Nonsense, it's thread evolution. He started it off with a DnD reference, we just progressed(regressed mayhaps?) from there.

Well, I've never had the (dis?)pleasure of DMing, but as far as leading collaborative creative things, your answers need to be good enough to satisfy the people who're asking the questions. I think this:




...pretty well sums it up. Tervicle should have known that Elostian wanted better!

You know, ironically, this same comic could be used for most current scientific quandaries in recent memory. LHC magic future intervention anyone? Or maybe Wave-Particle Duality of Light? Or Dark Matter?

In the end, Arthur C. Clarke has it right. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I would make the addendum that one can interchange "technology" with " explanation for a Phenomenon".

The wave-particle duality isn't weird at all. It's a particle, and it has a wavelength, both of which have been pretty concretely measured at this point. If anything, stationary matter is an emergent property.

Not that this stuff is any less mind-warping.

Sorry, as far as I'm concerned, any attempt at a rational explanation for the Double Slit experiment just falls apart when considered. Light is a wave until something looks at it? Am I a female until I go check? Is a circle a square when not seen? There is a patch job explanation, and that is about it.

Yup. Until you can prove otherwise, you're both genders. My cat is dead and alive. There are no angles on the square when you're not looking at it, as far as you can prove.


Like this.

Things about subatomic particles and intergalactic distances, which refuse to conform to an intuition designed for finding fruit and escaping tigers, do not stop being real because of that. What would be profoundly amazing, and obviously wrong, is if real physics actually did fit into the intuitions of brains that evolved to work with macroscopic objects over perceptible time frames.

Since I am a poli sci major you will have to explain this to me. But doesnt the very definition of a square involve it having angles so regardless of whether I see it or not, if it fits the definition it would still be a square?

The definition of something is different from the actual instance of that same something. If you were a programmer, I could explain it in terms of classes versus objects, the latter being specific instantiations based on definitions of the former.

And I am even more confused... gonna go back to denying people mortgages now.

You sir, are a terrible person.

And thus the cusp of the point! In general regards and respects, magic to most people is something that defies explanation and is only understood by the enigmatic being wearing star and planet studded blue robes (I will not be surprised the day Elostian asks someone to pull a sword from a stone.... Or should I say, Merlostian!). Any Magic as a rule tends to be things that fall outside our little hunter-gatherer mindsets.... Is it really strange to suggest that science tends to be no different? 99% of the population has absolutely no idea how or why most things work (try to get the average human being to explain how a CD works and you'll see what I mean), and in the end most "science" is built up of rules and theories that sit on a base no one really understands. If Quantum Physics truly is the "base" science, then it's practitioners are simply making things up as they go along, hoping for that one lucky guess. You know how many times I have asked a physics professor for an explanation and have been met with the same shrug that medieval folk surely gave their children when asked how birds flew?

The point I'm trying to make is thus - (some) Science and Magic both fall into the realms of things that our sad little minds cannot comprehend. Science just tends to be the more long winded of the two, with more repeatable results. And when we have a scientific phenomenon we do not understand, magic is essentially the placeholder we stick on it until we have something better. Disagree? Fine. Dark Matter. Matter that is absolutely undetectable by any means, technique, or process, and as of now, is rather unprovable save by cause-and-effect logic. Which last I checked, is listed right underneath God in my book.

This is a breathtaking level of wrongness density. You just concluded that because you have a lot of company in not understanding something, ergo, the thing is just made up and there's no truth behind it. Wow. Just wow.

You know that they postulate dark matter because they see the influence of something, but can't see the something, right? It's like a black hole. You don't see those either. Not very undetectable.

"We don't demand solid facts. What we demand is a total absence of solid facts."

No, not really. I more said that often times before an explanation, complete with empirical evidence can be garnered, the strange phenomenon is given an explanation that ranks on the level of "magic". And that often times the explanation is no better to people then magic.

I should so start wearing the blue star and moon robes, IRL.

There's a difference between "ranks of the level of 'magic'" and "is no better to people than magic." A huge difference, in fact. That's not even mentioning that I think both accounts are thoroughly wrong. I totally appreciate that many fields have progressed to the point where you can't understand the cutting edge without devoting a substantial amount of time to it. Still, a full understanding of the details is rarely required for an understanding of the concept, and unless you plan on doing something with that field, the details aren't necessary.

For example, I enjoy programming. I don't understand public key cryptography in the fine details, though. No matter how many times I try, I can't wrap my mind around the idea that someone can send an unencoded cypher followed by an encoded message using an open source implementation and have it still be secure. I know how it works in the abstract, and I know it works concretely, but I just can't grasp the details. That's not magic, though. That's a personal failing.

Not necessarily correct. They calculate, say the speed of a spinning galaxy, then factor in the known mass of a galaxy. Normally, there is a deficit in the amount of matter needed to produce such spin, and this "missing matter" is undetectable by any means currently known to man. So they use inference to imply it must exist. Not so with Black holes. Black Holes not only emit Hawking radiation, but they influence the space around it. Not to mention you could conceivably fly a probe "into" a black hole.

Even then, Dark Matter is simply a theory without a shred of direct evidence. Until there is, it's kind of foolish to imply it is truth. Thus the "magic" placeholder.

What you're describing is dark matter influencing the space around it, ya know. You're equivocating again. There's a difference between " a shred of direct evidence" and "not a shred of evidence on what it is," which is similarly untrue, but close enough for government work. It is a working hypothesis, and not a true theory, but it's a pretty well supported hypothesis with lots of pretty math that I would step aside and let a physicist friend explain to you, because math like that is just a jumble of symbols to me.