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.
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
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.
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.
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?!?
Circuit boards are basically runes, written in stone and inlaid with precious metals to conduct pure energy around in very specific ways to do pretty much anything we wish.
As someone who is trying to get Meshtastic to work I feel this. My pocket node can connect to people 50km away, but the base station with the chongus antenna can only connect across town?
I've always told my students that programming is just magic. If you get the right combination of words and symbols, the magic lightning rock will do your bidding.
Just don't build a house of neutron-reflective tungsten carbine bricks around it or cowboy the beryllium hemispheres, hell, maybe just trust the last guys' calculations instead of testing for closeness to criticality. Safe as houses.
We sometimes conjure fireballs but it's totally from a certain type of invisible gas and also you can't smell the gas but it's definitely there and NOT MAGIC
The difference between physics and magic is that physics works by describing the forces acting on a system. To predict an outcome, you just progressivly apply those forces over time.
With magic, you just specify the outcome, but not how you get there.
This is how we know that thermodynamics is magic. Conservation laws and Lagrangeans too.
As one of my Daughters told the Chair of the Physics department at a large Big 10 collage to switch her major from ME to Physics, "I want know the answer, not guess."
Weird, because my experience with science and mathematics is that everything I learned only leads to more questions. I personally preferred taking a small chunk of that knowledge and using it to do real-world stuff which was always surprisingly complicated but satisfying. An engineer that "guesses" is not a very good one IMO lol
My whole life I thought I'd study mechatronics. I was one of those kids winning robotics comps and getting sponsored to go to global ones and get my arse beat by actually smart people.
Anyway, I switched to physics because "I want to know why".
Ahaha, hahahahaha, aaahshahshshshs oh naive little me. Ha ha ha ha. Now I am an overeducated house wife with a head full of questions. I could have done something useful instead of rocking back and forth in a padded room screaming "but what is time? why does it break all the patterns?"
So you're saying Electronics is Electromagnetics is Physics?
In that case Biology is Chemistry is Physics and therefor Medical Doctors have degrees in Physics. If you feel like fighting me I will await you out back.
That orb in the middle of the apparatus is The Demon Core, a piece of plutonium produced during the Manhattan Project, for a third nuke which was never needed. So it was used for criticality experiments, which is where those hemispheres come in.
Anyway, in those experiments it was key in a few accidents, which caused the deaths by radiation of several researchers. After the later bout of experiments, the core was scrapped.
Just about anything with “black,” or, “dark,” in its name, be very skeptical. 🧐 But quantum entanglement, that’s the good stuff. Only GR’s SpaceTime mechanics comes close to being as crazy.