Real magic is hard and also unsatisfying

[This post originally appeared on Cohost.]

I‘ve been around long enough to notice that stories involving magic seem to be more popular now than they used to be, and I’ve often wondered why that might be. I was reminded of that once again while reading one of the most delightful and charming stories about magic, Kamome Shirahama’s manga series Witch Hat Atelier. In the manga the young girl Coco is initiated into the world of witches—a world she thought had been closed to her from birth, but which she discovers is open to anyone who can learn to draw the intricate designs by which spells are cast.

The world of Witch Hat Atelier is of course fictional, and its magic likewise. But here in the real world we can also perform magic by making drawings, like so-called Feynman diagrams (see above), and manipulating symbols in other ways. These manipulations have a deep connection to physical reality, and enable us to divine the secrets of the universe and shape matter and energy to our will. They are “magic that actually works.”

So why don’t people pay more attention to real magic than fake magic? Of course, fake magic is embedded in stories that are more entertaining than real life. But beyond that, I think there are two key reasons:

First, real magic is hard. Not as hard as people think—it’s possible to grasp the basics of something like quantum computing or even quantum mechanics with no more mathematics than what is taught in high school (algebra, complex numbers, and matrix multiplication). But it is indeed true that applying that knowledge to real physical systems calls for much more knowledge and expertise.

More important, I think, is that though our diagrams and calculations may capture the universe precisely, in and of themselves they are powerless to change it. To do that requires advanced engineering and precision manufacturing, using techniques refined over multiple generations by thousands of people. No one person can totally comprehend everything that goes in making, say, a modern smartphone; even mundane products like LED light bulbs and your cat’s laser pointer are incredibly sophisticated at their core. Unable to understand how these devices work and what goes into making them, we simply take them for granted.

Once upon a time technology was simpler to understand. I think one of the attractions of the steampunk genre is that it harks back to the last time technology was truly legible, all puffing steam engines and rotating gears. Even electric motors and generators are not incomprehensible, although they mark the transition from the intuitive physics of Michael Faraday (famed for giving lectures and demonstrations to enthusiastic crowds of Londoners) to the mathematical physics of James Clerk Maxwell and his equations of electromagnetism.

Maxwell published his key papers in the 1860s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, 1870 is when the economist Brad DeLong sees everything changing: “In 1870 industrial research labs, modern corporations, globalization, and the market economy . . . proved keys to the lock that had kept humanity in its desperately poor iron cage . . . . And previously unimaginable economic growth revolutionized human life over and over, generation by generation.”

Those developments brought advanced technology to millions and ultimately billions, but they also killed its magic, as the heroic lone inventor in their workshop (another steampunk staple) gave way to the corporate R&D department and globalized supply chains. So we seek the magic we crave in novels, comics, and films and TV—the latter themselves benefiting from the use of computer graphics to create increasingly fantastical special effects.

Now we can be (fake) magicians ourselves, thanks to software and its ability to create virtual worlds in which our actions can be translated instantly into effects, whether that be digging a hole in Minecraft or casting an elaborate spell in a fantasy MMO. I could be snobbish and dismiss all this as inauthentic wish fulfillment (for example, comparing “survival mode” in Minecraft to a true survival experience in a wilderness), but I think that’s a fundamental mistake: we have always created new environments for us to live in, and (for example) an urban street with quaint shops and comfy apartments is just as much an artificial creation as the latest AAA title. There is no virtue in elevating the former over the latter.

And just as science drives technology, so technology drives science in a feedback loop, for example from the early microscopes that discovered bacteria to the scanning tunneling microscopes that can visualize and manipulate individual atoms. It’s possible that software worlds and the tools used to create them will in turn enable new ways to do science and engineering, so that in the future the diagrams drawn by a real-life Coco can create real-life magic.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-11-19 20:31

Nice thoughts! Theres a lot of interesting things to talk about here, but one aspect that comes to mind is the way that this relates to the role of agency in fiction.

For example, why are medieval fantasy themes popular? I suspect that part of this is because they are useful for both the writer and the reader in terms of providing a setting that allows for more flexible agency.

If you compare a medieval fantasy setting to a realistic modern setting, I think you’ll find differences such as:

• The state is less powerful(except at the author’s whims) and has less ability to distribute its power effectively. This means several things—such as that the interactions between friends and foes is less cordoned off, and the onus of fixing a problem can be relocated more to individuals.

• Warfare can conceivably make individual skill/effort a lot more relevant, especially when you introduce magic and unrealistic strength etc, which gives characters more agency and room for expression of their efforts

• There is more nature to act against and with- even without the fantasy element, nature is wild and untamed, back to when it was more of a threat to humans.

• There’s more unknowns, because of less state/more nature/less information/less ability to completely overwhelm individuals with modern structures and technologies, even prior to magic.

And there’s probably more that I’m just not remembering from the last time I thought about this, haha.

Because of these, the writer has more avenues to create and unfold conflicts dynamically to create drama, back and forth, themes, gravitas, specific ways things play out, etc without having to fight constantly to create plausibility. I guess the “Wild West” setting has a lot of similarities to it, now that I think about it.

Fictional magic, similarly, is an individual-scale avenue for potential/unknowns/agency that the writers can get more freedom with and readers can be connected to particular things they enjoy seeing expressed(again, agency of individuals).

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-11-20 00:54

Thank you for the comment! I think you are correct about historical/fantasy settings providing more agency to the characters. I’m guessing that a part of this is also that rule was/is personalized, being centered in the persons of the monarch and their courtiers/vassals/etc., as opposed to being exercised via a more impersonal bureaucracy.

squircular reasoning (@spiders) - 2023-07-24 23:19

i think an aspect of “real magic”, as you put (sub)atomic sciences, that makes it disinteresting to a large number of people (including myself) is how divorced from everyday sensory reality it is.

i say this as somepony who is intensely interested in earth sciences; geology, botany, paleontology, zoology, even microbiology and some aspects of astronomy, to a certain degree, are all fairly accessible, and influence ones life in very visible ways. i may not be able to see tectonic plates moving but i can feel earthquakes, and i can see rock structures that are only possible because of uplift. i don’t have a microscope, but if i wanted one, i could get one, and suddenly the cellular structures of the organisms around me would be open to me

even molecular biology, to a certain degree, is somewhat accessible. like, PCR is revolutionary not just because it is a powerful tool for multiplying and sequencing dna but also because it is such a wildly simple technique that you can literally do it over a fucking campfire, and someone has. the barrier to entry for dna sequencing as an amateur biologist is mostly the cost of the chemical components—you don’t need a college degree to understand and carry out the process.

quantum physics, and to a strong degree also much of astrophysics, by contrast, is not something that can readily be understood if you didn’t specialize in it. people can sell you analogies in pop sci books but my trust of such books has been basically irrevocably damaged after i’ve been burned too many times finding out that i’ve been fed a false explanation of how something worked and that the true explanation is just way over my head completely incomprehensible. and if i did manage to understand it, it would feel about as real to me as fictional magic.

i feel like i couldn’t go applying the things i learned in any real way, not the way that knowing about the genetic history of plant families makes you understand what your senses are experiencing better.

the closest i ever came to feeling like i got that kind of everyday application of quantum mechanics to my life was reading QED by richard feynman and him adding up arrows to explain why light bent on a hot road. which is pretty interesting, if a bit abstract! (and there’s that thing again, the real magic doesn’t actually feel particularly real or connected to reality) but meanwhile, i have never actually been able to “understand” quantum computing. ppl make videos trying to explain it and i’ve watched many of them, i’ve tried to even write qasm, but the conclusion i came to is that you can’t actually understand it unless you go into heavy maths and write code, and you can’t write code that actually does anything discernable on a quantum computer unless you have a lot of money reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:00

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You’re right about quantum phenomena being hard to see and visualize, though people do try: here’s an article about seeing single photons with the naked eye, and another one about replicating the famous double-slit experiment with a cheap laser pointer. You’re also right about Feynmann’s QED: it’s an interesting and fun book.

rose (@rosieposie) - 2023-07-25 03:05

for me the closest thing to ’fictional magic’ is ’cooking’. you follow a recipe passed down by the sages of old, you improvise a little every once in a while to make it better, and voila, you turned things that people don’t like so much into a magical substance that enamors everyone at the party and has them begging for you to do that trick again next month. and you can just do it in real life any time you want to.

and really if you think about it, the only difference between chemistry and cooking is that cooking is that cooking is limited (mostly) to human-safe substances. and has significantly less extreme effects, like your product probably won’t kill most people. also something something potion brewing. reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:01

Thanks for commenting! You’re right, cooking can be pretty magic at times, especially in the hands of a master chef.

ArBe (@arbe) - 2023-07-25 05:46

I’ve thought about these comparisons(often from slightly different angles, but definitely in the same vein, and often also inspired by fiction like WHA) many times, especially the frustrating disparity between [ the ability to understand the fascinating systems underlying everything ] and [ the ridiculously disproportional amount of time and effort required to actually utilise that knowledge practically, especially as an individual ].

This post really nicely expands on those thoughts in ways I never would’ve thought of, and introduces some entirely new threads of thought that feel really enjoyable to explore, like the point about artificial environments. Great post!

brackets added for readability, maybe I wouldn’t need this crutch if my punctuation were better. Sorry

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:02

Thanks for your comment! I’m glad you found the post interesting.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-07-25 12:00

this feels like a very wise and true analysis

i’ll add that programming is one field where you can still be a rag-tag do-it-yourself-magician. the stuff you produce will not have the production value and polish of a megacorporation, but it still just might be functional

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 12:53

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I apologize for being so late to follow-up. Yes, you’re absolutely right, software is the one place a sole creator can make a difference, especially given all the (mostly) free tools at their disposal nowadays.