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Fuck it, physics is magic. You study for years to learn the innate laws of the universe and bend them to your will. You know what most people would do if magicians were real people? They'd call them nerds for spending too much time studying and most people would avoid the subject like the plague. Magicians and physicists are the same thing.
Every sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, read minds, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?
All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay
I dare say physics would be more popular then
But that's never how magic is depicted - it always takes decades of knowledge and learning or powerful enchanted artifacts forged from rare minerals and materials, and rituals which always name a price.
Modern magic can do all those things - if you have the right artifacts, likewise made of precious metals forged by lightning and etched with beams of sunfire and inlaid with gemstones from beyond the sea, fuelled by the ichor alchemically distilled from the remnants of ancient forests and carefully assembled by entire courts of white-robed magi who have each spent decades perfecting their deep knowledge of ritual and arcane lore.
With these artifacts, I can incinerate an entire room with a twitch of my finger upon a staff of fire summoning, read minds with a helm of probing, lightning people with a tiny wand of stunning, and conjure familiar from across the world to do my bidding on my black mirror for the small sacrifice of tiny particles of lightning in a distant runestone.
- Fireball? We have rocket launchers.
- Lightning people? We have tasers.
- Mind reading? Ok, I'll give you that.
- Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Many of the fantasy powers can be done. It isn't a question of capability but of economics. The economics are ignored in most stories, no matter if it's fantasy or a real world thriller.
Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.
Also washing machines, robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers.
Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing
But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world
If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best
My physics teacher is also a magician so you got a point
We all crowning ourselves high wizards of the college of Winterholm yet the coolest bending of universal laws I’ve done is an acid-base titration. WHERE BROMOTHYMOL BLUE GO?!?