magic vs. scienWhatwce, how would you strike a balance?

[jollyreaper]

It's more than a bit boring to say "Warlocks stomp special forces" or "A gangster with an uzi tops your wizard." In a setting with a mix of both, there need to be a mix of advantages and drawbacks. A lot of this will come down to personal taste. This is my shot at it.

The thing about science is you can learn things with the scientific method. Experiments can be repeated. What's true for one scientist is true for another. Proofs are there to be had. When something has been reduced to a science, it means you can follow the steps and obtain the same results.

Magic is wonky. It's an art. Each magician has to learn it for himself, one adept's approach can be entirely inadequate for another, and the results are difficult to replicate. This would have to be the case or else the scientific method could eventually reduce even the most esoteric and strange of the mystic arts to just another branch of science.

So, what would this mean for applied technologies, applied thaumaturgy? I think about the difference between the longbow and the crossbow. A proper archer has to train his whole life, dedicate himself to the art, and cannot be stamped out with mass conscription and a few months of training. A crossbowman needs some brute strength to turn the crank and a little talent in aiming and might not be the equal of a longbowman but is a whole lot cheaper to recruit and easier to train.

If magic is really cheap in a setting, there's less incentive for developing technology. If we could cast a spell to preserve food we'd have no need of canning or refrigeration. A cold spell could chill a drink before consumption. More spells to heat or cool a house, teleportation for the transport of goods and people, and so forth. This thought parallels the proposition that the Romans never would have developed the steam engine because slave labor was so cheap. Only in a scarce labor environment is labor-saving machinery worth the capital investment. (There's a counter-argument that the Romans couldn't have invented a steam engine even if they wanted to, lacking the theory and materials to even make a go of it. Very difficult to prove conclusively whether they could have done it or not.)

In a balanced setting, I think that society would see a mix of thaumaturgic and technical solutions for a great many problems. While both schools might have a healthy dislike of each other, one can not entirely supplant the other. My own bias is towards making magic be the superior solution but often too expensive to be widely applicable. A proper combat wizard could burn down ten men in a fight but would be overcome if facing a hundred. An assassin with magic ability might very well be able to act like a Hollywood ninja with levitation, invisibility, super-strength and accuracy, and has the potential of taking out an enemy general and throwing a campaign into chaos. But he's not going to be able to go out on the battlefield and take out a phalanx on the move. He can't stop a cavalry charge. A king might be able to avail himself of a teleportation portal but he won't be able to send a legion across the map in an hour.

This is my thinking on the matter, of course. It's not the only possible answer. What's yours?

[Mr Bean]

The explanations I've run across vary but here are some I've seen that make it work.

1. Magic is harmful
Either magic directly harms the user or harms the environment ala Athis from D&Ds Dark Sun setting were working magic can physically destroy the land and large scale spells turn rolling fields into bleak landscapes of dead and cracked dirt where nothing will grow and all water is poisoned.

2. Magic takes lots of effort
Discworld is a good example of this, if you wanted to learn a spell to summon a pie it would take less time to simply go buy a pie and bring it back home than the incantations and mystical preparations to simply summon a pie into existence.

3. Magic directly messes with technology and the reverse
Seen in old Shadowrun where if you wanted to cast spells and chant incantations you had to keep yourself "pure" IE no augments, no replacements, the more you deviated from basic human with technology the less effective magic was to the point that 25% or more cyborg could do next to nothing magic wise. There were alt rules were magic messed with technology and the reverse so you could summon woodland critters to fight for you in the forest but try that in the city and the best you could do is summon rats which would hurt as much as help you since you could not control them. Likewise areas attuned to magic tended to make technology decay at high rates and make most gadgets just break until removed from these areas.

[Tasoth]

I think an approach like bronze versus iron would work.

Bronze is pretty good compared to iron. Easier to make, shape and less likely to fracture while retaining a good edge. The problem is finding tin and copper in the same geographic location is extremely hard, and there is evidence that ancient bronze making cultures in the Middle East/Mediterranean may have had outposts in England to mine for tin. That's going to jack the price up.

Now compared to bronze, iron tends to crack more, is less flexible and requires a crazy high temperature to work but it is pretty damned common and would allow you to field a larger number of soldiers carrying iron arms and armor compared to bronze at a significantly cheaper price. It would also come to serve a basis for steel and better arms.

Make magic like bronze, where it is assuredly potent, capable wondrous feats and held up as prestigious but finding someone who can work spells on a level that allows for battlefield domination or to threaten nations being relatively rare and intensive to learn. Science/technology then fills a slot like iron. It's abundant, anyone can use it with the right training or equipment and it can be used to do similar effects as high end spells with a greater ease.

High technology won't completely negate magic as you still need vehicles and machines to do most of the work where a wizard can simply wave a hand, spit out some hokey syllables or draw a goofy shape and complete the act.

[Lord of the Abyss]

You can make magic a limited resource in various ways. For example, there may only be so much "mana", and if you try to build a magic using army they'd use up all the mana in a region almost immediately and get slaughtered by the guys with swords and bows (or guns) before it has a chance to renew itself. But if you have just a few wizards, they can pull off some really powerful magics, and when the mana is gone the non-magical bulk of the army finishes the job.

Or the power of magic may be divided up among however many magic users there are in a region; if there's only one or a few wizards they are really powerful, but if everyone uses magic then no one person can do better than light a candle. Sort of like magical rituals in the Harry Dresden books; the wizards diffuse such dangerous rituals by publishing them in occult books and such. If one or a few people perform such a ritual they can accomplish significant magical feats; if hundreds or thousands of enthusiasts are using the same ritual then the effects of the ritual are spread out among all of them to the point of uselessness.

[Vendetta]

Unless you posit as a feature of your magic that it never works the same way twice, "science vs. magic" isn't really a thing. If magic can be relied upon to have consistent effects, it's a science (It can be studied using the scientific method). If magic is widespread then magic is the technology of your setting. (See: Codex Alera). Technology, after all, is just an application of knowledge, no matter where that knowledge actually came from.

Now, you could have a universe where the people who do magic don't want everyone else taking a close look at what they're doing, and have "science vs. wizards", but it's not science vs. magic, it's science vs. people who don't want your nose up in their business for some reason.

[lordofchange13]

If magic is a widely common place like technology of the setting, the Incarnations of Immortality books setting would probably be the result. In the books mode magic and science exist at the same time and are more or less equal in ability. "Magic and Technology are diffrent methods to the same end"-Pale Horse

[jollyreaper]

Unless you posit as a feature of your magic that it never works the same way twice, "science vs. magic" isn't really a thing. If magic can be relied upon to have consistent effects, it's a science (It can be studied using the scientific method). If magic is widespread then magic is the technology of your setting. (See: Codex Alera). Technology, after all, is just an application of knowledge, no matter where that knowledge actually came from.

That's what I described above. Tech subscribes to the scientific method and magic does not, even though you can create observable effects and people damn well know it ain't a trick, it's real goddman magic.

Now, you could have a universe where the people who do magic don't want everyone else taking a close look at what they're doing, and have "science vs. wizards", but it's not science vs. magic, it's science vs. people who don't want your nose up in their business for some reason.

It's a guild monopoly. And that's of primary importance when the secret is something that other people can readily accomplish. The world's greatest pianist doesn't have to keep his technique a secret because nobody else can do what he does. It would actually be a challenge for him to deliberately train someone to be as good as him.

In the situation I posited above, wizards might keep their secrets but it's really difficult to even find another person who can comprehend what he does.

The other question is whether you have to know what you're doing to use a magic artifact versus a tech artifact. I don't need to know much about a gun to shoot it. I would need to know some things to use it well. A swordsman needs a great deal of specialized knowledge to fight well even if he doesn't know anything about making the sword.

But if wizardly skill is required to use a magical artifact properly, it may be awesomely potent but not of use to many people.

[Guardsman Bass]

If it's almost entirely individualistic, with no common rules or practices, then how do your magical acolytes learn to master their abilities? Is it always Trial-and-Error, possibly with a high death rate?* I think your wizards would likely end up either being worshiped as holy men or persecuted for the potential chaos they might cause while mastering their abilities.

Personally, I like it when a fantasy author actually integrates their unique magic system and shows how it would shape technology. One of my favorite examples of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender, where they integrate their magic into everything, creating some rather interesting results. The trick is just to avoid having your magic turn into something that fixes everything, simply because you can just cast a Spell of Containment/More Food/Cure All Diseases/Etc.

* This is one aspect of the Wheel of Time that I liked. Magic-users in that setting who have no choice about using magic (those with the "spark") are statistically not likely to survive adolescence/early adulthood without proper training - the death rate is around 75%.

[Chirios]

The problem with science vs magic is that the moment magic enters the universe it becomes science by definition. Anything that can affect the world in can empirical manner can be tested and repeated by the scientific method, at which point it's limits can be defined, and we get all sorts of shit coming out of it. What people usually mean when they say "science" vs magic is technology vs magic, which is just as illogical. How do we define technology? Usually writers create some arbitrary definition of "advanced" and then say magic stops that from working. Jim Butcher is especially guilty of this, since Dresden not only affects electronic components but mechanical ones as well. The same is true for Harry Potter.

Of course, for the most part this doesn't matter. Your readers will be more than capable of suspending their disbelief to allow for such things, that's why they're reading fantasy after all. But if you create a magical system that has set rules and set abilities that don't contradict each other, then you've created a subset of science; and if you have a universe where the general scientific community is aware of the existence of magic then it's not very long before you get magitek.

[Guardsman Bass]

The problem with science vs magic is that the moment magic enters the universe it becomes science by definition. Anything that can affect the world in can empirical manner can be tested and repeated by the scientific method, at which point it's limits can be defined, and we get all sorts of shit coming out of it. What people usually mean when they say "science" vs magic is technology vs magic, which is just as illogical. How do we define technology? Usually writers create some arbitrary definition of "advanced" and then say magic stops that from working. Jim Butcher is especially guilty of this, since Dresden not only affects electronic components but mechanical ones as well. The same is true for Harry Potter.

In Harry Potter's case, I think it's an artifact of when segregation of muggles and wizards happened. At that point, physics and science as we know it was in its relative infancy, so there wasn't much chance of magical knowledge influencing its models. Since then, the wizards have been actively suppressing any form of magical knowledge among muggles, which makes it difficult for them to develop theories on how it ties into the rest of physics. You still get some technology bleeding through into the wizarding community, though, such as cameras and radio.

I agree with your greater point, though. I think it's because the authors want to do a "Modern World but with X" story, even when the "X" would drastically change how the "Modern World" would develop to the point where it's almost unrecognizable, and you're writing Alternate History. There was a similar discussion about how comic book superheroes usually have the same issue, a couple of years back.

[Alkaloid]

Jim Butcher is especially guilty of this, since Dresden not only affects electronic components but mechanical ones as well. The same is true for Harry Potter.

Actually, Butchers makes sense one he explains it and is one of the better ways I have seen this done. Basically, the presence of a magic users or magic increases the likeliness of unlikely events happening by a tiny amount, so with mechanical things like a gun jamming, the chance of a firing pin hitting the charge and it not igniting is slightly higher than normal. Mostly this doesn't make a difference because the chance of it happening is small and only increases by a tiny amount, but it's still there. (It seems to have changed a bit too, in early books a dozen guys across the room from Dresden had their guns jam in a short period of time, whereas by the later ones Murph can fire a P-90 right next to his head while he is throwing around a shitload of magic with no problems, I just assume that is Butcher ignoring the old stuff that sucked a bit) With electronics it becomes almost inevitable that something goes wrong in pretty short order simply because there are so many individual events occurring in even a simple IC that you are going to get problems, which is why the effect is so much more pronounced. It isn't impossible for a wizard to live in a modern house with all that implies, Molly does it, it just means that a whole lot of maintenance needs to be done all the time to ensure that there is a very small number of things that can go wrong at any given moment which most people don't have the time to do.

[Eleas]

It isn't impossible for a wizard to live in a modern house with all that implies, Molly does it, it just means that a whole lot of maintenance needs to be done all the time to ensure that there is a very small number of things that can go wrong at any given moment which most people don't have the time to do.

Yeah. Even so, as her power has grown Molly's taken to stepping outside whenever the family holds a movieathon, and she's far less overtly powerful (and could very well be more skilled at managing her "leakage") than Harry.

[Chirios]

Actually, Butchers makes sense one he explains it and is one of the better ways I have seen this done. Basically, the presence of a magic users or magic increases the likeliness of unlikely events happening by a tiny amount, so with mechanical things like a gun jamming, the chance of a firing pin hitting the charge and it not igniting is slightly higher than normal. Mostly this doesn't make a difference because the chance of it happening is small and only increases by a tiny amount, but it's still there. (It seems to have changed a bit too, in early books a dozen guys across the room from Dresden had their guns jam in a short period of time, whereas by the later ones Murph can fire a P-90 right next to his head while he is throwing around a shitload of magic with no problems, I just assume that is Butcher ignoring the old stuff that sucked a bit) With electronics it becomes almost inevitable that something goes wrong in pretty short order simply because there are so many individual events occurring in even a simple IC that you are going to get problems, which is why the effect is so much more pronounced. It isn't impossible for a wizard to live in a modern house with all that implies, Molly does it, it just means that a whole lot of maintenance needs to be done all the time to ensure that there is a very small number of things that can go wrong at any given moment which most people don't have the time to do.

Don't want to derail the thread but even that's pretty silly. There are aspects of biology much more complicated than a gun jamming, yet Dresden doesn't affect human digestion; the immune system; or the CNS. It's still a good story, and I am a fan, my thing is that the idea of Magic vs Technology requires a lot more Suspension of Disbelief than Magic being integrated into technology.

[Guardsman Bass]

Actually, Butchers makes sense one he explains it and is one of the better ways I have seen this done. Basically, the presence of a magic users or magic increases the likeliness of unlikely events happening by a tiny amount, so with mechanical things like a gun jamming, the chance of a firing pin hitting the charge and it not igniting is slightly higher than normal. Mostly this doesn't make a difference because the chance of it happening is small and only increases by a tiny amount, but it's still there. (It seems to have changed a bit too, in early books a dozen guys across the room from Dresden had their guns jam in a short period of time, whereas by the later ones Murph can fire a P-90 right next to his head while he is throwing around a shitload of magic with no problems, I just assume that is Butcher ignoring the old stuff that sucked a bit) With electronics it becomes almost inevitable that something goes wrong in pretty short order simply because there are so many individual events occurring in even a simple IC that you are going to get problems, which is why the effect is so much more pronounced. It isn't impossible for a wizard to live in a modern house with all that implies, Molly does it, it just means that a whole lot of maintenance needs to be done all the time to ensure that there is a very small number of things that can go wrong at any given moment which most people don't have the time to do.

Don't want to derail the thread but even that's pretty silly. There are aspects of biology much more complicated than a gun jamming, yet Dresden doesn't affect human digestion; the immune system; or the CNS. It's still a good story, and I am a fan, my thing is that the idea of Magic vs Technology requires a lot more Suspension of Disbelief than Magic being integrated into technology.

That was my immediate thought as well. If these people cause random events to happen more frequently, then why aren't the people around them having spiked cancer rates and other forms of health problems? Yes, electronics are complex, but our bodies' biology is arguably more complex than a lot of consumer electronics (never mind relatively simple mechanical contraptions).

[Alkaloid]

They never go into it. Maybe human lifespans should be as long as wizards and they are killing everyone slowly just by existing. If I had to guess I'd say that because everyone is a low level wizard anyway they insulate themselves from it. The point is though that even though Butchers world has magic and tech interacting poorly it does so for specific and predictable reasons.

[Purple]

I can't believe no one suggested the obvious. To limit magic and make it less useful all you need to do is limit the number of magic users. First there is no reason to separate magic from science. As others have said, if it can be observed it can be quantified and it becomes science. So don't bother with that. Have spellcasting be a subset of science, a repeatable and understandable one. Just like music is a repeatable and understandable practice of creating vibrations in the air or how painting is just a repeatable and understandable practice of combining chemicals that reflect or absorb certain wave lengths of light. And just like fine music or painting have it require innate talent and not just practice to master. That way any human in your story could learn to light his own cigarette with a finger. But in order to create a ball of flame, contain it, heat it up to just the right temperature and than throw it at a target all the while keeping it contained and controlled so that it does not disperse. That requires a Picasso of flames.


TLDR; Make magic be an art form that requires innate talent. And make that a talent that is very rare among humans.

[Formless]

What is this "balance" you speak of? Are you making a video game or something? Because as far as I care, you can make it scissors=gunz, paper=magic, and rock=profit(???)

Really, this is one of those memes I don't understand. As long as people are using their respective abilities in a manner that makes sense given their limitations and level of ingenuity, magic vs science only ever made sense to me as superstition vs science; and that theme is pretty much non-starter in actual fantasy stories where astral projections are real and dragons breath fuckin' fire.

[jollyreaper]

If it's almost entirely individualistic, with no common rules or practices, then how do your magical acolytes learn to master their abilities? Is it always Trial-and-Error, possibly with a high death rate?* I think your wizards would likely end up either being worshiped as holy men or persecuted for the potential chaos they might cause while mastering their abilities.

As far as academics go, up to a certain point you have teachers telling you what to study, then professors doing the same. But after you are sufficiently advanced, nobody else is telling you what to do. You set your own study. I've heard martial arts described the same. Up to the point of attaining black belt, you are following a formal system of instruction. Once you've obtained the black belt, you still have much to learn but no one can teach it to you, you must learn for yourself.

One of the ways super-science gets explained in comic books like the Fantastic Four is that Mr. Fantastic may create a doodad to do something and it may look like a machine anyone can use but it's effectively a wizard's staff or a sonic screwdriver -- it's magic that nobody else can touch. It also explains why he can't mass produce his inventions and change the world. (I don't believe it was explicitly explained this way within the comic but was more of a meta-commentary on super-science characters. I know it was brought up in the Pagan Press WWII superheroes game Godlike. Super powers are warping reality. A super-science device that violates the laws of physics is not a working machine but is simply a talisman the superhuman uses because he believes in it. Therefore nobody else could make it work.)

Operating within these rules, from the practical sense technology would rule the day with specific examples of magic stomping all over tech from time to time.

[jollyreaper]

The problem with science vs magic is that the moment magic enters the universe it becomes science by definition. Anything that can affect the world in can empirical manner can be tested and repeated by the scientific method, at which point it's limits can be defined, and we get all sorts of shit coming out of it. What people usually mean when they say "science" vs magic is technology vs magic, which is just as illogical. How do we define technology? Usually writers create some arbitrary definition of "advanced" and then say magic stops that from working. Jim Butcher is especially guilty of this, since Dresden not only affects electronic components but mechanical ones as well. The same is true for Harry Potter.

Yeah. I don't like the way Butcher handles magic and tech not mixing.

I think you are completely correct in that magic would just be another form of tech if could be studied scientifically. And there's also the possibility of something that seems random and inexplicable is simply the results of not being fully aware of all the variables in question.

Things like brewing and smithing were all art back in the day. Nobody could really describe what was going on. A brewer could well say that the booze fairy visited his casks and brought the gift of alcohol and nobody else could offer an educated rebuttal to that. The Japanese swordsmith up in his mountain retreat would give you a line of mumbo jumbo about awakening the spirit inside the metal and you just have to take his word for it because he's making the world's best sword and you can do no better.

Fermentation and metallurgy have both become sciences because we can accurately describe what's going on in the process down to the atomic level. There's no room left for the mystical.

Now compare that with a telekinetic girl. She has the ability to move things with her mind when she is in a state of extreme duress. You can sit her down in a lab and ask her to perform on command and you won't get anything. You have your lab assistant threaten to kill her puppy and he will be pulled apart with a hundred pieces traveling a hundred different directions in the blink of an eye. No physical force can be detected, no source of impulse. It's like invisible hands are involved. Her brainwaves are elevated in panic but nothing unusual can be detected. She's anatomically human. There's just the observed fact that people who threaten her or people she love have a habit of exploding. Objects that might cause harm are stopped as if hitting a wall and crash to the ground.

At this point you don't even know she's causing it. It could just as easily be she has an invisible guardian angel or shinigami or whatever protecting those she cares deeply about.

That's on case. Now imagine a combat sorcerer. The usual pattern is a master and several pupils but a government decides they want elite teams with the same skills. They can mass recruit riflemen and get a fairly reliable product. Pilots require more training but can still be cranked out. Not everyone has the mental aptitude to be a combat pilot but veteran instructors have worked out a sensible set of tactics and can give the boys a solid chance of surviving.

The combat sorcerer can explain things in simple generalities but it's not as simple as shooting a rifle. It takes an emotional trigger to tap into the magic. Each pupil must discover his own trigger. Things are what they are until they aren't. This is what you always do except for when you don't. And even when someone finds a system that works for them, which might personally be reduced to a science for them, it remains incredibly difficult to convey any meaningful teaching to someone else.

Imagine if the formula for gunpowder changed depending upon the position of the stars, the pull of ley lines and the emotional state of the alchemist. The alchemist could get a read on what the proper ratios should be for a given day but it's impossible to put into clear instructions. How warm does the baker think the oven should be? "Feels hot enough," he says, sticking his hand close for a feel. The methodical student sticks a thermometer in and discovers it's 375 degrees. What's the best temperature for proofing bread? Find out where the baker likes to set his loaves and see that it's by the ovens, a toasty 80 degrees. What's the pull on the ley line? Feel it. Can you describe it in words? "Feels right." Yeah. But can you measure it? Do you have a tool? "No."

The technically-minded would insist that if there's a something there, it should be measurable. If we can't at the moment, it's likely due to ignorance as opposed to the force being fundamentally unmeasurable. The scientist throws up his hands in frustration. "I can make you a gun that's not as powerful as a blasting rod but at least any damn fool can use it and I can make you guns by the dozen."

[Guardsman Bass]

As far as academics go, up to a certain point you have teachers telling you what to study, then professors doing the same. But after you are sufficiently advanced, nobody else is telling you what to do. You set your own study. I've heard martial arts described the same. Up to the point of attaining black belt, you are following a formal system of instruction. Once you've obtained the black belt, you still have much to learn but no one can teach it to you, you must learn for yourself.

If you've got a group of people who can learn the same thing (to a degree), and a curriculum you can actually teach to students, then you've got a system of magic. A system of magic is certainly open to scientific inquiry, especially since magic-users can get verifiable results under the above rule (otherwise there would be no point in trying to teach it).

One of the ways super-science gets explained in comic books like the Fantastic Four is that Mr. Fantastic may create a doodad to do something and it may look like a machine anyone can use but it's effectively a wizard's staff or a sonic screwdriver -- it's magic that nobody else can touch. It also explains why he can't mass produce his inventions and change the world. (I don't believe it was explicitly explained this way within the comic but was more of a meta-commentary on super-science characters. I know it was brought up in the Pagan Press WWII superheroes game Godlike. Super powers are warping reality. A super-science device that violates the laws of physics is not a working machine but is simply a talisman the superhuman uses because he believes in it. Therefore nobody else could make it work.)

That doesn't actually stand on its own too well, unless it's explicitly some type of miracle magic that only he can perform. It also doesn't fit with a setting where you can actually teach magic to others.

Personally, I've never thought it worked well in The Fantastic Four. It's just another "Real World plus X" setting that doesn't really make sense.

Now compare that with a telekinetic girl. She has the ability to move things with her mind when she is in a state of extreme duress. You can sit her down in a lab and ask her to perform on command and you won't get anything. You have your lab assistant threaten to kill her puppy and he will be pulled apart with a hundred pieces traveling a hundred different directions in the blink of an eye. No physical force can be detected, no source of impulse. It's like invisible hands are involved. Her brainwaves are elevated in panic but nothing unusual can be detected. She's anatomically human. There's just the observed fact that people who threaten her or people she love have a habit of exploding. Objects that might cause harm are stopped as if hitting a wall and crash to the ground.

You could have her wear monitoring equipment designed to pick up physiological data when she gets extremely distressed, and uses her ability. If you're unethical, you could also knock her out, and put her in a series of tests designed to get her to express her powers without letting her know that it's a series of tests.

The technically-minded would insist that if there's a something there, it should be measurable. If we can't at the moment, it's likely due to ignorance as opposed to the force being fundamentally unmeasurable.

That's my opinion. Even if the actual magic-users have little more than a vague sense of how their abilities work, you can still monitor their use of them in various ways. The ideal would be those who could use their powers in a lab setting, but even that's not strictly necessary (biologists do a lot of research in the field, and Magicologists would likely do the same).

[jollyreaper]

If you've got a group of people who can learn the same thing (to a degree), and a curriculum you can actually teach to students, then you've got a system of magic. A system of magic is certainly open to scientific inquiry, especially since magic-users can get verifiable results under the above rule (otherwise there would be no point in trying to teach it).

Up to a certain point, it can be taught. But past that point it's a matter of self-exploration.

Even if magic could be completely reduced to physics that everyone can understand just like golf, not everyone could be Tiger Woods, even with the best training.

There are certainly some cool settings where magic is susceptible to scientific inquiry and we see a scientist from our world dumped into that one and he revolutionizes everything. It's like introducing a handmade world to the industrial revolution. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that approach.

The exact balance I'm trying to strike is magic is better than tech but there's a question as to whether it's commercially useful. Hence the example I came up with concerning stealthy warriors with the full set of fantasy ninja magic. Far more expensive than your average mook with a gun but might be worth the cost if you can kill the enemy general and throw a campaign into collapse. But you're not sending a ninja squad to take on a tank battalion.

That doesn't actually stand on its own too well, unless it's explicitly some type of miracle magic that only he can perform. It also doesn't fit with a setting where you can actually teach magic to others.

Personally, I've never thought it worked well in The Fantastic Four. It's just another "Real World plus X" setting that doesn't really make sense.

American superhero books don't tend to sit well with me because of the convoluted retconning required. If you make a firm break from our own timeline while referencing events of our time within the story's timeline like Watchmen then I'm cool with it. It gets really weird when trying to keep a Marvel comic in our timeline with city-smashing fights and then suddenly 9-11 comes along. Shit, that's the typical Tuesday in Marvel world. And then they did the tribute comic with crying Dr. Doom.



WTF? Something like 9-11 is the WIN scenario in one of his typical schemes. If anything, Doom's pissed that a bunch of base-type humans in a cave were able to pull off something he with all his resources couldn't.

You could have her wear monitoring equipment designed to pick up physiological data when she gets extremely distressed, and uses her ability. If you're unethical, you could also knock her out, and put her in a series of tests designed to get her to express her powers without letting her know that it's a series of tests.

And if you still can't figure out what's happening here?

In my personal view, I do agree that if it exists, we should be able to explain it. If a human being is psychic, we should be able to test for it. If it's something that only happens under stress, we should be able to replicate the conditions. If information is passed from one brain to the next, we should be able to detect the method of transmission be it through the five classic senses or through some immaterial mental radiation. We very well might lack the means of detecting it. Nobody in ancient Rome could detect radio waves, nobody in Renaissance Florence could detect x-rays. Nobody in Victorian London could imagine that pigeons have a sense of magnetism for direction-finding though they could certainly marvel at how they unerringly navigated the landscape.

So what I'm getting at is a what-if scenario here, what if it's real but we can't explain it, can't usefully weaponize it. If we look at something from history like the ME-163 Komet program the Nazis ran, it's all real-world physics but seemed downright demonic. Fastest combat aircraft of the war but the fuel could dissolve the pilot alive if it sloshed on landing, assuming it didn't just explode. Too many variables to properly control, a high-performance weapon pushing the bounds of our understanding. In anything less than an utterly desperate situation the Luftwaffe would have stuck with piston-engine aircraft and continued researching the newfangled jet turbine engine. Now what if it's not even real-world physics? What if we aren't dealing with concrete reality but the squishy, squirmy subjectivity of mind-warping magic?

That's my opinion. Even if the actual magic-users have little more than a vague sense of how their abilities work, you can still monitor their use of them in various ways. The ideal would be those who could use their powers in a lab setting, but even that's not strictly necessary (biologists do a lot of research in the field, and Magicologists would likely do the same).

Like I said, I'd agree with you in the real world. As a kid I was a huge supporter of the idea of the paranormal but became disillusioned with how all the wonderful stuff went away when you looked at it closely. If there was anything to it, science should find some proof. You have to start really pleading hard for special cases to justify a scenario where it's real but scientists can't come up with anything to explain it. But that would be a necessary precondition to have a setting where magic and technology coexist but aren't the same thing. Where magic and tech are the same thing, well, you can get some pretty cool stuff going on. I love the Maxwell Demon Refrigerator. I also love the idea of "electric" motors that are really just djinn bound inside a hub turning an axle. You have to be careful not to push such a machine too hard because when it gives up the ghost it really gives up the ghost. The djinn breaks free and the machine is dead until you can get a proper mechanician to come by and coax another djinn back inside. Canny mechanicians realize that direct levitation uses a lot of energy and less effort is required to use magic to work pulleys and levers. A flying carpet is nice but it's cheaper to work the spell into a winged vehicle so that forward motion will produce lift, thus using far less magic than full levitation.

But that's an entirely different scenario. That's science and magic united. I want science and magic eyeing each other suspiciously. "There has to be a rational explanation for this," says the scientist. "Oh, there's certainly an explanation," says the wizard. "I can't say how rational you'll find it."

[Vendetta]

And if you still can't figure out what's happening here?

Here's the thing. You can figure out what's happening, because you can hypothesise a chain between cause "Agitated mental state in Patient X" and effect "movement of objects without currently detectable interaction", and you can perform experiments to disprove that hypothesis.

Even if the specifics of the process are a black box, you can still do science on the cause and effect. And then, when your understanding of that has improved you may develop tools that let you open the black box.

That's pretty much how science has progressed from the point at which people started to get really serious about it.

[Chirios]

The thing is, your readers will be perfectly fine with the idea of magic vs science. Even those who study/have studied science will be fine with it, fantasy is about suspending your disbelief after all; just try and make it internally consistent and you'll be fine. There's no real way to make it sensible though, and that's just something you have to accept and move on.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Actually, Butchers makes sense one he explains it and is one of the better ways I have seen this done. Basically, the presence of a magic users or magic increases the likeliness of unlikely events happening by a tiny amount, so with mechanical things like a gun jamming, the chance of a firing pin hitting the charge and it not igniting is slightly higher than normal. Mostly this doesn't make a difference because the chance of it happening is small and only increases by a tiny amount, but it's still there. (It seems to have changed a bit too, in early books a dozen guys across the room from Dresden had their guns jam in a short period of time, whereas by the later ones Murph can fire a P-90 right next to his head while he is throwing around a shitload of magic with no problems, I just assume that is Butcher ignoring the old stuff that sucked a bit) With electronics it becomes almost inevitable that something goes wrong in pretty short order simply because there are so many individual events occurring in even a simple IC that you are going to get problems, which is why the effect is so much more pronounced. It isn't impossible for a wizard to live in a modern house with all that implies, Molly does it, it just means that a whole lot of maintenance needs to be done all the time to ensure that there is a very small number of things that can go wrong at any given moment which most people don't have the time to do.

Don't want to derail the thread but even that's pretty silly. There are aspects of biology much more complicated than a gun jamming, yet Dresden doesn't affect human digestion; the immune system; or the CNS. It's still a good story, and I am a fan, my thing is that the idea of Magic vs Technology requires a lot more Suspension of Disbelief than Magic being integrated into technology.

That was my immediate thought as well. If these people cause random events to happen more frequently, then why aren't the people around them having spiked cancer rates and other forms of health problems? Yes, electronics are complex, but our bodies' biology is arguably more complex than a lot of consumer electronics (never mind relatively simple mechanical contraptions).

I've heard that on his forum Butcher has said that in large part it works that way because wizards (and others) believe it works that way. The distinction between technology and organic processes is that the wizards themselves don't look at them as the same thing. In the past wizardry did things like spoil milk; these days it screws with gadgets.

In settings like his where magic is affected by belief much of what appears to be the nature of magic may in fact only be the effect of people's collective belief about how magic works.

[jollyreaper]

And if you still can't figure out what's happening here?

Here's the thing. You can figure out what's happening, because you can hypothesise a chain between cause "Agitated mental state in Patient X" and effect "movement of objects without currently detectable interaction", and you can perform experiments to disprove that hypothesis.

Even if the specifics of the process are a black box, you can still do science on the cause and effect. And then, when your understanding of that has improved you may develop tools that let you open the black box.

That's pretty much how science has progressed from the point at which people started to get really serious about it.

As long as magic remains at the black box level, would we really be replicating the effects with technology? At best you might end up with Flintstones technology where you have a weapon cobbled together out of a few bits of tech you do understand and a big piece you don't. It'd be like taking your psychic girl, drugging her and taking her to Grand Central Station. She wakes up in pain and confusion and with some acid burns tossed on her arms for good measure, she'll start killing people with her mind left and right. Suicide bombing taken to the next level. Still doesn't mean you understand a lick of what she's doing. Even if you think you'll figure it out eventually, it's not happening soon.