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A good illusion is still spectacular even when the illusion is broken. The magical world was boring to begin with.
Every coin has two side, uh…
Just because you know how something works doesn’t make it not magic
Any sufficiently analysed magic is indistinguishable from science!
If you understand how quantum mechanics works, why are you keeping it a secret?
Out of pure spite.
If you understand magnets you know how magic works. Hell, even aerofoils seems like a glitch in reality.
Totally agree. I just witnessed my sister delivering her baby a few days back.
The dictionary disagrees with you.
Sorry, but higher literature (DnD rulebooks) disagree with YOU
This is Science Memes, not Fantasy Memes lol
The dictionary sucks.
That’s because it’s a dic.
Even magic itself loses its magic when you know how it works.
Does it, really? Or is it “magic” all the way down…? :-D
As someone who was crazy about magic as a kid and learned a bunch of magic tricks, yes, it does. Really.
As someone else who was crazy about magic as a kid, I feel like that just made magic even more magical. Having an understanding of how magic tricks work lets you really appreciate the art and be truly wowed when you see a trick you can’t figure out.
I still appreciate it, but the “magic” is gone. It becomes an intellectual and physical challenge once you understand the mechanics behind slight of hand and other forms of stage magic.
Yeah, for sure. To me, the intellectual and physical challenge is the magic.
I guess to me the magic that’s left are the reactions I get from people who really love magic. There isn’t really anything else I can do that provokes such a happy reaction from people. Plus the genius behind some of these tricks is really amazing. Guys like David Blaine really are geniuses in their field. I found a PDF file on the torrent network that contained all of his popular tricks back in the mid 00’s, and the looks of absolute amazement I got at parties was priceless. One of my brother-in-laws accused me of being a warlock when I showed him some tricks the first time I met him. Haha!
What did you think of magic after you learned occultist techniques?
That it’s not real, which was also a disappointment.
Oh yeah, for magic “tricks” that’s fair:-).
You could still use it to cause squeals of delight from young’uns who don’t know any better yet. So the utility is vastly diminished, but not entirely gone.
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. Btw, FlakyPastry does this really well.
Quantum mechanics unveils the spaghetti code on which our universe runs
i can’t wait to see the source comments
“this should NOT work, yet it does, if you touch this i will flay you alive”
This is beautiful, it’s poetry.
String theory… further proof that breaking your spaghetti violates the fundamental laws of the universe.
breaking your spaghetti
This angers the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I just want to say that string theory is in all likelihood complete bullshit and I’m tired of people acting like it’s not.
For those in the unknowing state: https://existentialcomics.com/
God doesn’t play with dice
-Einstein<An infinite number of dice appear at the plank scale>
Tada!
-GodIf 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.
Scientists are this world’s wizards
Ah yes the giraffe, the most magical being
I appreciate you. https://imgur.com/gallery/new-favorite-gif-EkO9uj8
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.
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 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 legen of a deeper magic known as “Lagragians”, although knowledge of that lost art remains confines to the warlocks’ ivory tower.
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.
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.
Reality is a social construct and is therefore limited by human imagination.
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.
That’s, uh… That’s completely not true. I know lots of otherkin magic users. Magic tends to be more popular with otherkin than humans in my experience. Humans are happy to remain in consensus reality because it was built for them. Otherkin need to use magic to find worlds where they can exist.
What?
Translation: my acid was extra spicy today.
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.
Open your mind, and you’ll see it again. Below organisms lay organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and even before you hit the quantum it all works together spectacularly, in ways that nobody really understands.
e.g. is there a cure for Alzheimer’s, or “cancer”, or death? Can we grow new limbs, either from the patient’s own cells or at least off the rack generically? We’ve convinced ourselves that just bc we have a good enough microscope to view the book of life (DNA, plus some other stuff like mitochondria and centrioles) that we “understand” it, but we do not, I promise you, or else we would have all of those aforementioned things.
But don’t take my word for it: pick one of those places you mentioned and visit it - I mean actually go there. You will see what even the locals who have lived right next to it for their entire lives do not. Or start reading a Wikipedia page for something you have always been interested in but never taken the time to learn about, and you’ll see that you may never want to stop… The mystery is nowhere close to being gone, we’ve just told ourselves that it is.
Your third paragraph hits on something I had to realize in my “how to enjoy existence” journey. Put simply, don’t discount meatspace. Sometimes your brain needs those experiences even if you think you don’t. Plus with any current or near future technology, consuming media about a place is not the same as being there. There is no comparison vs the data throughput of all of your senses, even before you get to the social/cultural aspect and being able to interact.
I’m in the US and have coworkers in Europe along with the ones local to me. We talk almost every day, and interacting with them led me to learn a bit on my own about their area, culture, etc.
I’ve also gotten to visit a couple times over the past couple years, and yeah like I said there’s no comparison. You get a lot of the vibe for a place in all that extraneous data your senses are always generating. Just seeing how the people carry themselves, and the different ways various mundane everyday stuff is done, it all incrementally builds into a more cohesive experience.
The only people claiming UFOs are disproven are feds or patsies.
Two eyewitness and a whistleblower testifying seeing nonhuman craft under oath to Congress:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?529499-1/hearing-unidentified-aerial-phenomenaIf UFOs are so disproven, why is congress trying to declassify projects involving them? And why is the Military Industrial Complex pushing back and claiming that they need to be able to patent reverse-engineered technology?
I’m not saying believe me, I’m saying that if you take a serious honest look at the phenomenon it’s very plain that there’s something there
Wow, this is the first time I’ve disagreed with an Existential Comics take
