Ever wonder how magic would work if a fictional setting was more scientific?
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@terrence And ain’t that the most important thing?
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@oathkeeper95
Why my undergraduate pharmacy and medical students tend to be annoyed with me (I don't care about how methamphetamine works chemically from a neurotransmitter perspective, I just want to know that it's "speed"), but I'm a well-regarded graduate school prof...Maybe the smart person's answer is:
Almost no one really contemplates how much normal reality is broken by even simple magic displays (you've got a fire spell on command, burning stuff would be trivial compared to some of the awesome things you could do with it), but most overestimate how useless having our advanced technological knowledge is without our normal reality to fuel it (you can't make drugs or blacksmith anything without a whole lot of equipment and chemicals that are not easily available without other things being present). Many authors who are not careful blow up their story from exposing the inconsistencies too much.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief
Normally, that does not have to be a suspension of disbelief problem, but some authors are so inconsistent with the implications of their own universe that the story falls apart. I don't mind having an unreal universe in a story, but the narration has to be consistent with its principles or be so dramatically potent that readers are willing to disbelieve it for the sake of entertainment.
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If you're interested in magical systems which are more 'scientific' in approach then I would recommend you read the works of Brandon Sanderson such as Mistborn, Elantris and the Stormlight Archives. To some extent or another they are all stories of 'scientific discovery' of the potential uses and mechanisms of magic, but also do an interesting job of exploring how those magic systems have shaped the society they are in.
If you are interested in the concept of magic, or 'sufficiently advanced technology', being introduced to Earth, then you might be interested in the book series Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke), which has magic in the Victorian era, or the anime Kado: The Right Answer which is set in modern-day Japan. Also on point is the Long Earth book series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter that explore the impact of people on a near-future Earth suddenly having the ability to travel to parallel Earths (plus various other sci/fantasy complications). The Reckoners by Brandon Sanderson covers the issue of superpowers being unleashed on modern Earth and how it changes society, but more as a fun setting for a story than a serious study of humanity.
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Getting out of topic this reminds me of RH and how the mc mentioned how life style would certainly change if magic existed(on earth). For example if with this magic we can make material lighter we would engineer airplanes differently if airplanes would even be needed. But RH doesn’t really go into this topic that much. It makes you just space out and think would we even be this advanced in technology if magic actually existed or would technology be superior and thus magic wouldn’t really matter and be more of a quality of life thing. There is this show on Netflix called Magicians which sorta mixes our modern time with magic which I wouldn’t say explains anything at all but it’s something I found entertaining to watch. I know Harry Potter does the same but for HP we sorta don’t get a feel it’s modern times since most of the time it takes place somewhere where we don’t see modern technology at.
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@hyferzftw Personally, I feel that if magic were a thing in our reality, we still would pick to advance technology over it because our world doesn’t fit the criteria for proper magic usability. Again though, the Shouts of Skyrim? Totally possible. Definitely more than a bit difficult let alone massively dangerous, but if we advanced the science involved with vibrations, we could totally Fus-Ro-Dah someone.
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@oathkeeper95 that would be fun, but now that I remember doing that in game by mistake got me killed/arrested A LOT of times lmao, irl I’d be in jail for either a long time or forever depending on the outcome of the damage done.
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I'm reading Species Domain, which is a manga that deals with "science as magic". It's not supposed to be ultra realistic (guy's smartphone runs programs that make molecules in the real world change, so he can do things like fall through physical objects or reassemble a rock from gravel), but it's kind of fun to see science be compared to magic and outstrip it.
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@terrence Technically you could actually reassemble a bunch of gravel through vibration and interaction between two objects is just vibrations on a scale of molecules. Granted, reaching those levels of vibration would likely destroy thousands of cells in both of the bodies affected and in the case of the rock, you’re looking at all of th impurities turning into a steaming puddle of magma at the foot of the completed product if only those...
There is a saying that ‘Magic is just Science we don’t understand yet’ (I heard it from Eureka (I’ll leave you all to guess which one)), so I don’t really see the ‘Science of Magic’ being totally singular... Maybe there could be sub-sciences called Pyromanology (study of Fire Magics) and Cryomanology (study if Ice Magics) upon other ‘sub-sciences’... Or maybe we really are just looking too far into the rabbit hole and are finding the Jabawoki doing a CanCan... -
I liked how the Symbology "magic" in Star Ocean 3 is
@oathkeeper95 said in Ever wonder how magic would work if a fictional setting was more scientific?:
@paulnamida huh... I didn’t actually think about the Biology factor there... I guess it is possible to generate an energy within the body (after all we still have no idea what half of the human DNA is even for let alone the brain), so I guess that is plausible...
I remember the MC in the Da Capo anime saying that his magic, which produced sweets out of thin air, was useless to keep himself fed as it used calories.
@jon-mitchell said in Ever wonder how magic would work if a fictional setting was more scientific?:
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Clarke's Third Law
"Any sufficiently systematized magic is inditingusable from science" - not sure who said it - might've been Heinlein.
It came up in the 7th Doctor Who serial Battlefield (which saw Arthurian knights invading from a parallel universe) as something like "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from magic. The reverse is also true".
@oathkeeper95 said in Ever wonder how magic would work if a fictional setting was more scientific?:
WHY DID WE NAME OUR PLANET AFTER FREAKING DIRT?!?!
"Earth? Sounds dull" - either Loonquawl or Phouchg
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@shiroi-hane My god you are the perfect nerd aren’t you? Not making fun... Those are very quality levels of ‘nerd’.
I like the magic using calories thing. It brings to mind Eve from Needless and I seriously had to leap though hoops to find the name of that anime. Still, that couldn’t be the only factor in magic, and I’ve already estabolished that any magic with a chant would need to be concise, so either every series that takes place under Gaian style conditions would need some variations of Biology or every caster would need their voicebox replaced to accomidate the whole vibrations thing.
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IMHO the settings that work the best are settings where magic is so uncommon/obscure/difficult to do that it does not affect the day to day happenings of the fictional world.
If you make magic commonplace then chances are it should morph the society into something radically different from what we have now or had in the past. To do this kind of world building is IMHO exceptionally difficult.
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@paulnamida So I just started reading the Irregular series and half way through folume three it occurs to me that this series has a worse understanding of physics than Smartphone does of causality...
Creating dry ice from literal nothing? Does Tsutomu Sato have the same thing Hideo Kojima does where they read a bit of the Wikipedia page for Negative Mass and decided to have themselves some of that? Seriously! A borrower nor a lender be, and here in Irregular and... hell, almost all fiction that treats ‘magical energy’ as some kind of force outside of nature, we’re seeing ice and stone being created with only slight nods to the laws of conservation of plying mass!
Basically, I was still looking forwards to my Rokujouma?! THE SCIENCE parody, but there is absolutely no way I can just leave this be.
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@oathkeeper95 dry ice is high pressure, frozen CO2 right? There's enough of that in the atmosphere. I never said it was totally physically accurate, it's just that magic in Irregular makes emphasis in that if you try to follow physics to some extent, it reduces the strain on your use on magic. The Dry Ice Bullets slow the CO2 particles in the air and make the molecules converge through Acceleration and Convergence magic to freeze and make the bullet, then uses the energy sapped through this process to convert it into kinetic energy to shoot said bullet, by respecting the laws of conservation of mass and energy, the strain on the caster is heavily reduced and the level of phenomenon interference needed is much lower. Unlike let's say Niflheim that freezes an area over just because, but the strain it causes and level of interference needed is so high only a handful of mages can actually cast the spell effectively.
