Wizards, and Sorcerers, and Scientists, Oh My! . . . Or, The Age of Magical Realism

Arthur C. Clare

By Steven McLain

We live in a magical age.  Arthur C. Clarke once posited that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  This rather off-the-cuff remark has since passed into the realm of law, much like Moore's Law, or Murphy's Law, a much-cited dictum that helps articulate and explain the human behavior beyond the more universal laws of physics, thermodynamics, and others.

When Clarke made that that observation, however, he meant it almost entirely within the realm of speculative fiction.  It has since been embraced by members of the scientific community (most famously by SETI) as a means of explaining how an advanced alien civilization would appear to human beings.

Nikola Tesla

Magic, since we're on the topic, is any means of causation not immediately explicable (if I throw the ball across the room, that's physics; if I levitate the ball across the room, that's magic).  That definition is a little vague, I know, but useful for our purposes.  Normally, I'd add the caveat that magic also defies the known laws of physics through supernatural (often divine) means.  Modern fantasy has taken that a bit further, and codified magic so that it is indistinguishable from technology; in a sense, modern fantasists have simply replaced one set of physical laws with another (magical) set.  More importantly, magic is often restricted to the initiated: magicians, sorcerers, wizards.  It was for this reason that Thomas Edison was called "The Wizard of Menlo Park."  His demonstrations of electrical phenomena were often misunderstood, if they were understood at all.  We'll get back to the initiated and the uninitiated later.

You might be a little more familiar with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, (or Army of Darkness starring Bruce Campbell) in which an man from what would be perceived as the future is transported back in time to the Middle Ages and uses his advanced knowledge to fool his audience into believing that he is a magician.  The principle, however, is the same and exemplifies Clarke's Law perfectly.  Were we to transport someone even from the turn of the twentieth century to our world, they would be amazed by the technological progress we have made.

But they would understand that it is technological.  Nonetheless, it would be incomprehensible to them.  The fundamental scientific knowledge would be beyond their grasp, just as it is beyond the grasp of most people living today.  Between the turn of the twentieth and the very first years of the twentieth century, revolutions in physics, chemistry, and medicine fundamentally altered accepted scientific beliefs.

A paradigm shift had occurred in physics, which moved beyond atomic theory into quantum theory.  Chemistry had yet to unlock the secrets of vitamins (a substance still famously misunderstood), and medicine had yet to divide the mental from the physical.  Technology was mechanical; cause and effect were easily understood.  Metallurgy, however, was still in its infancy (as the brittle steel from the Titanic can attest) and the most advanced technology for that time was steam power (a technology which had existed for well over a century).  Inroads had been made in battery technology, and electricity was becoming useful, but was not yet common.  Indoor plumbing was still a sort of fad, telephones were yet to be invented, and radio was unknown.  It was a fundamentally different time.

But if you were to explain the differences between then and now to our hypothetical time-traveler, you would, undoubtedly, calm his (or hers, but probably his since education was largely restricted to men even in this time) fears by explaining that all these wonders were products of human ingenuity and human technology.  When pressed to explain all of them, however, you would be left stumped.  How does that car work?  What is that chunk of strange material you hold to your ear (or perhaps the smaller bit wedged indecorously into your ear that is neither blue, nor does it resemble much of a tooth) and how does it function?  Could you please design and explain the workings of the thing which curiously resembles a typewriters and emits the glowing radiation the Curies have famously just demonstrated?

More importantly, why are you not worried about contracting polio, typhus, measles, mumps, influenza (in any real sense), or the myriad other common contagions which still decimate the human population in frequent batches.  More to the point, why do you have all your teeth?  Why are you so abnormally tall?  And mother of all wonders, how can you afford to eat a hamburger (possibly with bacon) for every single meal?

I'm cherry-picking examples, because these are the most obvious wonders of our age.  But pressed, how many could you explain with sufficient detail to satisfy our time-traveler?  This all comes back around to my original statement.  This is all technology sufficiently advanced to be mistaken for magic by the uninitiated.  Even the word "initiated" has embedded within it hints of the esoteric, of secrets hidden and only carefully divulged.  We currently spend nearly twenty years being inducted into that world (an American high school education being woefully inadequate for this endeavor), an entire lifespan to many of our forebears.

Just two guys . . . making science

What's more, as our knowledge becomes more specific, and the humanities de-emphasized, bodies of study are growing less able to communicate their discoveries with one another.  Lacking a common tongue, they fall back on the patois and jargon of their specialties.  Case in point, try asking a lawyer what language they're using in court and I'm sure they'll answer English.  But try to understand just what it is they're saying.  Lawyers have developed a jargon which is indecipherable to those outside the profession, and the same thing is happening in the sciences.  Though this makes it more and more difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend scientific discoveries, it also makes it more difficult for members of different branches within the same body of study to communicate their discoveries with one another.

Ultimately, it means the fracture of human knowledge into increasingly inaccessible bits.  As this phenomenon becomes increasingly commonplace, and the average body of knowledge shrinks, technology will become much more mystical, until one day it will be regarded with the same wonder and fascination as magic.  This gets me back to my original point, which is to say that we've already reached that point to some extent.  Our technology has outstripped our ability to understand and define it.  No one person can fully understand all of it, or even grasp the fundamental principles which underpin it.

This guy got it

If we value our medicines, technologies and other wonders, we ought to stop and ponder the ways in which they have been acquired.  For good or ill, they represent the apex of human accomplishment; they're tangible proof of the human capacity to cooperate and overcome obstacles.  Losing that appreciation means undoing all the work of human enlightenment, from the Scientific Revolution, to the Industrial Revolution, to the Information Revolution.  And because it removes power from the people and places it once more in the hands of the rarefied few.  Democracy and education have always gone hand in hand, and as our education is threatened by specialization and a general lack of enthusiasm (on the part of students and leaders) our political system is threatened as well.

So take this as a rallying cry.  We live in a magical age.  Let's make it understandable again.