Sounds like someone needs to read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”.
Comment on Anon is a winner
Zementid@feddit.nl 5 days agoIf magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
To cover up magic on all “fronts” would be impossible by today’s standards. Harry Potter would never be as successful nower days as it was. Simply because the smartphone enters the life’s of humans as essential device very early in life.
Kind of hard to switch off all those thoughts.
gramie@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Nowadays* one word.
MBM@lemmings.world 5 days ago
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
Unless it does so unpredictably / always exactly the way you don’t want it to. It’s magic after all.
Zementid@feddit.nl 5 days ago
If some wizards of quantum mechanics can write math for… whatever quantum mechanics is… I think there could be a way or two, to manipulate magic by science.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Disagree. My kids love Harry Potter.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 days ago
To cover up magic on all “fronts” would be impossible by today’s standards. Harry Potter would never be as successful nower days as it was. Simply because the smartphone enters the life’s of humans as essential device very early in life.
Even then, Harry Potter canonically took place in the early 90’s even though it released in the 2000’s
lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today 5 days ago
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated …that would also be true if it didn’t interact with electricity.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s not given. Many magic systems are inherently unexplainable. Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow. A bunch of stories use a similar explanation (replace monotheistic god with primal forces/strands of fate/eldritch gods).
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today 4 days ago
Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study. Is there a correlation between particular prayers and miracles? Are particular mental states helpful? Are various traits make someone more likely to produce a miracle? Are there drugs that affect it? What are the limits to a miracle? Is there patterns in the time intervals between miracles? And so on, and so forth. A world with such a magic system, if you want it to be realistic, should have had an entire history of people studying these and many other things.
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study.
It might be technically studiable in the way you describe, but there’s no requirement for consistency of any kind. My statement was extra-universal, so you can’t assume that it’s discoverable intra-universally. If the result of your study is “this is behaving in completely inconsistent and random ways”, you have technically studied it, but you haven’t measured or analyzed it in any way.
You can just apply your approach to our universe. People have spent centuries attempting to measure and analyze miracles. Would you say that we have analyzed and studied the magic system by which the christian god works?
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
You’re still making assumptions about the magic system. Take for example the Solphons from “The Dark Forest” - super-smart subatomic machines that change the laws of physics to prevent advances in fundamental physics. Now imagine that they weren’t designed by an alien race, but instead by an extra-universal god, and there was no way to ever arrive at this knowledge (since no instruments for measuring etc. can ever be developed).
Suddenly you have a magic system that is fundamentally unstudiable, no matter the amount of humans with “common sense or intelligence”. No matter what idea you come up with to study the system, I’ll be able to come up with a way to make it fundamentally unstudiable. That’s what’s great about fiction - we’re not limited by the assumptions we have to make in real science.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 5 days ago
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It also Gary Stu’s the hell out of Harry. The only thing I love about that book, and it’s spiritual sequal, is the fact that Hermione is, correctly, in Ravenclaw.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 5 days ago
From a quick search, I understand that the book makes Harry flawless, is that it ?
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Exactly. Basically a male “Mary Sue” character.
AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 5 days ago
This is why we invented the Internet
kalpol@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I was sold at Efficient Market Hypothesis
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I’m sorry I don’t understand
kalpol@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Asset prices reflect all the information that everyone knows about the asset. So wands are not efficiently priced because the wand chooses the owner, but robes are generally fungible so should be priced efficiently
nesc@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
Easiest explanation is: there is no electricity in hogwarts and wizards don’t have electricians nor electricity generation, so “electricity doesn’t work in hogwarts”.
If magic was electromagnetic or at least can be measured by effects that it has wizards would have been found during 20th century by general populace.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
The easiest explanation is that it’s magic and we’re all muggles and therefore incapable of understanding it.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Something something magichlorians
nesc@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
There is nothing in the books that says that people without magic can’t understand it? I think there was a plot point in 4 or 5 book where harry is on trial for using some spell to scare away dementors, and his neighboor testifies that he really did it and people don’t believe her cause she doesn’t have magic. But that’s only seeing magical creatures, what stops anyone from understanding it exactly? They do repeatable things that return repeatable results, pretty understandable.
imsufferableninja@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
the neighbor is a squib, not a muggle
Zementid@feddit.nl 5 days ago
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic. So that is a new physical law in disguise. An especially interesting one that interacts with certain intelligence.
Sentient Electromagimagnetic field confirmed?
nesc@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
Or that can be a bullshit by uninformed wizards with superiority complex, they have like 5 years of mandatory education. And most don’t interact with anyone but magical people in their enclaves.
Zementid@feddit.nl 4 days ago
And are getting mamed and inbred out of tradition in a school designed to teach them survival skills in a world the muggles already made their own.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Magic could operate differently from electromagnetism, but still interfere, such as with quantum effects. Inference doesn’t need to go both ways.
I thought about writing a magic setting with fairly hard justification for magic, and in my world, you’d control individual atoms and combine them to get the effects you want. You’d do this by gaining the respect of or instilling fear into atoms so they’d do your bidding. Spoken spells are more like tricks taught to dogs than having any power of their own, and the power derives from the respect or fear the atoms have for the caster. This explains why some wizards/witches are more powerful than others, and why learning isn’t necessarily the best way to get more powerful. The strongest magic users in my world spend a lot of time meditating, meaning communing with the target group of atoms.
The inner workings of atoms is poorly understood, so I think there’s room to insert some form of sentience.
Zementid@feddit.nl 4 days ago
Getting your magical SI units right could help you balance the powers. I like the idea of “Respecto Atomum”
How much respect is needed for no more movement at all (0°K) in 1m^3?
mkwt@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Significant Digits is an HPMOR sequel-fanfic that toys with these kinds of ideas.
Dasus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t think there’s actually any such mention. There’s several mentions about how “muggle technology doesn’t work in the Hogwarts grounds”, but there’s no mention of electronics going haywire when someone is doing magic outside of hogwarts, imo?
Please do correct me if I just remember wrong.
And even just turning out lights is something that is apparently not that simple to do. Aside from Peruvian instant darkness powder — which doesn’t exactly snuff out lights, but covers them in darkness — the only thing to affect lights is Dumbledore’s deluminator. And he’s a magical genius.
My point being even turning off the lights is challenging. Muggle tech may not work in Hogwarts but I don’t recall any mention of magic fucking up tech unless it’s magic specifically meant to fuck up tech. Hogwarts is just like such a protracted and magical place that “muggle tech doesn’t work” but even that’s kind of a silly overarching statement that’s easy to challenge. Plumbing is technically muggle tech. It works. Wouldn’t ball point pens work as well? I imagine those would be pretty highly valued commodities. I think muggle borns could easily flog biros for at least a galleon a piece. Which the muggleborn could then go and exchange for the value of the gold, getting probably hundreds of pound for a galleon.
Endless money glitch.
But yeah at least pens would work I’d argue. Something like calculators is easy to see being fucked by some ambient magic fields, but pens? Nah.
Zementid@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Afaik the camera used in the first movie is analogue… Holy Shit, I have to read this before I can answer.