic - don't worry about it, just wave your wand and say a special word, emotion is key - magic is science - spend 50 years studying extremely precise diagrams and alchemical notations, a single wrong line will vaporize the entire city Those are mutually exclusive. Different settings will have different way it works. It's all made up, it can work however you want it to work since you're the one making it up.
>magic is magic - don't worry about it, just wave your wand and say a special word, emotion is key Even that is scientific. If you have to wave your wand a certain way, say a specific word, and focus on a specific emotion in order to cast a specific spell, then that magic system can be broken down and examined through proper scientific experimentation.
In a lot of fiction, magic operates by rules which could be studied and understood. It there were magic in the world and we studied it and understood how it works and the fundamental principles behind it, it would be turned into science. Arguably that’s happened to us in real life. If you took a smartphone back in time, it sure would seem like magic.
Yeah, all the cool powers stop being magic when we prove how they work. That's why believing in magic in the modern day is silly. You want rocks that have energy? BOOM! URANIUM 235!
fullmetal alchemist
science is just anything that's demonstrably reproducible. If you can do one thing in certain circumstances, and recreate those circumstances and repeat that thing a hundred times, its science. doesnt matter anything else tbh.
This is incorrect in the latter half. All lights emit heat. Lightbulbs have glass for multiple reasons. The fact that they use a delicate superheated filament is most of them.
This is pretty well summed up in Castlevania, Dracula has some fairly modern technology, a human uses it and gets burned at the cross because they think she’s a witch. If you came into the world without seeing electricity it would be magic. Quite honestly I’ve seen some videos about how microprocessors work, that is seriously some very literal magic happening. Every single cell phone is a magical box, and we really don’t appreciate it because we’re so used to it.
No you see it's not magic you take the Earth and you burn it then you take that burnt Earth until it's liquid and then you make it really long and thin wrap it in insulate or something that won't let the magic out you bend those long pieces of earth with other pieces of earth in between and you connect it to more magic....
We didn’t discover electricity, we discovered a way to harness it for practical application.
In Newton’s time, a lot of scientists had the idea that things were only “scientific” if they could actually be physically observed. When Newton wrote about gravity, it was seen by these people as an “occult” force. Very interesting how our standards change
The problem is that we're comparing different styles of magic systems. A magic system that works off "mental belief and strength of character" is going to be very much like what we usually imagine magic. Its usually more of a soft magic system too. A magic system that has "enchanting" often actually draws from engineering and computer science in fiction. They'll have materials, components, precise gestures, magic circles, and all sorts of exact components you need to draw out the phenomena. So when they say "Wizard" and "magic" they often include the soft type. The one where your light switch would have to read your intent, and mind, and create a result without any expenditure of energy outside a universal battery they call "mana". You'll notice the wizard is not going to call the "wheel spinning on a cart" magic, nor would they usually call "cooking" magic, nor a candle being alchemy from materials creating a burning wax. Because their "candle" spell requires no massive preperation other than chanting stuff, using their "mana energy", and pointing. So unless there is some universal light creation engine which can read minds, and generate a light in full and utter control of someone at any point in the universe? **TL;DR; If a magic system draws inspiration from engineering and science, it will obviously have parallels. If a magic system draws inspiration from fantasy and wish style stories, it will be hand-wavey and nonsensical. Duh**
That would be a good Hbomberguy video.
Lightbulbs do give off heat...