When is it "magic" in the Magic vs Science trope?

In the Magic Versus Science trope when is something considered magic and when is it considered advanced, unexplained science aka science fiction?

In some of the entries, the work in question makes the distinction between the two, but in some of the entries like the Star Trek entry the entry seems to be commenting on the fact that what appears to be magic is never admitted as a possibility that it might be magic? When does something stop being science fiction and start being magic? Does it have to make a distinction to fall under this trope? If a distinction is not made should Star Trek be removed?

I guess another example would be Doctor Who. In the Tenth Doctor episode "The Shakespearean Code" the villains use what looks like and pretty much meets any definition of witchcraft and themselves call it magic making a distinction from the science used by The Doctor. Yet the Doctor says it isn't magic, that there is no such thing and calls it a different form of science.

An earlier adventure with the Third Doctor called "The Daemons" had a similar problem. The Master used what in any other setting would be called black magic and according the episode's witch is black magic. Yet the Doctor insist it is only a form of "secret science" neither humans nor Time Lords understand.

So, for the Magic Versus Science or any other related tropes to apply does something have to be considered magic in the story itself or only as magic by the real world? Where is the line drawn?

edited 11th Sep '14 3:37:12 PM by seekquaze1

I will say the Doctor Who examples seem to be simply Doctor's personal opinion. He thinks there's no such thing as magic and so goes out of his way to call it science, but everyone else calls it magic (and it seems to actually be what is commonly defined as magic), so it's effectively magic for everyone in the setting who isn't the Doctor.

I figure something similar may figure into the Star Trek examples.

There's isn't always a line at all. Plenty enough works where magic is a science. And even ones where science is magic. Doctor Who is pretty firmly in the latter category, any wizard would be happy to call that screwdriver a magic wand.

Basically, there is a line if and where the writer wants to draw one.

Generally I would say anything that does not abide by laws observable by the scientific process would be magic. In reality the general assumption is everything can be observed and documented by science and if it currently cannot be than science simply has not caught up, an assumption based on thousands of years of 'magic' turning out to have an observable reason behind it.

In a fictional world if something is describe as 'magic' or as 'not science' I usually assume it it impervious to study in some manner, unless it is clearly meant be a 'sufficiently advanced' type of deal.

A lot of works are very... loose with the term 'science' and what it actually means, of course.

Arthur C. Clarke's three laws are your friend.

I've always interpreted magic as a different form of physics in whatever universe it is portrayed in, sometimes there's an explanation (e.g. midichlorians) and other times there isn't (soft sci-fi and fantasy).

Probably the best rule of thumb is what the magic/science is called in-universe. Because there's universes where the magic is explained so thoroughly in-universe that it is science is all but name (The Elderscrolls]). And then there's universes where the so called science is never explained (Star Wars).

Looking at things from a scientific mindset, it is logically impossible for anything not to be science. It just... makes no sense. Even if something works against the rules as we know them, or even if the rules seem to change based on context, those are still rules that can be experimented on and incorporated into our scientific worldview. In that sense, magic cannot exist, and if something's called "magic" in a fantasy setting, it's just a fancy word for a fictional science.

That said, sometimes writers like to make conflicts between science and magic for whatever reason. In these cases magic is whatever they say it is (although most likely they leave the conflict pretty vague since as I just said it doesn't make any sense). You just have to take the author's word for it. And if there is no Word of God on the issue of what magic is in the setting, then the trope simply doesn't apply. No need to squeeze the trope into works that don't use it.

edited 17th Sep '14 10:17:38 PM by Clarste

I'm inclined to agree with this. But it still leaves that fuzzy area where some characters say it's magic and others say it's science, which is what the thread was originally about.

Actually, not everything is a science. The word "science" refers specifically to the application of the scientific method (first you form a hypothesis, then you perform experiments to prove or disprove that hypothesis), and the body of knowledge gained as a result. But that's not the only way to learn things; for example, history is not a science, since historians acquire information by reading through historical records, not by performing experiments.

So it makes perfect sense for a story to say that magic isn't a science, so long as, in its setting, magic cannot be learned through experimentation. If all magical spells are passed down from teacher to student since time immemorial, or are discovered purely through instinct and intuition, or are something that certain people can just do, no learning required, then they're not a science. Magic can be a science if people can mix around magical words or potion ingredients or what-have-you to discover different magical effects, but not all magic systems work that way.

For the record Magic Versus Science is usually defined in fiction as something along the lines of "Science is a method of exploring and using the laws of reality to do something" contrasted with "magic is a method of violating the laws of reality and logic to your favor".

Essentially, science is mundane, working within the parameters of our universe while magic is essentially low-level Reality Warping~.

When reading over this, I think one problem that sometimes comes up is due to the variant definitions of magic. Once upon a time, magic was considered a science: alchemy, astrology, summoning rituals, etc. All of that was considered as real and legitimate a science as chemistry or physics. Heck, going by some Renaissance literature magic was the highest science and specifically called such. Magic was thought of a way to control the universe through repeatable means. It only became thought of as false due to real-world experimenting not proving any of it hence why magic is called false.

In a lot of fantasy and to a certain extent science fiction all of those are real. Writers call it magic because that is the name for it in the real world. One might reasonably say magic is the branch of science that deals with things like that especially functional magic. Some writers do draw differences. Science is supposed to work for anyone by following constant physical laws of the universe...sometimes specified as this universe. Magic will often violate one or more of those making is not strictly science in the real world understanding of it. Yeah, you can always say it is an unexplained science or expand/create definitions, but that runs into a whole other set of problems.

In short, sometimes magic and science can both be real and be the same thing.

History can be considered a science: reading records is simply another, less reliable, means of collecting data, which is another side of experimentation. Historians certainly form hypotheses and such. Frankly, based on your narrow definition, astronomy and evolutionary biology aren't sciences either, since we can't perform experiments on stars or create control animals who weren't subject to evolutionary pressures. Sometimes you just have to take what the world gives you and work with that.

Something being intuitive doesn't mean it's not a science either. Plenty of people just "get" math in a way that others don't, but that doesn't mean we call math unscientific. Even if you say math isn't technically a field of science (which is reasonable, it's more like abstract logic), it's certainly deeply intertwined with a scientific worldview. I can't think of any science that would make sense if we didn't assume the truth of math.

That said, I think magic would be closer to biology or astronomy than math. You just observe stuff happening in the world. Whether you can learn to cast spells by doing this is completely irrelevant to whether it's a science or not. I can't cast spells, but I can't compress my mass and undergo nuclear fusion either. Nor can I change the color or my skin to blend in with my environment. Freaking magic octopuses.

edited 21st Sep '14 8:49:12 PM by Clarste

If something exists, and it's not completely random, then it can be studied, and that field of study could be called a science. However, while you can have a scientific study of magic, that's not the same thing as magic itself being a science.

As I said before, "science" refers both to the scientific method and to the body of knowledge gained through that method. For magic to be a science, it would have to be something people either created, discovered, or refined through scientific inquiry. If magic is something that people are just born with and instinctively know how to use, or if it's a body of knowledge that's been passed down through the ages without knowing where it actually came, then it's no more a science than a fish's ability to swim, or mouse's ability to squeak, or a person's ability to make a fist.

edited 24th Sep '14 11:34:26 PM by RavenWilder

Okay, sure, you're making the distinction between stars and astronomy, and that makes sense except it has nothing to do with this topic. The topic is about magic as some kind of anti-science that is against science in some way, which is about as logical as mouse sqeaks being anti-science. We don't have a "Science versus Mouse Squeaks" trope, and my entire point was simply that this trope makes about as much sense as that.

More to the linguistic nit-picky point, I only mentioned that magic would be part of a "scientific worldview", not necessarily that it was a separate field of study. I did use the word "science" somewhat casually, but I would hope context made it completely clear what I was talking about. And yes, the fact that mice squeak is part of a scientific worldview.

You're saying that gravity isn't physics, and while it's true that gravity would work whether or not we had a theory of it, saying "gravity isn't a science" is more confusing than enlightening.

Also I object to the preconception that magic is necessarily something we "use". Magic is presumably something that would exist in the setting, regardless of whether or not anyone "uses" it. The use of magic would simply be analogous to technology, which definitely can be used by people who don't understand it. And in the real world technology was invented millennia before the scientific method. Does saying that technology is anti-science make any sense to you? Engineering isn't a science, medicine isn't a science, animal husbandry isn't a science...

The word "science" was also in use prior to the invention of he scientific method. Science isn't a science.

edited 25th Sep '14 9:19:17 AM by Clarste

First off, the scientific method has been around for as long as people have tried to figure out how things work; it just took a while before someone named and codified it.

Second, I think we need to make a distinction between science as a means of learning for learning's sake, and science as a means of accomplishing goals. Certainly, science can be used to learn about magic, to catalog what it can and cannot do, how much of it there is, who can use it, and so forth. From a purely academic standpoint, there's no reason magic can't be part of the "scientific worldview".

However, usually when people talk about science, it's with the expectation that we'll be able to use the knowledge we gain through scientific inquiry to accomplish something. We learn about physics so we can build machines; we learn about human anatomy so we can perform medicine; we learn about chemistry so we can control chemical reactions. But, in some settings, that won't work with magic: we can examine, analyze, and take apart all the magic mirrors in the world, but it won't help us build one of our own.

That really, really doesn't work well as a definition. Any work that veers into Magitek, Fantastic Science, Sufficiently Analyzed Magic, Utility Magic, or Science Fantasy is most definitely going to be studying "magic" like a science, understanding how it works, and be using it to make things or even improve on them. Magic in those types of works is treated like real-world physics in-universe; it's just that since to the readers it's not physics, it's not called that.

IE: In The Elderscrolls, magic is everywhere. Yet it's "scientificly" possible to prove the gods/greater powers exist and magic is used for everything from casting spells, to enchanting objects to studying the world. We know why magic works, what it's caused by and can bend it to our will to enchant objects with the properties we want to give them. Heck, there's records of magicians making spaceships that run via magic to get to the God's plane(t)s while at the same time it's possible to make a magic portal to the same plane(t)s. In that universe the magic is the physics.

And yes, I know that's an extreme example, but the question there isn't is it Magic Versus Science, instead there's no difference between the magic and the science to begin with.

Which is why I think you have to go by what the work says is magic and science. Depending on the work, they could very well be flipped.

edited 26th Sep '14 8:51:22 AM by ObsidianFire

I would say the "science" in Magic Versus Science more often refers to modern/futuristic technology rather than to the scientific method.

I've always understood the trope to really be Magic Versus Technology as that's almost always how it's portrayed. IE: its relevantly common for objects/beings with lots of magic to negatively affect modern technology and cause it not to work right.

Edit: Did not know Magic Versus Technology was a redirect to Magic Versus Science!

edited 26th Sep '14 9:17:29 AM by ObsidianFire