But how is it that in a world of magic it isn't obviously possible for a few bright-thinking mages to invent the equivalence of kerosene or sterno?Magic and magic users don't make for better scientists. Sure, by the rules, magic-users are highly intelligent, so this isn't a knock on character. The main problem with magic is that it doesn't help advance science, so I don't see how it could have a significant, sustained push on science.
Magic doesn't help with discovery. There are no spells that would allow sight deep into the cosmos compared to or better than a telescope to advance astronomy or its application for ocean bound navigation. Conversely, there are no spells for microscopic vision to advance the fields of biology or medicine. There are no spells to isolate, refine, or process elements and compounds to advance materials science. And so on and so forth.
Magic doesn't help with measurement; scientific inquiry is built on measurement.
Magic doesn't help much with generating, controlling, and applying energy. I'm thinking in the form of engines here. Well, maybe the use of a Permanency and some sort of fire spell could create a fuel-less flame. But magic wouldn't help with the invention of gears, cams, and other power transmission systems to deliver work from the heat generated.
You could look at it the other way too. How would magic have helped classical man devise a method for creating concrete? How would it have helped to create new steel and metal alloys (beyond creating higher temperature forges)?
Magic in D&D is geared towards combat, exploration, and all the fun things that go with the game. It could have just as easily been geared towards science (but what kind of game would that be?). It is not like what I am saying here is any big revelation, but it is both a common sense and convoluted answer to how we can have magic and Medieval/Renaissance technology side by side.
Note that I am making a slight distinction between technology and science. An enterprising magic user can use magic to create some wondrous things, but their magic is not advancing (or creating) science or the scientific method.
Again, I'm not saying that an inventive use of magic couldn't create effects that resemble technological advances, but said effects are not advancing science qua science.
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I would even look at magic and science being diametrically opposed to each other. One could even have a world set up where as technology advances magic fades though that might be too long term for game effects. It could be that if there is advanced technology near magic has an increasing chance to fail completely or act in some undesired and unexpected manner.
ReplyDeleteIt depends on what underpins magic in a world. If magic has the same sort of rules, observable and replicable, that science does it might lead to an expansion of the scientific method. But you would still have fewer scientists as many of the sort of people that would become scientists would be wizards instead.
ReplyDeleteIt would be difficult to reconcile magic with science, magic definitely doesn't operate with the same rules as reality. Look at what magic can do: create fire without fuel, create and destroy matter and energy, produce force/motion without the corresponding opposing force, and otherwise fly in the face of the fundamental principles and laws that the sciences are built upon.
ReplyDeleteI agree, this is why I have such a hard time with those who get science fiction and verisimilitude in my fantasy.
ReplyDeleteThe world of fantasy is in itself inexplicable, or follows its own rules. To explain or rationalize it based on our reality drains it of its magic.
In our world, magic was directly or indirectly responsible for any number of scientific (not technological) advances. Magic, in the form of alchemy, lead to the first metallurgists and chemists. Sometimes this was because thinkers were reacting against the boneheaded things the alchemists believed, sure, but sometimes not. Anyone who has strong acids in their game owes a debt to the alchemists who first refined vitriol while looking for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life (both distinctly magical technologies, since they defy known laws of nature).
ReplyDeleteArguably, it was the ancient scientists--especially Aristotle--who held science back the longest, while the magicians--especially Isaac Newton, who was an alchemist, and Roger Bacon, who may have discovered gunpowder--were responsible for some of the greatest advances.
Just sayin'.
Outside of considerations of faith and revelation, everything in our world adheres to natural laws. How do you go from alchemy to magic, which is by definition bereft of natural law? There is nothing magical at all about the invention of strong acids, metal alloys, or gunpowder.
ReplyDelete"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Sir Sri Lankabhimanya Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, FRAS.
ReplyDeleteAnd thus the converse is true.
Can you explain life and consciousness and love in complete scientific terms? Can you sufficiently explain the Big Bang in terms that are measurable and have been proven?
"Others — for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein — considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws." - Carl Sagan
Is magic not another manifestation of a law or laws, expressed in the use and manifestation of that which we don't have yet the tools, the insight or the dimensional capability to measure?
What would a sphere be to a 2 or 1 dimensional being, if not magical?
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." Albert Einstein
I would substitute "magic" for religious.
Regards.
Yeah...I can't really see how the "magic is anti-science" angle makes any sense.
ReplyDeleteAnything we cannot explain is magic. Anything we attempt to explain is science. If we attempt to explain the unexplainable, it is therefore science.
Duh.
Just because we haven't figured out, for instance, why Dryads are so very attachedd to trees doesn't immediately mean that such an answer doesn't exist.
Understand, in a world of magic, our science would grow to encompass it, simply because humans are exploitative of nature, by nature. This seems obvious beyond obvious to me.
As ChicagoWiz above commented, any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science. And any insufficiently analyzed -anything- is insufficient from magic.
I think many comments are missing the point here.
ReplyDeleteWe are dealing with magic in D&D, not magic as a romanticized ideal or just a term used to describe anything not yet understood as science.
Magic is extremely well analyzed and understood in D&D, just turn to the chapter with all the spell descriptions in them.
Like I said in my post:
"Magic in D&D is geared towards combat, exploration, and all the fun things that go with the game. It could have just as easily been geared towards science (but what kind of game would that be?). It is not like what I am saying here is any big revelation, but it is both a common sense and convoluted answer to how we can have magic and Medieval/Renaissance technology side by side." and I will add "without magic enabling advanced technology." Magic-enhanced technology would probably be a decent definition of steam punk or Victorian fantasy or what not.
Magic in D&D doesn't help with science because science isn't in D&D. And I am ok with that. Any enterprising DM can easily create spells that could change this paradigm.
I am not making that change. You can conjure up as many explanations as you want. Such as scientists that want to practice their art without 'cheating' an using magic, or some social prohibitions, etc etc.
I would go further and say the existence of Magic forbids science. I don't mean to make the kind of argument for why the Mayan civilization supposedly never worked much metallurgy (why invest in bronze or iron when obsidian makes far superior blades!), though you could make some similar arguments about how magic would reduce the investment in science.
ReplyDeleteI go for a far more basic level. Magic means the rules of physics wobble and bend easily, if magic is natural and common to 'monsters' then the natural world is full of magic. Science is based upon repeatability.
If form an optical lens one day, and use the same methodology tomorrow but instead it has been infused with magic to show me the world as it was yesterday. I may have a useful tool, but I can't repeat it nor can I really experiment in optics. Now picture high sciences and how little deviation you would need to screw up devices.
Well, there are two things going on in your post, so it's not surprising there's confusion: first you make general statements about magic, later about the smaller and very different topic of magic in D&D (which, as a reliable game token, I'm tempted to say is "not magic" as a philosophical category, but then I'd have to define what magic is and that's beyond the reach of this comment).
ReplyDeleteRe magic in D&D: indeed, the spells as written in the LBBs or 1e are, if anything, anti-research, anti-scientific, weirdly specialized and clearly produced to satisfy the contingent needs of particular persons. In that very grab-bag weirdness, though, don't they imply that it's possible to make up new spells? Don't they show that certain individuals do so as their circumstances demand? I'd call that technology. And if they have the means to produce new technologies then they must have some intelligible theory or practice, at least some bits to bricolage together, which should provide some kind of crack or foothold for research. How do MUs do magic? How do they memorize spells and what is gone when the spell is cast? Is Tenser's floating disc always exactly the same, when cast by different casters or from scrolls? What if you deliberately get the formulae slightly wrong? These are all questions for the individual game. If their answers are absolutely unreliable then we have some deeper mystery to plumb.
I'm guessing your post is a fundamental truth about your game, not necessarily anyone else's. If you don't say that you'll get confused comments.
@Zzarchov: the way a lot of science is done these days, this might already be happening, and we might just be shielded from it by a pervasive and self-supporting hieratic network. Which could actually be a neat setting for a world with clerics and MUs (a bit like James Maliszewski's): MUs point out the chaos that lurks under he blanket of everyday life, clerics keep that blanket nailed down.
...and I forgot to mention Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is like a really, really heavily worked version of this post, as well as wildly entertaining. Potter magic makes no more sense than D&D magic, a fact that greatly frustrates a scientifically-inclined young Harry. Potter magic is also in bad Latin, a detail that sets certain species of Potter-head wondering.
ReplyDelete"I'm guessing your post is a fundamental truth about your game, not necessarily anyone else's."
ReplyDeleteYea, sorry, human nature and all. Our ceaseless vanity at work.
And this blog IS explicitly about my own fundamental truths; bloggers shouldn't be so set on trying to force their truths on others. But I'll throw up another explanatory post either way (instead of just this cheap comment).
Hmmm...I think Richard covered it. I would add, I guess, that if magic is reproducible and reliable (which in D&D it is) then it is science--or at least its technology--whether we know how it fits with other scientific laws or not, so to say science and magic don't mix is to use a rather fanciful (though I'll admit, not uncommon) reading of them, rather than a utilitarian one.
ReplyDeleteActually, most spells have variable components that vary by dice roll and/or caster level. Not reproducible at all, but we've gone off on such a tangent so far from the OP that I should probably just stop commenting...
ReplyDelete"There are no spells that would allow sight deep into the cosmos compared to or better than a telescope to advance astronomy or its application for ocean bound navigation."
ReplyDeleteClairvoyance doesn't count why?
"There are no spells to isolate, refine, or process elements and compounds to advance materials science. And so on and so forth."
If you're using a modern view of the elements, I see no reason why, say, a Uranium elemental can't be summoned, not to mention the various "Purify X" spells. After all, what's "Purify Food and Drink" if cast by a Xorn? A way to purify various rocks and metals.
"Magic doesn't help much with generating, controlling, and applying energy. I'm thinking in the form of engines here. Well, maybe the use of a Permanency and some sort of fire spell could create a fuel-less flame. But magic wouldn't help with the invention of gears, cams, and other power transmission systems to deliver work from the heat generated."
Are there kettles? If so, then any mage who's taken a few minutes to think about one should have a basic understanding of steam pressure. With Permanency, Create Water, and the aforementioned flame spell, you've got a perpetual steam engine based off of reasonable extrapolation from a teapot.
Ultimately, the ability to fashion, say, a steam engine from three spells doesn't invent a boiler. With 'mundane' materials, we can create boilers without resorting to magic. So magic can manufacture a steam engine, but magic would not invent a steam engine.
ReplyDeleteHumans have noticed the power of steam for a few thousand years (see the aeolipile, also a fun experiment we did in AP Chem). Why was it not applied to an engine until the 17th - 18th century? That answer is the core difference between manufacturing a technological device from magic and invention/science/etc.
I think this is why it is so important for a DM to decide for herself what magic is, and what it represents.
ReplyDeleteIt CAN be any of the things above - a strange branch of exploitable universal laws; or somehow more faerie-tale and emblamatic of the nature of unknown and unknow-able.
But the DM has to decide.
I think most published settings are truly awful at this. They skirt around the issue of what magic is and how it is done, with the result that it is impossible to extrapolate logical effects it would have on society.
Fantasy falls under the umbrella of 'speculative fiction'. One of the inevitable things about it is that it makes us speculate about the consequences of 'what if'. What if magic was A? What if magic was B? To avoid this is to deny one of the most powerful aspects of fantasy.
Look at it this way, we have a cure for Tuberculosis that we can mass produce, and people still die from it. How many wizards are there in the world, and how may are of a high enough level to cast Permanency or make items.? Wizards have better things to do than be craftsman, namely dealing with all of those monsters that like to smash things.
ReplyDelete"I think most published settings are truly awful at this. They skirt around the issue of what magic is and how it is done, with the result that it is impossible to extrapolate logical effects it would have on society."
ReplyDeleteThey do that for a reason, they don't want magic to change society into a imitation of our own. They want players to experience playing in a different world. If you are going play a knight, they want you to live a world just like medieval times (or at least the stories from medieval times). I don't want my magic to turn on the lights, I want it to kill dragons.
I have a feeling I should have just used the paragraph from the OP "Magic in D&D is geared towards combat, exploration, and all the fun things that go with the game..." and left the rest out. What originally started as a relatively insignificant thought on having a historical game untouched by magic (so as to preserve history for the game) turned into a meta-physical discussion of near useless proportions...
ReplyDeleteI agree with Flavian, I want magic to kill dragons[Protestants/Catholics/whatever] and not change the history/society in which I want to play.
So, even dropping Clairvoyance as telescope - since I haven't looked at that spell for a while - what about the Xorn using purify food and drink, or the fact that using a modern view of the elements means you could summon - and harvest from - an Aluminum Elemental, or a Lead Elemental, or an Iron Elemental, completely composed of pure elements?
ReplyDeleteSorry, blogger ate my long comment, so I will settle for the condensed version.
ReplyDeleteIf you are trying to integrate magic and reality and want to stay close to actual physical law, these elementals would actually be metal-ore elementals. Elements are rarely found in their pure form in nature since pure elementals are typically highly reactive. So a pure aluminum elemental wouldn't work, it would have to be an aluminum-ore elemental. Then you have to wait until the 19th century for processing of Aluminum ore.
If you want to hand-wave elementals as 'pure' elements and physics be damned, then it defeats the purpose the purpose of the hypothetical.
Hope that makes sense...
To suddenly jump in on an old post...
ReplyDeleteTo my eyes, magic does not so much not lead to good science, as make it obsolete. The original view of telephones was that eventually there would be one on every street(!) If this were the prevailing view in D&D world, it wouldn't be worth the effort, as you could just go to your local wizard and get him to cast sending. Why bother to refine the telescope when you can cast clairvoyance? Why invent gunpowder when you can cast fireball?
While MUs /could/ improve scientific or technological knowledge, there'd be no point, as they probably have a spell in their repertoire that can do the job easier.