Fuck it, physics is magic. You study for years to learn the innate laws of the universe and bend them to your will. You know what most people would do if magicians were real people? They’d call them nerds for spending too much time studying and most people would avoid the subject like the plague. Magicians and physicists are the same thing.
Every sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
My physics teacher is also a magician so you got a point
We all crowning ourselves high wizards of the college of Winterholm yet the coolest bending of universal laws I’ve done is an acid-base titration. WHERE BROMOTHYMOL BLUE GO?!?
Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, l read mins, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?
All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay
I dare say physics would be more popular then
But that’s never how magic is depicted - it always takes decades of knowledge and learning or powerful enchanted artifacts forged from rare minerals and materials, and rituals which always name a price.
Modern magic can do all those things - if you have the right artifacts, likewise made of precious metals forged by lightning and etched with beams of sunfire and inlaid with gemstones from beyond the sea, fuelled by the ichor alchemically distilled from the remnants of ancient forests and carefully assembled by entire courts of white-robed magi who have each spent decades perfecting their deep knowledge of ritual and arcane lore.
With these artifacts, I can incinerate an entire room with a twitch of my finger upon a staff of fire summoning, read minds with a helm of probing, lightning people with a tiny wand of stunning, and conjure familiar from across the world to do my bidding on my black mirror for the small sacrifice of tiny particles of lightning in a distant runestone.
- Fireball? We have rocket launchers.
- Lightning people? We have tasers.
- Mind reading? Ok, I’ll give you that.
- Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Many of the fantasy powers can be done. It isn’t a question of capability but of economics. The economics are ignored in most stories, no matter if it’s fantasy or a real world thriller.
Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Also washing machines, robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers.
Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing
But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world
If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best
Man, 2 full bridge rectifiers in the same meme?
This is either electroboom, or struggling for things to fill a memeWhere’s the second one
By elimination it must be the “what the fuck”
Edit: Yeah, that’s it. Someone below mentioned a mercury arc rectifier.
Ooo that’s exciting. At a glance without paying attention it looked like a reactor with cherenkov radiation
Computers are magic.
Circuit boards are basically runes, written in stone and inlaid with precious metals to conduct pure energy around in very specific ways to do pretty much anything we wish.
It’s sand we carved into patterns and tricked into thinking with tamed lightning.
Then there’s RF (radio frequency) which is the DEEP magic.
As someone who is trying to get Meshtastic to work I feel this. My pocket node can connect to people 50km away, but the base station with the chongus antenna can only connect across town?
I’ve always told my students that programming is just magic. If you get the right combination of words and symbols, the magic lightning rock will do your bidding.
We write incantations to make the magic rock think and give us answers.
I love mercury vapor rectifiers!
What’s the bottom right image of?
That is a mercury arc rectifier:
I thought you might also enjoy its German name: Quecksilberdampfgleichrichter
Sounds kinda similar to the Swedish word “kvicksilverbågelikriktare”…
EDIT: After doing some more googling, the proper name for the device in Swedish is:
“Kvicksilverlikriktare”
and sounds nothing like the hungarian “higanyív szelep” or “higanygőz egyenirányító”
Or its Dutch name:
Kwikdampgelijkrichter
It shows Cherenkov radiation of a nuclear underwater reactor (I think, I don’t know this exact picture)
Nope, just plain UV from the mercury arc in the rectifier:
Looks like cherenkov radiation?
Nope, that is a mercury arc rectifier:
That’s some fuckin’ 1800s steampunk adjacent shit
Oh yeah, the glass age of electronics gave us some really cool stuff!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimo_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoscope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_eye_tube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoscope
This is why I always appreciated that Brakebills in The Magicians was basically grad school with better dorm life.
What’s the middle bottom one?
That orb in the middle of the apparatus is The Demon Core, a piece of plutonium produced during the Manhattan Project, for a third nuke which was never needed. So it was used for criticality experiments, which is where those hemispheres come in.
Anyway, in those experiments it was key in a few accidents, which caused the deaths by radiation of several researchers. After the later bout of experiments, the core was scrapped.
Idk how you can include all this but not the Kyle Hill documentary
Good point, thanks for pointing to it.
(Also, pro tip: take off that ?si=… stuff from your link, that’s tracking tags)
I think someone made a floating lamp using the power of magnets about a decade ago. It looks cool.
Totally not magic at all, not even a little bit.
The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.
With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.
This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.
OK but electromagnetics is totally magic.
As one of my Daughters told the Chair of the Physics department at a large Big 10 collage to switch her major from ME to Physics, “I want know the answer, not guess.”
Weird, because my experience with science and mathematics is that everything I learned only leads to more questions. I personally preferred taking a small chunk of that knowledge and using it to do real-world stuff which was always surprisingly complicated but satisfying. An engineer that “guesses” is not a very good one IMO lol
My whole life I thought I’d study mechatronics. I was one of those kids winning robotics comps and getting sponsored to go to global ones and get my arse beat by actually smart people.
Anyway, I switched to physics because “I want to know why”.
Ahaha, hahahahaha, aaahshahshshshs oh naive little me. Ha ha ha ha. Now I am an overeducated house wife with a head full of questions. I could have done something useful instead of rocking back and forth in a padded room screaming “but what is time? why does it break all the patterns?”
That’s actually the reason a friend of mine gave for switching from physics to maths.
Don’t start me with heath rays you can’t block.
Saw a working mercury arc rectifier for the first time recently and those things are wild, definitely don’t look “right”
Yeah, don’t touch it or it kills you with a lightning strike.
The “not a demon” guy is going to have a real bad time.
He will not sacrifice an entire room to a deamon. I repeat, it’s not a sacrifice of everybody in a room for a deamon.
Just don’t build a house of neutron-reflective tungsten carbine bricks around it or cowboy the beryllium hemispheres, hell, maybe just trust the last guys’ calculations instead of testing for closeness to criticality. Safe as houses.
Fool me once, shame on… shame on me. Fool me twice? You can’t get fooled again!
Because of the fatal dose of radiation.
