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As a matter of fact, reality is far more exciting than magic. Magic is limited by what our feeble human minds can dream up. Science has shown time and time again that reality is far more complex and far more interesting.
The difference between magic and science is that magic is centered on humans in the way that the entire cosmos was once thought to rotate around Earth. Both a magical universe and a scientific universe contain rules that humans can discover and tools that humans can use to influence their environment, but a magical universe is for humans and about humans whereas a scientific universe is not even indifferent to humans.
I admit that it would be nice to have gods and even the very fabric of reality care about what I want…
Sorry, hon. The magical universe may SEEM to be centered around you, but you’re really just experiencing the side benefits of it being centered around me.
Shut up, Harry Potter.
I think that’s actually a question that can be taken seriously. My answer would be that a Turing-complete universe with a mechanism for decreasing local entropy would be sufficient to make it possible (not necessarily likely) that some sort of computing entity would arise and comprehend something like the anthropic principle.
Pretty much everything in Terry Pratchett’s oeuvre could and should be taken seriously. Praise Anoia that he also took it with a grain of salt, and with tongue stuck firmly in cheek!
God doesn’t play with dice
-Einstein<An infinite number of dice appear at the plank scale>
Tada!
-GodA good illusion is still spectacular even when the illusion is broken. The magical world was boring to begin with.
its funny to me, the existence of science being something as mundane as “rubbing three moderately flat surfaces against each other in succession will inevitably produce a flat plane as it is the only functional outcome for that problem”
opposed to the incredibly complex and intricate technicalities of steel smelting, and even beyond that, casting properly.
and then also, we know why cicadas make so much noise, it’s really simple. Just a little bit (ok well a lot of bit) of constructive interference. But actually, we also have no fucking clue how they manage to count such long periods of prime duration reliably and consistently.
There’s also the technicality of being able to explain how molecule level physics works, but then not being able to comprehend molecule scale physics in something like biology until recently.
I’m convinced that science is just reverse engineering the universe. Eventually, one day, we will figure out how to create an entire universe, and we will.
Science is the ultimate version of philosophy.
The woo doctor says there’s fairies in the garden and unicorns in the forest, and never shows them to me. The biologist says there’s birds the size of your thumb that flap their wings so fast they become a buzzy blur, and there’s huge winged creatures that fly through the ocean called “Manta rays.” He shows me pictures and specimens of both.
The woo doctor says my fever is caused by a lack of yellow bile, eat this dandelion it’s yellow. The physician says my fever is caused by an infection of tiny creatures inside my body, look you can see them if you look at this snot sample under a microscope. We have a chemical that kills these organisms called antibiotics, eat those and you’ll get better.
The woo doctor says the dot in the sky he thinks of as the god of time has traveled into the crab part of the sky so I probably shouldn’t make any big decisions this week. The astronomer looked through a bunch of old records, noticed a pattern, and predicted the next appearance of a comet down to the finest detail, years in advance.
The woo doctor says things that can burn are full of a substance called phlogiston, which is released by fire into the air, which can only hold so much phlogiston. The chemist says it’s hydrocarbons or carbohydrates combusting into carbon dioxide and water vapor, and proves it by burning a variety of things and condensing water from the vapors that emerge. He’s built way better lamps and is starting to build these powerful engines based on his techniques.
The woo doctor tells fun stories sometimes I guess. The scientist has all the actual cool stuff.
The woo doctor says there’s fairies in the garden and unicorns in the forest, and never shows them to me. The biologist says there’s birds the size of your thumb that flap their wings so fast they become a buzzy blur, and there’s huge winged creatures that fly through the ocean called “Manta rays.” He shows me pictures and specimens of both.
This sounds so much like a writing prompt.
Does it? Because it sounds like history to me.
“Tell me the history of the world using a woo doctor and a scientist as actors.”
Joe wonder why great sky fire rise from mountain every morning, you will explain this to joe.
All basically being bubbles of probability where a field of energy exists, in a seething universe of virtual particles (fields) coming into existence and getting annihilated by it’s anti-part again.
The “universe of whirling chaos, birthing existence” i’ve seen in some Manga as origin story of gods, doesn’t seem so far fetched now.
If I watch too much fantasy world or read about it too immersively , I think about how all of their powers are normal to them. Light, fire, storms, electricity, the states of water, tides, giraffes, etc., they’re all magical. We’ve just named them and have ways to describe how they work in an orderly, understandable, format.
Ah yes the giraffe, the most magical being
I appreciate you. https://imgur.com/gallery/new-favorite-gif-EkO9uj8
Science shows us why the world is excting and lets us find even more exciting things. That beings said, it’s still a funny joke.
Quantum mechanics is not magic. Magic specifies the outcome, but not how a system evolves to reach that outcome. Quantum mechanics has precise equations describing how a system will evolve over time, but is famously bad at describing the outcome.
By the same token, we can see that thermodynamics and conservation laws, while widely accepted, are magic. I have heard legend of a deeper magic known as “Lagragians”, although knowledge of that lost art remains confines to the warlocks’ ivory tower.
The internet has definitely stolen a lot of the magic from the world. Foreign places aren’t mysterious anymore. I’ve seen a million videos and pictures of every place I want to visit already, and I talk to the people who live there every day. The Burmuda Triangle isn’t something mysterious anymore, The Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, UFOs, everything, it’s all pretty much disproven now. Even ancient Chinese medicine has been peer reviewed and either proven or disproven. Where’s the magic that existed before the internet? I guess in the quantum realm, but that doesn’t have the same type of mystery.
Thats not what quantum mechanics shows at all.
What is being described is the pop-sci version quantum mechanics.
That version has people believing in multiverses and wormholes and other nonsense that is not falsifiable like magic and has no evidence like magic but people believe in it because people desperately want magic to be real.
Quantum tunneling effect is very much magic, on the same way that relativistic time is magic.
