# Technology vs Magic



## Queshire (Mar 18, 2012)

So, for my story I'm having trouble dividing the line between sufficently advanced technology from magic, or really, I'm wondering whether I want to divide them at all.

I know I want some overlap between tech and magic, but just where should the line between one and another be drawn? What should differenciate magic from super science? SHOULD there be a difference?


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## BeigePalladin (Mar 18, 2012)

Queshire said:


> So, for my story I'm having trouble dividing the line between sufficently advanced technology from magic, or really, I'm wondering whether I want to divide them at all.
> 
> I know I want some overlap between tech and magic, but just where should the line between one and another be drawn? What should differenciate magic from super science? SHOULD there be a difference?



It could be a little awkward to extrapolate without knowing about your magic system here - namely avaliability and effects of the magic system, and how it's triggered.

It depends on the avliability and effect of the magic of your world in general I'd say. As a rule of thumb, if both can produce the same results, the more bountiful/economic one would probably be used for the more - pardon the expresion - mundane, daily tasks (for example, boiling water or cooking food), whilst the rarer one would be used for more uncommon tasks.

If both can produce the same results with the same avaliability, then it'd make the most sense for them to be used equally; like picking your flavour of icecream, or as a hybrid machine (for example, a kettle that magics up the water, then technologically boils it*). Other forms of hybridizations could be using magic as the power supply/heavy lifter, whislt giving the technology the precision based control. or something like that.

either way, If you do plan to break fantasy tradition and incorporate magic as more than just a bunch of superpowered old men locking in a tower refusing to join society (which, as this post probably makes clear, is a pet peeve of mine), then I can eaisly see a world where both are used together in society.

hope this helped, even if it's only a little  I'd recomend going for an even-leveled version if you want some overlap, because it's the best way to shwo such without one accidentally overarching t'other due to circumstances. 

and remeberer, any sufficiently powerful magic is as indistinguishable from technology, as advanced tech is from magic.


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## Anders Ã„mting (Mar 18, 2012)

Queshire said:


> So, for my story I'm having trouble dividing the line between sufficently advanced technology from magic, or really, I'm wondering whether I want to divide them at all.
> 
> I know I want some overlap between tech and magic, but just where should the line between one and another be drawn? What should differenciate magic from super science? SHOULD there be a difference?



Look, it's not that difficult:

_Science_ is something that requires advanced technology to accomplish stuff. 

_Magic_ is something a guy in a bathrobe can pull off by waving a stick around.

I don't care what Arthur C Clarke said: Just because the two are indistinguishable at a certain point doesn't mean they are the same thing.


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## Queshire (Mar 18, 2012)

Anders... that is absolutely not helpful at all...


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## BeigePalladin (Mar 18, 2012)

Anders Ã„mting said:


> Look, it's not that difficult:
> 
> _Science_ is something that requires advanced technology to accomplish stuff.
> 
> ...



ummm, calm down. 

it is perfectly possible to have some overlap as there's no gaurantee he's uisng "standard magic system A" with "Standard technological package B". It's also perfectly possible (and considering the human mindset, increadably plausable to the extent it becomes fridge logic it's often not) that if we did possess magic it would have been industrialized to work alongside technology.

especially since this wasn't a thread on which is better and/or if they're the same, but on how both could work together in a setting. Which raving about fantasy cliche's does not help in the slightest


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## Queshire (Mar 18, 2012)

Depending on your interpretation of magic, we might already have magic. We've simply have explained how it works with science. I mean, just look around, we trap lightning to provide light, we have giant metal things that manage to fly, we've uncovered the code of life, hell, we've flown to the bloody moon!

EDIT: Huh, I think I just answered my own question, the difference between science and magic is that we know how science works. Though that makes me wonder about post-singularity societies where artificial intelligences have come up with concepts that human minds simply are not wired to grasp...


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## Anders Ã„mting (Mar 18, 2012)

Queshire said:


> Anders... that is absolutely not helpful at all...



Well, sorry. What I mean is that science is something you _make_; something you invent via observation, theory and research. Magic is more of a naturally occuring phenomenon that can be exploited for various applications if you just figure out how. 

Of course you can _apply_ science to magic, going: "If I wave a stick made out of this particular wood, calling down lightning from the sky becomes easier. I wonder why that is?" But it's not something you have to _invent_. It's already there to begin with. Technology works the other way around: Since nature stubbornly refuses to let you hurl lightning at your enemies, so you build a machine that does it for you. 

See, it's not a matter of what results you achieve, it's a matter of where the results came from.


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## Anders Ã„mting (Mar 18, 2012)

Queshire said:


> Huh, I think I just answered my own question, the difference between science and magic is that we know how science works.



Well, not really. Even if I don't know how a piece of technology works, it's still technology. Whoever made it certianly knows how it works.

Like, if space aliens shows up tomorrow and turns out to have technology that is completely beyond our understanding, we won't go all: "Magic!" And if we did, we would still be wrong.


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## Steerpike (Mar 19, 2012)

It seems to me that science operates on know laws and principles of the universe. Magic, on the other hand, defies those laws. Advanced science may look like magic to a more primitive people, but it's still not magic.


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## Queshire (Mar 19, 2012)

yeah, I also considered that, having science being essentially minmaxing, abusing the rules for your own advantage while magic was specifically cheating the universe and was as risky as you'd think that'd be, but I dunno...


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## Phin Scardaw (Mar 19, 2012)

one of the things to think about along these lines is the energy source. to make our technology work, we have to derive vast amounts of energy from natural sources: hydro-electric dams, nuclear power stations, burning coal. 

the trickiest thing about writing about magic is that the power source is never clear, and so one is never really sure how much a magician can accomplish. the best limitation seems to be that the magician gets exhausted with the spell-casting. 

what if the power source for both was the same? for example: what if the wizards and magicians needed to wear tech-helms that had be charged with battery power, maybe even activated with software, in order to enhance a man's mental abilities and empower them with the ability to cast spells? or what if there was technology but the machines were only kept running by the spells cast by magicians?

in the end, both magic arts and technology are just about manipulating energy. the more that a society brings both into advanced development, the more integrated they'd become, to the point that they'd be bound together and indistinguishable. 

in my novel, Two Days' Son (still in production) I created a future society in which people could cast spells just by running extremely advanced programs through computer systems that could manipulate energy. i think that merging the two has a lot of potential for fun and creativity.


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## Benjamin Clayborne (Mar 19, 2012)

Anders Ã„mting said:


> Look, it's not that difficult:
> 
> _Science_ is something that requires advanced technology to accomplish stuff.
> 
> ...



They _are_ the same thing, at the most fundamental level.

Even if you consider magic something strange that can be triggered by waving a stick around, it still has a system: it obeys laws, it is predictable, and you could use math to describe it.

However, magic _as used in fiction_ typically is never explained, which makes it different for purposes of storytelling. But any magic system, if it was subjected to the rigors of modern scientific scrutiny, would become thoroughly explained and understood in short order. It would no longer be "magic;" instead it would just become a branch of science, and that is what Clarke meant.


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## Sheilawisz (Mar 19, 2012)

From my point of view, the difference between Technology and Magic and how they could perhaps work together depends entirely on the Magic System that you have in your stories: Some Fantasy worlds have "natural" magic that is almost scientifical, while in other stories (like Harry Potter) Magic causes malfunctions in Technology devices =)

The difference between both powers in my stories is like this: Technology is what can be accomplished by natural means, following the laws of the universe... in the other hand, Magic is some dark thing of unimaginable power that has no relation at all with nature or the laws of physics: Mages do the stuff that they do because they break all those laws, they break everything natural and they shatter reality.

I like having technology in my worlds anyway, but it's a different style of technology because it depends on different resources =)


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## Melissa G. McPhail (Mar 26, 2012)

I agree with many of the ideas above.  I also think it depends on how much machinery you have in your world.  

Magic can be codified into a technology, where the definition in use is "the methods, theory and practices governing application."  So you can have a very developed magical technology that involves laws and axioms of application.

Technology is commonly associated with industrial or engineering arts, however, which is where my question of machinery comes in.  Pat Rothfuss does a lot of combining technology with magic in his Kingkiller series, where some machinery is made functional by the use of the magic system in his world. 

You could really have any association of these two ideas - a symbiosis of magic and machinery, a separation or conflict between the two, or very little of one and much of the other.  I guess it depends on where you want to go with your story to see how these should fit together, but it would seem that any truly advanced society would either have no magic (because everything has been explained in science and/or lost to the demands of a scientifically-oriented society, as is the actual case with the lost practices of the eastern mystics) or lots of magic, because it's never been lost to the society and has been highly developed and incorporated into the culture.

Good luck!


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## Penpilot (Mar 26, 2012)

A lot of what I was going to say has already been said above. I will add one thing. Have you ever heard of the RPG Shadowrun? It's a cyberpunk-ish RPG world that combines hi-tech with magic. Maybe you can check it out and "borrow" some ideas from them.


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