A couple of weeks ago I was perusing my book shelves and ran across a book. I had picked it up at a local Little Free Library a couple of years earlier and enjoyed reading it. It looked like it would be a pleasant reread, so I did. And it was every bit as enjoyable a read the second time around as it had been the first time. The name of the book was The Incomplete Enchanter. And its title suggested the subject of this post to me. I'll eventually get back to the book, but in the mean time . . .
I remember my first encounter with Science Fiction very clearly. One year when I was a kid I found two books waiting for me under the Christmas Tree. Both were designed for young readers. One was a Hardy Boys book. It concerned itself with the adventures of two young brothers. They were the sons of a Private Detective and, not surprisingly, took up detecting.
The Hardy Boys books were very popular among the younger set and I liked them. They covered the male part of the target demographic. A similar series, the Nancy Drew books, covered the female part. Even though they were for girls, I read several Nancy Drew books and liked them.
But the book that most strongly attracted and held my interest was the Tom Swift book. Technically, it was a Tom Swift Jr. book. Why Jr? Because he was the son of Tom Swift Sr. And Sr had been the subject of a previous generation of very popular books aimed at young readers. The first Sr book had come out in 1910. The first Jr book, which was designed to replicate the popularity of the original series, came out in 1954. Both generations of books (as well as the Hardy Boys books, Nancy Drew books, and others) were the brainchild of something called the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
The Sr series was not Edward Stratemeyer's first bite at the apple. But it was one of his more popular ones. His daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, was what we would now recognize as the book equivalent of a show runner. She came up with the idea for the Jr books and helmed all of the later production of the syndicate.
As the showrunner for the Jr books, she developed and maintained the "bible" on the characters and other continuing elements. In many cases, she also produced a plot outline. The process of actually writing each book was then turned over to a contract writer. The series bible provided an efficient method for the various contract writers to get up to speed. They could then maintain the requisite level of plot and character continuity and maintain a consistent style from book to book.
The Jr books, starting with Tom Swift and his Flying Lab, were a combination of science and action. Much of the science was grounded in reality, but fantasy elements were added to spice up the action and the WOW factor. I was seven in 1954, so I don't think I read it when it first came out. But I am pretty sure I read it before 1957. That's the year the Russians put Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, into orbit.
This first book hooked me and I continued to follow the series for many years. I remember eventually becoming disenchanted. After the first few books the WOW factor started diminishing a little more with each subsequent book. And the books all started blurring together. So I dropped the series altogether at about volume 15 (Tom Swift and his Spectromarine Selector, 1960). Whatever the shortcomings of the series, it did successfully hook me on Science Fiction.
I branched out and started reading books by pre-Star-Trek (the TV series first aired in 1966) authors like Asimov and Heinlein. These were much more substantial and, therefore, much more satisfying to my now more mature mind. Heinlein introduced me to the concept of "Future History". The fly leaves of his books had an outline covering thousands of years of future history. His various books were slotted into key turning points identified in the flyleaf outline.
Heinlein also introduced me to an extremely subversive idea, the idea that a religion can be invented. A number of his books took us behind the scenes as an individual, or small group, literally invented a religion. His most well known example of this is Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). It is the retelling of Christ story, just transported to a different time and place. In Stranger Christ is played by a secular and otherwise normal person. He doesn't believe in religion or messiahs.
But he grew up on Mars where he learned how to perform several apparently superhuman feats from the Martians. I was a practicing Catholic at the time I first read the book. But, in spite of the fact that the Bible is supposed to be revealed truth while Stranger never pretended to be anything other than out and out fiction, the events described in Stranger seems far more plausible, sensible, and coherent than those laid out in the Bible. Religion and I parted ways permanently shortly thereafter.
Asimov is, of course, the Robot guy. His "Three Laws of Robotics" has migrated into our common cultural heritage. His Robot stories started out as short stories published in the "pulps", various Science Fiction magazines published on pulp paper. Later, they were collected into anthologies. And Asimov eventually wrote several full-length novels that were set in the world he had originally created as background for his short stories.
And Asimov famously followed in Heinlein's Future History footsteps with his Foundation series. Originally a set of three books (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation), Asimov eventually emulated Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, and tacked several full-length novels onto the end of the original trilogy. They covered the future evolution of the Foundation universe. These add-ons weren't Asimov's best work. But they were better than some of the follow-on volumes Herbert penned.
But this is all background, and probably way more background than I really needed to provide. So, let's get back to the main point, at least for the moment. The Incomplete Enchanter was written by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, two well respected authors from that same pre-Star-Trek era that included Heinlein and Asimov. It was first published in installments in the 1940-41 time frame. The book version that I read and reread was first published in 1941. My copy was a reprint published in 1950.
In this period there was, at least among readers, a sharp distinction between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Science Fiction tried to stay relatively close to established Scientific fact. Fantasy operated under no such restriction. To steal the famous line from Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, "Rules? There are no rules," when it came to Fantasy.
Fantasy authors were allowed to invent anything they wanted to. Of course, they had to come up with a compelling story and interesting characters. But that's just the first law of writing a successful book. But in spite of protestations to the contrary, Science Fiction has always incorporated fantastical elements.
In reality, the difference between the two genres was mostly in their focus. There never was a hard and fast boundary between them. For instance, the Lensman series, penned by E. E. "Doc" Smith (he had a PhD in food chemistry), was universally considered to be mainstream Science Fiction.
However, the series completely ignored the Relativity discoveries of Einstein and posited the existence of purely mental forces that could shred what little remained of the various Scientific laws the books purportedly paid homage to. A neutral reading of the books would tag them as Fantasy rather than Science Fiction. But they were published as Science Fiction and embraced by fans of Science Fiction, so they became categorized as Science Fiction.
Heinlein also posited the existence of psychic powers in several of his books. In one he allowed twins to psychically communicate over vast distances instantaneously. Asimov's "Positronic brain", the intelligence guiding his essentially human robots, had nothing to do with the positron, an actual subatomic particle. The name just sounded cool, and Scientific.
The same thing was true of the inventors of Superman. They turned the element Krypton, a real thing and one of the Noble Gasses, into Kryptonite, a solid and a made-up thing. Why? Because Kryptonite sounds cool and Scientific.
And almost all Science Fiction of this period owes a great debt to Jules Verne. He posited a scientific advance: a powerful submarine, a cannon that could shoot a projectile to the moon, various flying machines that operated along the lines of a Zeppelin, and more. He then built up an exciting tale of romance and adventure around it. But if Verne, or any of the authors that followed in his footsteps, got into a bind, they just fantasized whatever then needed to give their hero an out.
So, what has any of this got to do with Science? It turns out that Scientists operate in a manner that is more similar to Fantasy and Science Fiction authors than is generally understood. Both groups spend a lot of their time trying to come up with something that violates the laws of nature as they are currently understood.
From there a Science Fiction author has to turn that something into a story people will want to read. Scientists have a different and far more difficult job to do. They have to come up with evidence that shows that their new something results in an improvement in the Scientific understanding of how the universe works. Often this requires Scientists to have an imagination that is far wilder than that of a Fantasy or Science Fiction author.
For context, let me state the fundamental law of science:
Whatever works is right.
There is a corollary:
Whatever doesn't work is wrong.
And then there is he fundamental Scientific conjecture:
Nature operates according to rules and at least some of them are discoverable.
Scientists and Science popularizers rarely, if ever, say any of this. When asked, their response is usually some variant of "it's so obvious it doesn't need to be said." But I think it needs to be said. Science advances on two fronts. There is the obvious way, the one that everyone focuses on. Science is the accumulation of facts, data, theories, etc. that contribute to the broad advancement of knowledge.
That is what most of the discussion that surrounds Science focuses on. This theory is right, or wrong. This piece of data is true, or false. And so on. But this diverts attention from the second front, what I will call the "process" front. Science as a process is usually dated from the publication of The New Organon by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620. This was the first serious effort in western culture to get a handle on what "whatever works" means.
Previously, whatever works was often determined by authority. Someone, Aristotle for instance, was held up as an authority. From there it was a short step to "whatever he says, goes". Bacon in The New Organon said "nope, that's wrong". He emphasized the overriding importance of what was known, i.e. the data. If the data contradicted the authority, the thinking of authority was to be discarded and replaced by whatever worked better.
The next step was to use the data as the basis of a theory. The validity of the theory was to be judged solely on how well it accounted for the data, all of it. That led to the concept of doing directed experiments to probe a theory for possible flaws or improvements. If that sounds familiar, it's because this latter behavior is frequently put forward as the way that Science operates. And it sometimes actually does operate that way.
But it also operates in a lot of other ways. But the common organizational principle is that of finding ways to determine whether or not something, usually a theory, works or not. The "process" advances that Science has made since Bacon's time all revolve around finding out that this technique has a flaw that some other technique doesn't have. Or that a technique, which was previously thought to be unreliable, can be made reliable if the certain additions or changes are made.
Returning to the subject at hand, what has any of this to do with magic? Magic falls into the broad category of things that are considered unscientific. Here there be Science. But on the other side of this boundary be all kinds of things that are beyond the ken of Science. That is a clear statement of what's usually going on when people talk about the limits of Science.
Religion, for instance, is generally said to be beyond the reach of Science by many of its adherents. Traditional and complementary medicine is another example. The psychic powers posited by Smith and Heinlein in fictional settings are assumed by many to be real, and beyond the reach of Science, by many believers in such things.
But these people are ignoring the "whatever works is right" principle that is fundamental to Science. Religious believers believe that their particular religion (and often many others) is "right". Traditional and Complementary medicine believers are believers because they think traditional and complementary medicine works. The same is true for those who believe in various and sundry psychic powers.
But, if it's a question of whether or not something works, then it is a question that Science can tackle. In fact, that's what Science was designed to tackle. It's what Science does. And the real problem is that Science has tackled all of the topics I have listed above, and many others, and found them wanting.
For hundreds of years most Scientists were also Christians. They were very familiar with the "Genesis" story in the Bible. Science has spent a lot of time investigating how our world came into existence. And what they have found differs substantially from Genesis. In short, Genesis doesn't work. And, therefore, it is wrong.
And many of these Christian Scientists were true believers. They weren't professing to adhere to Christian beliefs in order to get along. Instead, for the most part, they were true believers. And as true believers in both, they were not about to use one belief system to sabotage the other belief system. Newton was one such Scientist.
At the end of Optics, his masterful study of light and its characteristics, he devotes a whole section to the idea that there is Scientific truth. But there is also "revealed" truth, truths that the Bible and his religious beliefs tell him. Beyond that, he believed that there is a third and greater truth that was a combination of the two. Each complimented rather than contradicted the other.
And the combination of the two would yield a truth that was greater than a simple sum. That is what he sincerely believed throughout his entire live. We know this because he wrote extensively about it. And Newton was not unusual. You can find Scientists who are devout Christians, or devout adherents of other faiths, all over the place.
They generally follow the Newtonian idea that the combination is greater than the sum of its pieces and that the two modalities compliment each other rather than contradicting each other.
They are a minority. But they exist. And the reason they are a minority is that most scientists look at the evidence and decide that there is overwhelming evidence that religion is wrong.
For a Scientist, the important thing is that the evidence decides. So, what if evidence emerged that magic works? Would that be a problem for scientists? No! The first thing to understand is what the word "natural" means in the context of the conflict between Science and non-Science.
Something is natural if it aligns with our expectations based on our everyday experience. If you apply this definition to what people who throw the word around are saying then what they mean will become much clearer. People find much of modern Science unnatural because many modern Scientific Theories don't align with our everyday experience.
You can't see germs or viruses without that infernal Scientific device, the microscope. Bad air often smalls bad, so it seems like a much more reasonable explanation for how people get sick. If we drink an elixir that contains alcohol or narcotics we immediately feel better. It makes sense that Chinese medicine should work. After all, people have been relying on it for a very long time.
If plants like Ginseng didn't work then why have people been swearing by them for so long? All this business about RNA and attenuated viruses sounds like nonsense. Finally, would a famous person that I like lead me astray? And so it goes.
People prefer natural explanations to unnatural ones. But none of this natural business has anything to do with whether or not something can be subject to a rigorous Scientific treatment. And more importantly, whether it works.
Science has validated many natural remedies. Aspirin is but one example. Unfortunately, lots of other natural remedies have been tested and found wanting. The only to tell which category a specific natural remedy falls into is to subject it to Scientific testing.
So, is magic like natural remedies? Can various kinds of magic be the subjected of rigorous Scientific study? They can if they purport to follow specific rules, even if we don't know what those rules are. Interestingly enough, magic systems in modern Fantasy often follow specific rules. One of the most well known proponents of this approach is Brandon Sanderson.
He was always interested in magic systems. At some point he became a fan of rules based magic systems. His books became wildly popular. That made other authors sit up and take notice. And he teaches writing. Not surprisingly, his acolytes, several of whom have become popular in their own right, are sold on his approach. And its a good one.
Good fiction is drama. And drama depends on conflict. Imagine a protagonist who is a magician. And imagine there is no limit to the magical feats he is capable of. Then where's the drama? Whatever the bad guy does, our hero can just pull some new, more powerful magic out of thin air and defeat him.
In drama we talk about stakes. What is the hero putting at risk in his efforts to defeat the villain? If the answer is nothing, then the stakes are low. And low stakes translates into little or no drama. And a lack of drama translates into little reader interest. And that translates into low sales. And that results in the author being forced to find a new line of work.
Sanderson's approach returned drama to Fantasy. And that has caused Fantasy as a genre to spike in popularity. And Sanderson's approach has always been there lurking in the shadows. Imagine a pre-Sanders Fantasy work. Often it featured a magician consulting some old and obscure tome. Aha! There were rules. It's just that we the reader (and likely also the author) didn't know what the rules were. But it was always true that if you followed the recipe in the book correctly the magic worked. In short, there were rules.
Now, Scientists would have an easier time if they had access to the book. They could analyze the various spells and try to determine the underlying rules that governed their effectiveness. Lacking access to the book then long and careful observation of the magician at work, even if they were not allowed to observe spells being concocted, would be illuminating.
And it is worth noting that in all of the Science Fiction and Fantasy works I have read I have never seen any fantastical element that was anywhere near as weird as what modern Science tells us is true. Consider the solar system. It has been studied since antiquity.
After hundreds of years of study the Ptolemaic system was developed in about 150 AD. It posited that the Earth was the center of the universe. That seemed reasonable to anyone who has spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky. Ptolemy posited that the Earth was surrounded by clear spheres which held up the Sun, the Moon, and various planets. This was a bit far fetched, but no one came up with a more sensible idea.
The model might have been unconvincing except for one thing. It was accompanied by a mathematical model that predicted the locations of the heavenly bodies well into the future. The predictions were reasonably accurate. Importantly, there was no competing model that could deliver accurate predictions. Over the years, various refinements (cycles and epicycles) were added. These increased accuracy while preserving the essential aspects of the model.
A part of the model was the idea that there were one set of rules that governed activity on the surface of the earth and another set that governed the heavens. Down to Earth spheres wouldn't have worked. That demanded that the heavenly spheres follow unearthly rules. The freedom to posit whatever rules were necessary to get the heavens to work became a necessity. The other thing that helped was a failure of imagination. No one could imagine how a different system would operate.
One of the things that limited the imagination of the ancients was the power of the Greek idea of perfection. Greek philosophy demanded that any exploration start with the idea of "what is the perfect . . ." and go from there.
In geometry the Greek exemplar was the circle. So, any model of the heavens must be based on the circle. Anything else was a deviation from perfection and God wouldn't allow that sort of thing. So, the Ptolemaic model was based on circles. After all, a sphere is just a three dimensional circle.
If you stick to circles and spheres it is hard to come up with anything that works better than what Ptolemy came up with. Even the "fixes", the addition of cycles and epicycles, just called for the addition of more circles and spheres. And the first successful effort to break away from Ptolemy relied on circles and spheres.
The Copernican model put the Sun at the center of the universe. The Moon continued to orbit the Earth. But all the other planets, including the Earth, orbited the Sun. It was an improvement, but not by much. Cycles and epicycles would have to be added to the Copernican model it it was to make truly accurate predictions. A lot of the people at the time argued "why bother".
Kepler was the first notable European astronomer to abandon the circle/sphere. He built on the work of Brahe, who made the most detailed and accurate astronomical observations made in the pre-telescope era. Brahe's observations, particularly of Mars, showed a pattern of systematic errors in the predictions made both by the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican one. The "fix" was to replace the circle/sphere by the ellipse and it's three dimensional counterpart. At the time the ellipse was seen as an unnatural replacement for the natural circle.
But from a Scientific perspective, Ptolemy and Copernicus were wrong and Kepler was right. In other words, Science could easily handle the change. Scientists proved sufficiently imaginative to imagine a universe constructed from ellipses rather than circles. That made some people very uneasy. But more and worse was to come. Newton revolutionized Celestial Mechanics, as it came to be called, with the introduction of Calculus.
Calculus depends on something called an infinitesimal. It is a number that is smaller than any number you can think of, but still greater than zero. How can such a thing exist in the real world? It can't. And Calculus depends on another trick, the continuous refinement of approximations. Every approximation yields the wrong answer. But every approximation brings us closer to the correct result. Nowhere along the way is the latest approximation is exactly right. Yet by "taking the process to the limit" the exactly correct result emerges.
Again, this is not possible in the real world. It is only possible within the imagination of mathematicians and Scientists like Newton. Calculus forces us to imagine the unimaginable then treat it like every other tool. In short, it is completely un-natural. But that's not the end.
As celestial measurements got more and more accurate thanks to larger and better telescopes, discrepancies emerged between Newtonian predictions and reality. The poster child for this was the planet Mercury. The problem was solved by Einstein's Special Relativity. Special Relativity requires us to believe that time does not flow at a fixed rate. Instead, it varies in speed depending on how you observe it. Compared to Calculus, this is way farther out. In short, it required even more imagination.
And we are not done yet. A decade later Einstein came out with General Relativity. It requires us to believe that space itself can be warped and twisted. Is there nothing that is sacred? On the other hand, maybe we can power Science Fiction space ships with a Warp Drive. Sounds revolutionary, and cool. But Einstein got there fifty years before Roddenberry did.
I could go on. Quantum Mechanics requires us to believe that electrons (and positrons) aren't particles. They are some kind of probability field. And that's not right. They are some kind of square root of a probability field. And, thanks to entanglement, that the fundamental characteristics of two particles can be intrinsically linked even though the particles are separated by a hundred miles, or possibly even greater distances.
The natural world is unbelievably weird according to Science. And it is weird in ways that are far harder to wrap our heads around than whatever wild ideas Fantasy writers have come up with. And compared to all that, plain old, boring old Magic is nothing special.
And that's the approach that was taken by the authors of The Incomplete Enchanter. They took a hard nosed Scientist, in this case a Psychiatrist of all things, and thrust him into a magical world. Specifically, it was the world of Norse Myth. He immediately set about observing how magic worked and turning what he saw it into rules he could use to do his own magic. He only needed to figure out a few simple rules in order to become better at magic than many of the local mages.
He returned to Earth. There he picked up a friend and the two of them traveled to another magical world, this one full of castles and princesses. The two of them immediately set to work in tandem. Again, it wasn't long before they had dissected the magical system well enough for both of them to become highly proficient. They were soon more proficient than the locals.
In both cases the magical system had rules, rules that were not hard to unearth using standard Scientific methods. Once they understood the rules it was an easy step to being able to use them to do things that the locals, who were restricted to the few techniques that had been handed down to them by previous practitioners, were incapable of doing. It had simply not occurred to any of the locals that magic could be studied rigorously. In short, the Scientific approach was beyond what they were capable of imagining.
And the idea behind The Incomplete Enchanter was not a new one. Back in 1889 Mark Twain had pulled off a similar feat in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain's story did not rely on magic. Instead, it relied on an idea popularized by Arthur C. Clark, a prolific Science Fiction author and the man behind the script for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
One of Clarke's "Three Laws" was that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The "Yankee Ingenuity" of Twain's hero met the "sufficiently advanced" test. So, the people living in King Arthur's time were unable to distinguish it from magic.
So, to succinctly answer the question I posed above, as long as there are rules to magic, Science will have no problem understanding it and incorporating it into its understanding of how the natural world works.
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