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AMFV
2014-01-03, 12:42 AM
Due to a recent conversation in the 3.5 forums, I've started to think about looking to see if there are any systems with a magic system that was not impossible in a real world setting (of course, I suspect that magic in general is, but bear with me here). Has anybody seen any magic systems in any rolegame that are roughly contained within the laws of nature as we understand them today?

Because I'd be very interested in finding that kind of system. If none exist, then what qualities do you think that this sort of magic system might have?

Edit: I'm actually not a physicist, I'm more of a geology person, so physics isn't my strong suite.

What about a world where the disciplines of magic line up with the sciences. You'd have a magical discipline that manipulated biology, a magical discipline that manipulated forces and the like. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but it sounds like it could be really interesting to me at least.

NichG
2014-01-03, 01:22 AM
The higher level it functions at, the more plausible its going to be. Manipulating fundamental particles? Almost everything you want to do will be forbidden by symmetry, conservation laws, even just statistics. Manipulating biology? Well, who knows what could respond to what...

Probably your best bet is a 'magic' that operates via chemical signalling. Basically, the 'wizard' emits pheremones which organisms in that world have been engineered to respond to in certain ways - apoptosis, signalling in response, increasing or decreasing metabolic function, etc.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 01:29 AM
The higher level it functions at, the more plausible its going to be. Manipulating fundamental particles? Almost everything you want to do will be forbidden by symmetry, conservation laws, even just statistics. Manipulating biology? Well, who knows what could respond to what...

Probably your best bet is a 'magic' that operates via chemical signalling. Basically, the 'wizard' emits pheremones which organisms in that world have been engineered to respond to in certain ways - apoptosis, signalling in response, increasing or decreasing metabolic function, etc.

Well I think you can still have things that work if you fundamentally can alter a few conditions. You'd have to be still bound by the laws of whatever science it is you're working with but since certain things are attainable in the world world, they should be replicable with magic. I'm currently that magic is like pouring time, energy, and control into a system. For example a Geology Mage (I really need to think up better names for this sort of thing) couldn't throw a stone at somebody a la Earthbending, but they could cause soft sediment deformation around somebody's feet, or cause Earthquakes, if only on a small scale, they could also cause rocks to melt and somewhat control the behavior of magma. That's presently the sort of thing I'm looking for.

I assume that a force or physics mage could do things with energy, like the throwing a stone example. But the energy would have to come from somewhere.

So the fundamental laws of magic and it's principles might be something like this:

First, nothing can be created or destroyed, things can be changed to energy and the reverse, but nothing is created or destroyed.

I think we should probably work in some thermodynamics but I've not got a ton of experience in them, entropy should only be reversible on a small scale or in an open system.

We'd also have a principle of reversal, just because something can be changed one way, doesn't necessarily mean that the process works in the reverse.

NichG
2014-01-03, 01:54 AM
Even the relocation of energy you have to be a bit careful about, since you also have to conserve momentum and angular momentum.

The big issue though is going to be thermodynamics. Something like how electric charge or the nuclear strong force works, that's (in principle) a result from the particular way in which spontaneous symmetry breaking occurred in our universe. Given different initial conditions for the universe, they could work differently.

Thermodynamics though is, at its core, just statistics and math. Entropy increases because of incomplete information combined with the mathematical properties of random numbers. Its comparable to what happens when you roll huge dice pools in a tabletop game - the result gets pushed more and more towards the average, the more dice you have. Thermodynamics, at its core, comes from 'you have ~10^24 dice, here are the consequences'.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 02:05 AM
Even the relocation of energy you have to be a bit careful about, since you also have to conserve momentum and angular momentum.

Well since we're allowing the changing of temporal properties to some degree the amount of energy you could have in any one spot would be near-infinite, if you could pull from any point in the future, possibly without having any significant danger of unbalancing other things.

So using temporal shifts you could potentially harvest the energy of different interactions, although we'd have to figure out how altering the flow for a specific process might work.

Basically as I'm seeing it you change the flow of time for a specific process. For example in geology you'd make the soft sediment deformation immediate rather than taking thousands and hundreds of years (pretty quick for geology) and then you'd use your magical control to lower the randomness in the system. You might not even need that much extra energy at all. Although sadly I don't know that much about relativity and temporal relationships to energy so I might be off on this count.



The big issue though is going to be thermodynamics. Something like how electric charge or the nuclear strong force works, that's (in principle) a result from the particular way in which spontaneous symmetry breaking occurred in our universe. Given different initial conditions for the universe, they could work differently.

True, so it would be very difficult to act on that level, perhaps impossible. But if you can manipulate time flow and control randomness of processes then you'd have a very magical type of effect even if you couldn't directly manipulate atomic forces.

Of course since we can harness these forces in real life we could probably harness them in the sort of magic we're discussing, although again my physics is kind of crappy, so you'll have to excuse me if I make physics errors, since I'm just looking the Wikipedia page on strong interaction (it's been over eight years since I've taken physics), so I only know a few things.



Thermodynamics though is, at its core, just statistics and math. Entropy increases because of incomplete information combined with the mathematical properties of random numbers. Its comparable to what happens when you roll huge dice pools in a tabletop game - the result gets pushed more and more towards the average, the more dice you have. Thermodynamics, at its core, comes from 'you have ~10^24 dice, here are the consequences'.

So you'd have to control the random aspects of a system, which is interesting in respects to entropy I think. Because you're pushing towards a specific random conclusion you'd be directly manipulating entropy.

At least how I'm seeing the system now is that you'd use your own particular field and then manipulate time and probability around it, which is unrealistic, but hopefully more realistic... Difficult to say though.

For example a bio-mage, could cause spontaneous evolution in an organism, and have some control over that particular direction of evolution, basically pulling things that haven't happened yet and bending probabilities.

I think I would have the degree of control be in some respects proportional to the hardness of the science in question.

For example, a socio-mage would have some control over social situations, but a lot of uncertainty would its way in depending on how they tried to control things.

Does that sound unreasonable to you? Again my physics isn't great, I was just kind of doing this as a thought experiment and now I'm really interested in the system.

Edit: This is mostly just trying to create a system of magic that would be more or less plausible in a real world setting. Which is obviously difficult.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-03, 03:11 AM
You want spontaneous "evolution"? Sit on a microwave. Or nuke a densely populated area and wipe out a large portion of a race.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 03:17 AM
You want spontaneous "evolution"? Sit on a microwave. Or nuke a densely populated area and wipe out a large portion of a race.

I'm confused by this... I was mostly trying to discuss magic that would be plausible or possible in a real world setting. Of course since is impossible that's a hard thing to discuss, but basically my goal would be to have a magic system where if you transplanted it to the real world it would function.

Also radioactive mutations aren't really evolution so much as tumors generally.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-03, 03:19 AM
On a less serious note-
Bio-mancy:
Sub schools
Ecology-Control of ecosystem level processes.
e.g. Summon predator- releases pheromones which attract a natural predator of the target. This predator is not under the casters control. Receives something akin to a "favored enemy" bonus vs the target. DM picks something appropriate to be summoned.
Disrupt gut flora- Causes massive gastrointestinal discomfort in the target, as their commensal bacteria die off rapidly.

Microbology- Control of the small parts of living creatures.
Destroy Cell Membrane- As disintegrate.

Neurobiology- Control nervous systems of living creatures.
Hold person, mind control etc.

Evolutionary- Control of evolutionary processes. Directs natural progression of living things.
Viral Bloom- Causes viruses present in the targets systems to rapid become more virulent, causing serious damage.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 03:23 AM
On a less serious note-
Bio-mancy:
Sub schools
Ecology-Control of ecosystem level processes.
e.g. Summon predator- releases pheromones which attract a natural predator of the target. This predator is not under the casters control. Receives something akin to a "favored enemy" bonus vs the target. DM picks something appropriate to be summoned.
Disrupt gut flora- Causes massive gastrointestinal discomfort in the target, as their commensal bacteria die off rapidly.

I think ecology would involve something like changing a system or something to that effect since we're discussing altering ecology on a time frame, it would be difficult to implement in game I think, without having something very very large scale.

Not impossible of course, just difficult.



Microbology- Control of the small parts of living creatures.
Destroy Cell Membrane- As disintegrate.

Neurobiology- Control nervous systems of living creatures.
Hold person, mind control etc.

I think that this might fall under Socio magic rather than Bio magic, although it'd be a toughy to figure out, mind control certainly would difficult, I suspect impossible, but making somebody freeze in place, or pass out would be possible certainly.



Evolutionary- Control of evolutionary processes. Directs natural progression of living things.
Viral Bloom- Causes viruses present in the targets systems to rapid become more virulent, causing serious damage.

I'm think the viral stuff would fall under microbiology rather than evolutionary biology, although that's kind of a niche debating thing. Probably better to just focus on overall fields.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-01-03, 03:41 AM
I once postulated to someone that one could have a magic system operate on the basis that there are bacteria in a dense, energy-rich air that react to certain substances (broken twig, open glass jar of specific chemical compound), certain electromagnetic signals, sounds or other such things.

In response the atmosphere might produce a variety of chemical compounds and small, distributed forces and effects. I was mostly suggesting this as a joke, because the person wanted to 'explain' the magic in a fantasy world using sci-fi explanations. And that's the first thing I thought of at the time.

Their response was to tell me that I basically just described Star Wars' midichlorians. It was the first I ever heard of it, but I got the impression that guy didn't like my random suggestion.

As for magical physics, I think other than keeping the big general laws in mind (thermodynamics, conservation of energy, etc...) for purposes of aligning with physics in the broadest possible sense of what physics is, I think you're justified in coming up with anything you want, really.

(Disclaimer, I am not a chemist or physicist. I may get something wrong in my rant here.)
For example. Nanomachines can be amazing, but you can't have them doing something like rearranging atoms of carbon into any shape you want at any speed you want. Most depictions of nanomachines are magic because they simply ignore the bonding energy of carbon (or any atomic bonding energies, really), or treat it as if the nanomachine has 100% efficiency in absorbing/expelling such energy. The faster you do work (like breaking a molecular bond) the more power you need.

Energy also needs to be stored somewhere if you plan to use it, and that produces heat. Nanomachines in fiction just typically just pull this energy out of nothing.

For example, trees need the energy of the sun in order to yank a carbon atom off of carbon dioxide and use it for something. It can't just do it without cost, the energy to do so comes from the sun.

In the reverse, carbon and oxygen can be bonded back together, but they don't all just fuse willy-nilly, there needs to be some energy invested to get them to return to the former state. But if you are incapable of investing the energy required in order to do so, O2 and carbon are not going to do anything useful for you.

And that's not even getting into things like entropy and the nanomachines' own bond energies (the tech could melt), or problems with the coordination and communication to get them to make something with an overall structure.
My own issues with popular sci-fi tech of the day aside, I think if you follow the big rules I listed, you can be pretty 'scientific' if the little rules still hold weight. It's all a matter of understanding the basic nature of science, and what an unexpected discovery or abnormal finding would actually mean to scientists.

A new theory would form that would attempt to account for the 'magic', and thus, would probably be investigated how it relates to the big theories. How the magic interacts with broad, 'law' notions like conservation of energy, conservation of mass, thermodynamics and so on. (Statistical and chemical problems would belong here as well. Like creating magic acid out of nothing. How do the individual atoms of the acid get bonded into a molecule, or is that acid summoned from some kind of acid-dimension?)

And the interplay between how those laws break down and how they are upheld would basically determine how consistent this magic system is with 'physics'. As long as the rules are internally consistent with one another, and generally sensible on a basic physics level, I think the system should be okay. The experts in the setting can understand it better than the author, but if the fundamental questions about the magic aren't answered, it's simply not going to line up.

It's going to be harder to make such a world 'believable' to someone more educated in the relevant sciences, though. Just simply because they're going to be able to think of serious flaws in the answers you come up with, or probably think of better questions to ask that might not even have a good answer.

As for an established world or setting with this kind of realism applied, I unfortunately don't really know of any. I've just thought about this topic on my own quite a bit, and this is the answer I've come up with for myself. I hope that it makes at least some sense.

NichG
2014-01-03, 03:56 AM
Overt time manipulation is pretty unrealistic when you come to real physics though. Quantum mechanical processes can be thought of as 'borrowing' energy from the future, but they obey a relationship between the amount of energy borrowed and how soon they have to 'pay it back'. This is the reason the nuclear strong force is so short ranged, and there we're still talking about very very tiny amounts of energy.

When you go to relativistic time manipulation, it turns out that there's an energy singularity associated with wormhole mouths when you get to the point where you can send/receive from the future. Basically the things blow themselves closed.

This is generally the problem with looking at very fundamental stuff - there isn't actually that much room for things working differently than they do in the real world, so there isn't much space to stick in a magic system.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 04:16 AM
Overt time manipulation is pretty unrealistic when you come to real physics though. Quantum mechanical processes can be thought of as 'borrowing' energy from the future, but they obey a relationship between the amount of energy borrowed and how soon they have to 'pay it back'. This is the reason the nuclear strong force is so short ranged, and there we're still talking about very very tiny amounts of energy.

When you go to relativistic time manipulation, it turns out that there's an energy singularity associated with wormhole mouths when you get to the point where you can send/receive from the future. Basically the things blow themselves closed.

This is generally the problem with looking at very fundamental stuff - there isn't actually that much room for things working differently than they do in the real world, so there isn't much space to stick in a magic system.

Well you could manipulate things more directly, over a long period of time, that would certainly work. I posit that however a magical system would have to be unrealistic at some levels, but it is possible to have a more realistic system than is present in D&D. That's what I'm aiming at here. Sort of the divide between soft and hard science fiction. I mean there have been hard science fiction works, with pseudo magic, or psychic powers present, and I assume they did their homework, so it has to be possible to some degree.

Again a lot depends on the amount of manipulation and the amount of energy. You could have a person with a direct link to an alternate reality energy source, and that might be something that would certainly be workable, while it requires stuff that doesn't happen, it's not stuff that couldn't happen, that's the main thing.

Obviously magic doesn't exist in reality, I'm looking for how it could exist without overtly violating the laws of reality, which is certainly a possibility.

NichG
2014-01-03, 08:00 AM
Well, psychic powers are no more 'realistic' a magic system than any other, really. The most physically consistent way to do magic is basically to have the framework for magic be engineered into the world. You need energy? You tap an ambient AC electrical potential that has been run through the ground, or certain wavelengths of radiation being broadcast down from satellites, or things like that. You need information out of nowhere? You have hundreds of monitoring stations in orbit that can send you the information about far away places on request. Need to manipulate someone's mind? Well fortunately, every sentient being on the planet has been genetically engineered to be susceptible to certain chemical signals which practitioners of the magic know how to emit.

Basically, once you allow for there to be some sort of devices in play whose purpose is to basically 'let people appear to do magic', then you can get past a lot of the otherwise difficult limitations for being able to just spontaneously make stuff happen. In such a magic tradition there would likely be a strong astrological factor (if only because a lot of things become a lot easier with satellite coverage, and if you can't see the sky then those things would be attenuated at best, and completely blocked at worst).

There are still going to be a few things that aren't going to be feasible - generating or shaping matter out of nowhere for example. It takes way too much energy to make even a milligram of matter out of nothing for that energy to be easily accessible, even with satellites beaming it down at you. There's too much information present/needed in a clump of existing matter to be able to easily re-arrange it at-will in a useful way, generally.

But I think you could cover influencing biological organisms (due to being engineered to do so), influencing minds (again, having certain susceptibilities engineered into sentient life), divination, above-ground spontaneous thermal or electrical effects (satellite with a microwave thin-beam) - possibly even faux-lightning, due to being able to ionize a trail through the atmosphere, though it'd be conditional.

If you had truly huge infrastructures in place, you could even do the geology stuff. If there's, for example, a subterranean structure every half-mile or so that can emit powerful, low-frequency vibrations, and which responded to the will of the 'magic' users, you could create things like subsidences, landslides, even soil liquefaction at will. It would almost necessarily effect only very large areas (the space formed by a triangle between three of the stations, for example) though it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that you could exploit e.g. transmission non-linearities to get it more precise.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 08:19 AM
Well, psychic powers are no more 'realistic' a magic system than any other, really. The most physically consistent way to do magic is basically to have the framework for magic be engineered into the world. You need energy? You tap an ambient AC electrical potential that has been run through the ground, or certain wavelengths of radiation being broadcast down from satellites, or things like that. You need information out of nowhere? You have hundreds of monitoring stations in orbit that can send you the information about far away places on request. Need to manipulate someone's mind? Well fortunately, every sentient being on the planet has been genetically engineered to be susceptible to certain chemical signals which practitioners of the magic know how to emit.

Except by realism I mean not in direct contradiction with natural laws. That's much easier to manage without having to include that particular sort of interface at least to my line of thinking. The whole thing would seem rather contrived at that point

Lorsa
2014-01-03, 08:41 AM
If you want to stick to some laws of physics in the general "what people will see" sense, then basic implementation of conservation is probably all you need.

For example, if you lift a large boulder with magic, there needs to be an equal amount of force (stupid concept but most people know what it is) to balance it. Either this force is acting on the mage in question, pushing them down, or if you want the mage could be able to redirect it towards something else, pushing some other object down.

Same way if you want to create heat, you have to take the energy from somewhere so either the mage will be cooled down by an equal amount (averaged over the body of course so very little for lighting a cigarette) or if you want they could be able to redirect it somewhere else, thus cooling down another object.

You could even let them create/destroy matter, just in equal amounts (here you probably want to forget about conservation of quark colours or it's going to become a mess). Or instead of thinking about it as creating some matter and destroying other, you could let the mage rearrange subatomic particles to form new elements and shift atoms around to make new molecules. As long as no energy is removed from the universe you should be fine.

So yeah, I think it's definitely possible to have a mage as some sort of conduit for all the natural forces, being able to move and rearrange energy at a whim. Just remember that for each action there's an equal and opposite reaction and you will stay somewhat true to physics.

DonEsteban
2014-01-03, 11:05 AM
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

So I guess in view of this the answer is either: Yes, magic is possible. Fireball? firearms, explosives, rockets: check! Sending? radiocommunication: check! Illusions? parabolic loudspeaker, (holographic) projectors, stage magic: check! Creation? Advanced chemistry/ nuclear physics, 3d printers: check! Charm person? Sodium Pentothal, hypnotics, brainwashing combined with advanced (future) neuro science and technology: check(ish)!

Or the answer is: No, magic is doing something unexplainable by or opposed to natural laws. So by it's very definition it's in opposition, it is incompatible, it is the opposite of science.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 11:10 AM
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

So I guess in view of this the answer is either: Yes, magic is possible. Fireball? firearms, explosives, rockets: check! Sending? radiocommunication: check! Illusions? parabolic loudspeaker, (holographic) projectors, stage magic: check! Creation? Advanced chemistry/ nuclear physics, 3d printers: check! Charm person? Sodium Pentothal, hypnotics, brainwashing combined with advanced (future) neuro science and technology: check(ish)!

Or the answer is: No, magic is doing something unexplainable by or opposed to natural laws. So by it's very definition it's in opposition, it is incompatible, it is the opposite of science.

But magic still can't violate the natural laws. For example if you can create matter from nothing you're violating the natural laws. Magic can still exist in such a way that it isn't violating the laws of physics or that it is comprehensible. Or at least I would assume so.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-03, 02:07 PM
But magic still can't violate the natural laws. For example if you can create matter from nothing you're violating the natural laws. Magic can still exist in such a way that it isn't violating the laws of physics or that it is comprehensible. Or at least I would assume so.

If you want magic that follows all the laws of physics etc, and is based around science, I think you just want science.

What about this magic system makes it magic, and not just applied sciences? If you aren't violating the laws, where is the magic part?

BeerMug Paladin
2014-01-03, 02:43 PM
But magic still can't violate the natural laws. For example if you can create matter from nothing you're violating the natural laws. Magic can still exist in such a way that it isn't violating the laws of physics or that it is comprehensible. Or at least I would assume so.
The natural laws that science discovers aren't actually rules of reality. They are models that we have a firm confidence in because in all our testing, they appear to always hold. If there was something that happened that contradicted a scientific law, no matter which one it was, the law would be thrown out.

That's why I said you could violate any law you want, as long as you explain how it violates the law in a consistent manner. Because if a law is violated, scientists would work out the new 'rules' around which the 'magic' is working.

After all, science is just asserting that reality has some sort of consistent behavior, and that it is possible to discover that behavior through a combination of observation and logical thinking.

AlaskaOOTSFan
2014-01-03, 02:49 PM
What about magic having it's own physics?

Like there exists a magic plane, and the act of casting draws from that plane. That plane is pure energy, so in the previous example, the energy to lift the rock comes from the plane of magic (think of it as pure energy+the holodeck from ST).

Also, the Plane of Magic is finite.

Certain activities release magical energy back to the plane (killing a magical creature, destroying a magical item...etc). It is theoretically possible to empty the Plane completely of magic, and no magic available until some other magical thing is destroyed.

Being a higher level indicates a greater connection to the Plane of Magic.

erikun
2014-01-03, 04:39 PM
Due to a recent conversation in the 3.5 forums, I've started to think about looking to see if there are any systems with a magic system that was not impossible in a real world setting (of course, I suspect that magic in general is, but bear with me here). Has anybody seen any magic systems in any rolegame that are roughly contained within the laws of nature as we understand them today?
Probably not, as magic (basically by definition) defies the laws of physics. If you're doing something that follows the laws of physics, then you're not doing magic. You're applying the appropriate physical laws.

I suppose that a system where characters are applying poorly understood concepts of sciences like chemistry or biology could get away with calling it "magic", although I'm not familiar with one that does so.

In Glorantha, the setting in HeroQuest/RuneQuest, low-level magic is an augmentation of a character's abilities, rather than outright effects. You could have magic that augments your jumping ability (but not beyond human levels) or augments a person's natural healing (allowing them to heal faster and fight off infection better) but nothing like mending wounds in battle. Mid-level magic does allow for supernatural effects, like magical mending of wounds, but nothing overt. High-level magic does allow for the overt, fireball-chucking. Perhaps Glorantha's low-level magic could be what you are looking for.


You want spontaneous "evolution"? Sit on a microwave. Or nuke a densely populated area and wipe out a large portion of a race.
Evolution is measured by generations, at the quickest, and never by the individual. A single creature would never "evolve". They wouldn't even "mutate", but would most likely simply die due to changes in their body. At best, you're looking at children being mutants with desirable traits.


Except by realism I mean not in direct contradiction with natural laws. That's much easier to manage without having to include that particular sort of interface at least to my line of thinking. The whole thing would seem rather contrived at that point
Obtaining/transferring knowledge, along with "manipulation of chance", are probably not going to mess with physics... much.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-03, 07:09 PM
The nuke point was to rapidly alter the frequency of genes in the gene pool, via wiping out large segments of the population. I was going to go for bringing up Eugenics or genocide, but decided against it.

NichG
2014-01-03, 09:03 PM
You can get useful evolution fairly quickly in the immune system, but it still takes something like 6-10 generations. The reason evolution takes a long time is that its a discovery process, not just a change process. If you know the target point, you can get there in one generation, but if you don't know the target point then a few generations are needed for what amounts to a swarm-based search of a high-dimensional space.

Simple fixation of existing traits in the population can occur faster of course.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-03, 10:09 PM
You can get useful evolution fairly quickly in the immune system, but it still takes something like 6-10 generations. The reason evolution takes a long time is that its a discovery process, not just a change process. If you know the target point, you can get there in one generation, but if you don't know the target point then a few generations are needed for what amounts to a swarm-based search of a high-dimensional space.

Simple fixation of existing traits in the population can occur faster of course.

That's why I assumed viral evolution for some sort of "magical" aspect. Anything else would take too long. I guess a mage using that sort of magic might set up more long term projects, but at that point you're at best doing selective breeding, at worst eugenics.

"Feel the wrath of my magic! You are now sterile!"

Devils_Advocate
2014-01-03, 11:22 PM
AMFV, what do you mean by "magic"? What's the difference between magic and non-magic?

It sounds like you're asking for what would normally be described as science fiction technology.

AMFV
2014-01-03, 11:32 PM
Probably not, as magic (basically by definition) defies the laws of physics. If you're doing something that follows the laws of physics, then you're not doing magic. You're applying the appropriate physical laws.

That's not necessarily true to be honest. Magic can exist without creating something from nothing, or without working wholesale against entropy, or without changing the laws of superimposition (Geology has slightly less exciting laws, but they're mine). Magic is doing something through magical energy, not expressly violating the laws of physics, at least to my thinking.



I suppose that a system where characters are applying poorly understood concepts of sciences like chemistry or biology could get away with calling it "magic", although I'm not familiar with one that does so.

That's still using machines, if the characters are applying sciences through psychic energies or whatnot, it could still thoroughly be a magical system rather than a mechanical one. That might be a better point of distinction.



In Glorantha, the setting in HeroQuest/RuneQuest, low-level magic is an augmentation of a character's abilities, rather than outright effects. You could have magic that augments your jumping ability (but not beyond human levels) or augments a person's natural healing (allowing them to heal faster and fight off infection better) but nothing like mending wounds in battle. Mid-level magic does allow for supernatural effects, like magical mending of wounds, but nothing overt. High-level magic does allow for the overt, fireball-chucking. Perhaps Glorantha's low-level magic could be what you are looking for.

That does sound like that would be more consistent with physical laws than anything else I might've seen. I've been looking at MERP, which is also much more consistent with physical laws than D&D (although I suspect that's less a design decision and more an accident of fate, though they had very specific guidelines)

Fireball chucking doesn't bother me that much, in real life there are things that make other things explode, I'm not sure why magic couldn't achieve similar results. As I said a probability manipulation field is probably the way to go. To create a fireball you change the probability that X item is going to explode from near zero (nothing has a zero explosion probability) to one hundred percent, which of course could have interesting results in other areas, but it would still be scientifically consistent or at least not violate any scientific systems.



Evolution is measured by generations, at the quickest, and never by the individual. A single creature would never "evolve". They wouldn't even "mutate", but would most likely simply die due to changes in their body. At best, you're looking at children being mutants with desirable traits.


Well if you're manipulating time and future probabilities, you could change the way that particular creature had evolved, it'd be tantamount to pulling a creature that had evolved under different circumstances from an alternate universe. Certainly causing physical changes in a creature doesn't violate any natural laws that I am aware of, and is therefore less of an overt problem.



Obtaining/transferring knowledge, along with "manipulation of chance", are probably not going to mess with physics... much.

Manipulation of chance can mess with physics in some pretty big ways. The explosion example I provided earlier. If you can manipulate prior chances you get some evolution related examples. It really depends on how much of a scale you can use.

But I suggest that such a system could certainly be possible.


AMFV, what do you mean by "magic"? What's the difference between magic and non-magic?

It sounds like you're asking for what would normally be described as science fiction technology.

I am asking for things that result from Arcane or unknown forces, so something that is difficult to explain (arcane and elritch type stuff) that works with technology, like being able to access something that would be technological but not having the full understanding of it. Using that "Technology at at a high level is indistinguishable from magic principle" It should probably be psychic or ritual based rather than mechanically based to my thinking. I hope that clarifies some stuff.

NichG
2014-01-04, 01:33 AM
I think 'possible' isn't really a good term for this, since it doesn't seem like what you're actually going for. A 'fully realistic' system of magic would be something that one could ostensibly do in the real world, and would involve machines as a framework or other tech-as-magic.

Rather, it might be better to pick certain things you want to remain preserved by your system (e.g. you don't want your system to let someone make infinite energy, or have a reactionless space-ship, or violate thermodynamics), and just live with the fact that very little is really going to be truly consistent with all known/observed physics in the sense of 'this really could happen'.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 01:58 AM
I think 'possible' isn't really a good term for this, since it doesn't seem like what you're actually going for. A 'fully realistic' system of magic would be something that one could ostensibly do in the real world, and would involve machines as a framework or other tech-as-magic.

Rather, it might be better to pick certain things you want to remain preserved by your system (e.g. you don't want your system to let someone make infinite energy, or have a reactionless space-ship, or violate thermodynamics), and just live with the fact that very little is really going to be truly consistent with all known/observed physics in the sense of 'this really could happen'.

I mean not in violation of the laws of nature. Energy and kinetics don't violate the laws of nature. In terms of what really could happen there are lots of things. Things can explode, they can be moved, those are certainly possibilities. I think your definition of possibility is fairly narrow. Sometimes things spontaneously explode, which means that it's certainly within the realm of possibility.

I'm saying that a magic system that doesn't do anything outside of the realm of possibility could exist.

Devils_Advocate
2014-01-04, 03:07 AM
I am asking for things that result from Arcane or unknown forces, so something that is difficult to explain (arcane and elritch type stuff) that works with technology, like being able to access something that would be technological but not having the full understanding of it. Using that "Technology at at a high level is indistinguishable from magic principle" It should probably be psychic or ritual based rather than mechanically based to my thinking. I hope that clarifies some stuff.
My understanding is that modern computers have reached the point where literally no one actually understands how they work anymore. There are people who understand how parts of them work, and there are people who understand how to put those parts together well, and probably additional people who understand how to put the configurations of parts together well, and so on... but not people who understand how computers work.

And much the same considerations apply to software as to hardware. A program written in a high-level language is translated into an assembly language which is then translated into machine code, etc. And this translation is done by a program that was written in a high-level language, translated into an assembly language, and then translated into machine code. Typically for the benefit of a programmer who barely knows how all of this underlying architecture works.

What I'm saying is that we are communicating by magic right now. This forum operates by magic. There is an actual system in the real world where you can produce the effects you want so long as you can come up with the right magic words. And it's quite arcane, I assure you.

And it isn't limited to making images appear on a screen (http://xkcd.com/722/), either. Computers can be used to control many things. And, indeed, the most ambitious artificial intelligence projects are ultimately about getting a computer to do literally everything you want that isn't physically impossible. There are some very intelligent people who believe that this is seriously an achievable goal.

The question is, how biased are you against reality? That is to say, are you gonna dismiss real magic as dull and unexciting precisely because it's something that actually exists? Or are you instead going to say "WHOA, MAGIC ALREADY ACTUALLY EXISTS? AWESOME!"

Basically, the same sort of dilemma faced by a reader of a Friendly Banter thread I recently happened upon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322715). Personally, my reaction was "Well, they may not be all that big or breathe fire, but I'm still rather pleased to learn that flying dragons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_%28genus%29) exist. Like, there being actual flying dragons is pretty cool."

I think that the existence of actual magic is pretty darned tootin' cool, too, but hey, maybe it's just me.

NichG
2014-01-04, 03:22 AM
I mean not in violation of the laws of nature. Energy and kinetics don't violate the laws of nature. In terms of what really could happen there are lots of things. Things can explode, they can be moved, those are certainly possibilities. I think your definition of possibility is fairly narrow. Sometimes things spontaneously explode, which means that it's certainly within the realm of possibility.

I'm saying that a magic system that doesn't do anything outside of the realm of possibility could exist.

The 'laws of nature' are pretty exhaustive though. They're prescriptive, not descriptive - we have equations (which are in practice impossible to compute for big systems) that cover, in detail, how almost all matter and energy will behave. The exceptions and unknowns are very strongly bounded, in the sense that e.g. you need structures kilometers long and using the energy output of cities or greater to probe them.

Where our understanding tends to fail is both in how large aggregates of things behave together, and what the actual 'boundary conditions' of complicated systems are. We could say how 10^20 particles would behave if we stuck them together, but we couldn't say exactly what modes those 10^20 particles should be in at the start to correctly model a bacterium. Thats why I say you have more leeway the bigger you go - if you're talking about a small lump of protons and electrons, 'natural law' is very restrictive because we know a lot in detail about exactly how it behaves. If you're talking about a cat, we know how the stuff that makes it up behaves, but the exact configuration of that stuff is beyond our knowledge and matters a lot in what it does macroscopically.

In the example of 'things explode', they don't do so randomly. They do so when there is a certain amount of potential energy available that can be converted to kinetic energy, and when the conditions for that conversion are met. When it comes to something like gasoline, sure, it just takes a spark to set it off. But the conditions for, say, a pound of dirt exploding are much harder to achieve. And thats because, even if it has a lot of potential energy in the sense of being able to convert it from carbon/etc to iron via fusion, the energy barriers to that fusion event, conditions to make that fusion process go to completion, etc, are basically prohibitive. While you could say 'it has a non-zero chance of occurring' we also know what controls that chance and the realization of that chance, and its not something that is basically open to manipulation in a fully 'real' physics.

Now, you want to introduce magic that can manipulate probability? Then you can do stuff like that - exactly the right stuff happens for that pound of dirt to spontaneously fuse, sure. But you are in fact violating natural law with that magic. Which is why I say, it would be much better to say 'what properties of physics do I want to preserve' rather than 'how do I make a fully realistic magic system?'

Erik Vale
2014-01-04, 03:43 AM
Skipping to the end.

In the Mealstorm system, magic is rated by levels of probability requiring more rolls of increasing difficulty the more unlikely it is.

For example, doing the impossible [say conjuring a fireball] has [at best] a 1/2^10% chance, assuming you have stats which would mean you are effectively all knowing and have enough willpower to resist any torture. [5 will rolls at -50, 5 knowledge rolls at -50], and take a huge amount of energy from the mage, even if he's non-successful, and could well result in his death.

However, having circumstance fall a coconut on a combatents head while he fights under a palm tree, easy as heck and is barely draining at all.


Thus, assuming you keep yourself to the possible possibilities in your magic, which is safer and easier, the magic system is entirely within physics, for it's all probability manipulation.

Mr. Mask
2014-01-04, 03:59 AM
Um.... Full Metal Alchemist?

AMFV
2014-01-04, 05:17 AM
Now, you want to introduce magic that can manipulate probability? Then you can do stuff like that - exactly the right stuff happens for that pound of dirt to spontaneously fuse, sure. But you are in fact violating natural law with that magic. Which is why I say, it would be much better to say 'what properties of physics do I want to preserve' rather than 'how do I make a fully realistic magic system?'

I'm curious as to why you would say that manipulating the probability of an event occurring is violating natural law, when it is clearly not. For example my keyboard has a non-zero possibility of each key that I'm typing being hit, and as I type them I alter that probability to a perfect chance of having occurred. We do things that manipulate the probability of large systems all the time, literally all the time, if you account for our affects on a large scale or our affects in terms of the butterfly affect, controlling that sort of relationship isn't unrealistic or impossible, just something we have yet to be able to attain. Just because technology or magical systems for something do not exist at this time don't make them impossible.

Furthermore I think you're applying the laws of nature thing, to things that are not actually laws, but rather theorems, which have exceptions. The laws generally do not, it's a more complex system. But again we are always manipulating the probability that something will occur, all of the time, sometimes without even our knowledge. All things factor into a probability, and being able to access a system of magic that makes those sort of probabilities comprehensible is possibly enough to manipulate them. Adding in a force that is aware of the effects of various things with the ability to alter them, could conceivably create a realized system of magic in line with natural laws.

Again if something can happen in the real world, it would work under my system, things can spontaneously explode, so creating a fireball is possible. But things can't spring into existence, so creating or destroying matter is not. Conservation of momentum is preserved for all things, so that if you pick something up using magic, there is a force directed downwards or outwards to reflect that. There is no reason why such a system could not exist in the real world. In fact we've created machines that do many of those things. There are explosives, there are grain explosions, human beings have manipulated the probability simply by interacting with them. I'm not sure why you are arguing this is impossible when it in fact happens, things that happen are possible.


Skipping to the end.

In the Mealstorm system, magic is rated by levels of probability requiring more rolls of increasing difficulty the more unlikely it is.

For example, doing the impossible [say conjuring a fireball] has [at best] a 1/2^10% chance, assuming you have stats which would mean you are effectively all knowing and have enough willpower to resist any torture. [5 will rolls at -50, 5 knowledge rolls at -50], and take a huge amount of energy from the mage, even if he's non-successful, and could well result in his death.

However, having circumstance fall a coconut on a combatents head while he fights under a palm tree, easy as heck and is barely draining at all.


Thus, assuming you keep yourself to the possible possibilities in your magic, which is safer and easier, the magic system is entirely within physics, for it's all probability manipulation.


This is almost exactly what I am looking for, thanks!

Erik Vale
2014-01-04, 05:44 AM
This is almost exactly what I am looking for, thanks!

Glad to help.
And it'll have wizards take up the motto: "The easier it is, the less likely they'll find you." or some such...
I wonder what that is in latin...
Hmm, "Facilius est facere, ut minus sint tibi" would work for a motto, might want to fiddle with the meaning a little.

Or to steal from someone else, Si deus est proprie officium nemo certus officium fecit. [If god does his job properly, no one is sure he has done his job.]


I'm not sure the book is still in print if you wish to look at the actual system, the copy I have is so old it's pages have changed colour and it's falling apart from age, however I could detail the important parts if you'd like [grading, how it decides it's penalties/why the penalties are those numbers etc]

NichG
2014-01-04, 06:08 AM
I'm curious as to why you would say that manipulating the probability of an event occurring is violating natural law, when it is clearly not. For example my keyboard has a non-zero possibility of each key that I'm typing being hit, and as I type them I alter that probability to a perfect chance of having occurred. We do things that manipulate the probability of large systems all the time, literally all the time, if you account for our affects on a large scale or our affects in terms of the butterfly affect, controlling that sort of relationship isn't unrealistic or impossible, just something we have yet to be able to attain. Just because technology or magical systems for something do not exist at this time don't make them impossible.

Its all about the entropy cost and the ability to exert pressure on events with the required precision. In a chaotic system, the amount of precision I need to have in order to achieve a specific 'butterfly effect' result increases exponentially with time - this is actually the mathematical definition of chaos (and its characterized by the system's Lyapunov exponent).

So what this means is that, if e.g. targeting a specific coordinate in phase space 1 second from now requires I control the system to within 1mm, then targeting it 2 seconds from now might require 0.1mm precision, and 10 seconds would then require precision down to 0.1 picometers. This is roughly 10 times the radius of a proton. So that basically means you can't use subtle manipulations over very long times to build up a lot of leverage.

So okay, you just want something to happen 'now'. Well, the problem is that many of the sorts of outcomes that seem like fair game for magic (make something blow up) are going to be highly improbable. By highly improbable I don't mean like a 1 in a million chance, I mean numbers like 10^(-10^20). If we take the phase space of the system and now divide it up into regions, we can roughly say that the fraction of the feasible phase space that leads to the desired outcome (in the near-future since we can't go to very long times anyhow) is proportional to the probability of that outcome. The upside is that we may have a lot of particles to play with, which expands the volume of the phase space, but the downside is that if we want to achieve some sort of 'extensive' effect (e.g. making all the dirt in a lump blow up) then the improbability also scales exactly the same way as the phase space volume increases.

The end result is that, again, we would need basically unattainable precision in order to pick out very unlikely possibilities - which most things are.

If you have a small magnet, can you alter a coin flip so that its always heads? Probably. Can you make a pound of dirt suddenly undergo nuclear fusion and blow up? No, not really, no matter how good your computers are or even how good your manipulators are, you're easily going to be under the uncertainty limit.

Your best bet for this sort of probability manipulation would be space-like trajectories through wormholes using Novikov's Self-Consistency Principle to force unlikely events to occur as they are the only self-consistent ones, but the problem is that iirc wormholes have an energy singularity when they go from time-like trajectories to space-like trajectories, so actually preparing these things isn't feasible in our understanding of physics.



Furthermore I think you're applying the laws of nature thing, to things that are not actually laws, but rather theorems, which have exceptions. The laws generally do not, it's a more complex system. But again we are always manipulating the probability that something will occur, all of the time, sometimes without even our knowledge. All things factor into a probability, and being able to access a system of magic that makes those sort of probabilities comprehensible is possibly enough to manipulate them. Adding in a force that is aware of the effects of various things with the ability to alter them, could conceivably create a realized system of magic in line with natural laws.

I've actually written a (computer) game where the gimmick is basically 'you have full knowledge of the deterministic outcome of the forces you exert on your character', where you're bouncing around and trying to get to a goal. You can do some crazy trajectories that get you there, but the phase space is still still fairly tame.

Compare this with, e.g., stuff that people usually do in computational chemistry, where they're trying to encourage rare reactions to go forward by adding biases to the system and then backing out the true probabilities by taking into account how hard it would be to obtain those biases from random fluctuations. State of there art there is maybe 10^(-30) to 10^(-60) range, and there we're basically talking about forces that you couldn't really exert in real life - it only works because its a computer program and you have perfect control of every force experienced by every particle, all the time. But you basically can't actually do that in real life - you can't push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt, because those forces have to originate from somewhere.

And of course, 'make a pound of dirt explode' or 'make a rock suddenly fly forward and strike someone' is in the 10^(-10^24) range - every particle (of which there are ~10^24 in a pound of dirt) has to simultaneously do the exact right thing to make the event happen. At that point, you might as well just give all your enemies an aneurysm, since its a much more probable event.



Again if something can happen in the real world, it would work under my system, things can spontaneously explode, so creating a fireball is possible. But things can't spring into existence, so creating or destroying matter is not. Conservation of momentum is preserved for all things, so that if you pick something up using magic, there is a force directed downwards or outwards to reflect that. There is no reason why such a system could not exist in the real world. In fact we've created machines that do many of those things. There are explosives, there are grain explosions, human beings have manipulated the probability simply by interacting with them. I'm not sure why you are arguing this is impossible when it in fact happens, things that happen are possible.


You're arguing against using machines for it though. Thats the real problem. You're saying 'because a machine can do it, its okay for it to happen without a machine'. But machines are actually the way that natural law is manipulated so that things happen. Forces don't just come out of nowhere - they have to be applied. There are certain limits on how those forces can be generated and directed. The result is, if you want to make a device that, say, ionizes a gas, its going to do so by projecting energy into a space such that, statistically, the electrons are more likely to spend time off the atoms than on the atoms.

Its not just going to say 'let all the electrons spontaneously decide to jump off their atoms'.

Its conceptually a lot harder to break the laws of probability than the laws of physics. I can suggest quite a few different plausible ways around the lightspeed limit, for example, but its quite another thing to devise a way to beat thermodynamics. If you tell me 'I have a machine that can let me travel back in time' or 'I have a machine that produces an antigravity field' I would give it far more credence than if you tell me 'I have a machine that reduces the entropy of the universe on average'.

Edit:

Anyhow, this is all moot if you don't actually care for a 'perfectly realistic' magic system. Its much easier to make a magic system that satisfies, e.g., 3 or 4 things about the real world that have the most dire consequences than it is to make something that could 'actually exist'.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-01-04, 06:29 AM
Its conceptually a lot harder to break the laws of probability than the laws of physics. I can suggest quite a few different plausible ways around the lightspeed limit, for example, but its quite another thing to devise a way to beat thermodynamics. If you tell me 'I have a machine that can let me travel back in time' or 'I have a machine that produces an antigravity field' I would give it far more credence than if you tell me 'I have a machine that reduces the entropy of the universe on average'.
I'd hope nobody would believe that! The universe is a big place. I'd also like to not be around a machine that could decrease the average entropy of the universe.

Anyhow, this is all moot if you don't actually care for a 'perfectly realistic' magic system. Its much easier to make a magic system that satisfies, e.g., 3 or 4 things about the real world that have the most dire consequences than it is to make something that could 'actually exist'.
That's the same thing that I figured, more or less. Toss out some weird exception to the 'rules', and worry about how it interacts with the most seriously consequential tenets of physics rather than is consistent with absolutely every principle.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 06:39 AM
Its all about the entropy cost and the ability to exert pressure on events with the required precision. In a chaotic system, the amount of precision I need to have in order to achieve a specific 'butterfly effect' result increases exponentially with time - this is actually the mathematical definition of chaos (and its characterized by the system's Lyapunov exponent).

So what this means is that, if e.g. targeting a specific coordinate in phase space 1 second from now requires I control the system to within 1mm, then targeting it 2 seconds from now might require 0.1mm precision, and 10 seconds would then require precision down to 0.1 picometers. This is roughly 10 times the radius of a proton. So that basically means you can't use subtle manipulations over very long times to build up a lot of leverage.

Well you're arguing that something is impossible based on the grounds that none of our current computation systems are capable of that level of precision. That seems like that's not really a related argument. The level of precision attainable in a system is not limited by our current ability to manipulate things. Ergo it's not an unrealistic thing to assume that things could be so manipulated with a more advanced system.



So okay, you just want something to happen 'now'. Well, the problem is that many of the sorts of outcomes that seem like fair game for magic (make something blow up) are going to be highly improbable. By highly improbable I don't mean like a 1 in a million chance, I mean numbers like 10^(-10^20). If we take the phase space of the system and now divide it up into regions, we can roughly say that the fraction of the feasible phase space that leads to the desired outcome (in the near-future since we can't go to very long times anyhow) is proportional to the probability of that outcome. The upside is that we may have a lot of particles to play with, which expands the volume of the phase space, but the downside is that if we want to achieve some sort of 'extensive' effect (e.g. making all the dirt in a lump blow up) then the improbability also scales exactly the same way as the phase space volume increases.

So again your main argument is that it's not feasible for humans in the current spectrum, which is not something I'm arguing for, I'm arguing that the system is possible. Do you disagree that with sufficient computational power such a system could exist? Since the crux of your argument seems to rest on our inability to do this rather than on any physical law that would prevent it.



The end result is that, again, we would need basically unattainable precision in order to pick out very unlikely possibilities - which most things are.


Unattainable currently, with our technology, but not necessarily with magic, you're making an argument against fictional technology based on the fact that current technology can't replicate it, that's an argument that's not exactly sound.

You can say "certain things are impossible", but "we have never built a system that can manage the degree of control to manage that" is not at all equivalent, not on any grounds. You are arguing that the control is impossible, but there is no reasoning that would rule that the degree of control is impossible in all situations with any technology.



If you have a small magnet, can you alter a coin flip so that its always heads? Probably. Can you make a pound of dirt suddenly undergo nuclear fusion and blow up? No, not really, no matter how good your computers are or even how good your manipulators are, you're easily going to be under the uncertainty limit.

My computers can be as good as I want them to be, because I'm inventing them, it's magic. I can have computers that are capable of almost impossible things, just not impossible things, you're arguing based on our current technology, which has no bearing on this particular argument.



Your best bet for this sort of probability manipulation would be space-like trajectories through wormholes using Novikov's Self-Consistency Principle to force unlikely events to occur as they are the only self-consistent ones, but the problem is that iirc wormholes have an energy singularity when they go from time-like trajectories to space-like trajectories, so actually preparing these things isn't feasible in our understanding of physics.

Well the you could theoretically have solved that particular problem, since our understanding isn't the limiting factor, any more than it would be in Star Trek, it's not a violation of a law, just something we see as impossible or improbable with current technology. I'm not sure why you continue to identify these things as synonymous, they aren't. You can do extremely improbable things with the right equipment, without violating natural laws as they exist. The problem is that you are conflating things that are improbable with things that are impossible.



I've actually written a (computer) game where the gimmick is basically 'you have full knowledge of the deterministic outcome of the forces you exert on your character', where you're bouncing around and trying to get to a goal. You can do some crazy trajectories that get you there, but the phase space is still still fairly tame.

That sounds pretty interesting, although difficult, full knowledge != full manipulation though, or the same degree of manipulation that might be possible in a future system.



Compare this with, e.g., stuff that people usually do in computational chemistry, where they're trying to encourage rare reactions to go forward by adding biases to the system and then backing out the true probabilities by taking into account how hard it would be to obtain those biases from random fluctuations. State of there art there is maybe 10^(-30) to 10^(-60) range, and there we're basically talking about forces that you couldn't really exert in real life - it only works because its a computer program and you have perfect control of every force experienced by every particle, all the time. But you basically can't actually do that in real life - you can't push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt, because those forces have to originate from somewhere.

We can't push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt, because we have created no system that can handle it. But are you arguing that it is impossible to push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt? Because I would argue that it isn't. You're arguing based on our inability to do things that they are impossible. In fact while I'm not familiar with computational chemistry, the fact that these people are able to get grants and funding means that the community at large doesn't believe that these things will be impossible.



And of course, 'make a pound of dirt explode' or 'make a rock suddenly fly forward and strike someone' is in the 10^(-10^24) range - every particle (of which there are ~10^24 in a pound of dirt) has to simultaneously do the exact right thing to make the event happen. At that point, you might as well just give all your enemies an aneurysm, since its a much more probable event.


Again it's incredibly unlikely, but for some reason you continue to conflate "unlikely" with "impossible" even an event that is nearly impossible, can still happen with the natural laws in place without violating our understanding of the laws of physics, we aren't limited by our understanding in the construction of the system, only by what is theoretically possible.



You're arguing against using machines for it though. Thats the real problem. You're saying 'because a machine can do it, its okay for it to happen without a machine'. But machines are actually the way that natural law is manipulated so that things happen. Forces don't just come out of nowhere - they have to be applied. There are certain limits on how those forces can be generated and directed. The result is, if you want to make a device that, say, ionizes a gas, its going to do so by projecting energy into a space such that, statistically, the electrons are more likely to spend time off the atoms than on the atoms.

Well obviously, we're going to have to add something to what is existing to create this scenario, it might be tantamount to machines, but you're arguing that because you don't understand a particular process that it cannot happen, which is a non sequitur at best. Magic or arcane wrote, could theoretically manipulate the butterfly effect or the like, probability manipulation is certainly not impossible, and even you've admitted that, you just suggested that it was now impossible because we can't do it, which isn't exactly a reasonable conclusion to make.



Its not just going to say 'let all the electrons spontaneously decide to jump off their atoms'.

Its conceptually a lot harder to break the laws of probability than the laws of physics. I can suggest quite a few different plausible ways around the lightspeed limit, for example, but its quite another thing to devise a way to beat thermodynamics. If you tell me 'I have a machine that can let me travel back in time' or 'I have a machine that produces an antigravity field' I would give it far more credence than if you tell me 'I have a machine that reduces the entropy of the universe on average'.'

Well you could still say, I tap into a machine that alters probabilities on a small scale, such a machine could exist. Furthermore, manipulating probability being possible is certainly a thing, as we've pointed out the chaos effect is a real thing, that can cause effects over a large area, if you have a good enough predictive model, you could theoretically control the chaos effect and create the results that you desire.

You still wouldn't be able to do anything that would be physically impossible however, just things that are improbable or unlikely.



Edit:

Anyhow, this is all moot if you don't actually care for a 'perfectly realistic' magic system. Its much easier to make a magic system that satisfies, e.g., 3 or 4 things about the real world that have the most dire consequences than it is to make something that could 'actually exist'.

I'm not sure why you're conflating things that we can't do now with things that are impossible. Because they're aren't necessarily the same. At least not to my thinking.


I'd hope nobody would believe that! The universe is a big place. I'd also like to not be around a machine that could decrease the average entropy of the universe.


But we don't have to decrease the entropy over the entire universe. Furthermore for the entropy of the universe to be a problem the universe has to be a closed system, and that could really go either way, particularly in a fantasy setting. All we have to do is alter probability in small ways, we could even preserve entropy by simultaneously increasing randomness in other locations, we just need a system capable of that, and magic could certainly manage it.

NichG
2014-01-04, 07:09 AM
I'm not arguing that its infeasible given our current computational ability. I'm arguing its unfeasible given the lower-bound on precision for the manipulation of matter given by the uncertainty principle. Basically, there are hard bounds on how much leverage you can get by running predictions on a system to find the right place to 'push' in order to get it to do an improbable thing. Basically, I'm not arguing its 'hard' to push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt to attain fusion. I'm arguing it is provably impossible given quantum mechanical uncertainty bounds.

Manipulate a coin toss or a dice roll? Sure. But if you want to explode a pound of dirt, look elsewhere.

Incidentally, there are actually hard limits on computation. Logic operations basically compress the phase space, which costs a certain lower-bound amount of entropy to do. It's another limit to keep in mind if you really want a 'could actually exist in the real world' system.

But this kind of stuff is why I'm saying, don't bother for a 'perfectly realistic' system. There are a lot of bounds in physics, thermodynamics, information theory, etc that will restrict your system in ways that are fairly tricky to take into account, much less actually apply during a game session. Most of these limits only really come into play if you try to force things in ways that they don't naturally go, like trying to achieve fusion in a lump of material or causing a rock to spontaneously jump to the left. Its much easier to cause the rock to fuse by compressing it and heating it to a billion degrees.

But if you just say, in my universe there's the Reizsh Interaction that catalyzes fusion, thats good enough for tabletop gaming.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 07:21 AM
I'm not arguing that its infeasible given our current computational ability. I'm arguing its unfeasible given the lower-bound on precision for the manipulation of matter given by the uncertainty principle. Basically, there are hard bounds on how much leverage you can get by running predictions on a system to find the right place to 'push' in order to get it to do an improbable thing. Basically, I'm not arguing its 'hard' to push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt to attain fusion. I'm arguing it is provably impossible given quantum mechanical uncertainty bounds.[Quote]

I don't think that is necessarily provable impossible, and besides which that could be the point of handwaving. We're arguing for something that is theoretically impossible, not actually impossible.

[QUOTE=NichG;16723459]
Manipulate a coin toss or a dice roll? Sure. But if you want to explode a pound of dirt, look elsewhere.

There's exploding rock that happens in real life. Under the right conditions, ergo replicating those conditions isn't impossible.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jav4-GLXecQ

Also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXcNqwDYbM

There's a man made lava-pour, which requires much higher energy and temperature than the sort of lava explosions that involve volatiles in the rock.

Furthermore there are volatiles in rock, so suggesting that a pound of dirt exploding is impossible, is pretty out there, suggesting that it may be extremely difficult to incite fusion, sure that may be very unlikely, but exploding a pound of dirt, certainly possible.



Incidentally, there are actually hard limits on computation. Logic operations basically compress the phase space, which costs a certain lower-bound amount of entropy to do. It's another limit to keep in mind if you really want a 'could actually exist in the real world' system.

Those are however not laws, and if the computational engine exists in another space, or throughout time then there are theoretically ways to exceed that bound. We're not talking laws here, but rather theoretical maximums, which are different things. You can theoretically exceed a theoretical maximum.



But this kind of stuff is why I'm saying, don't bother for a 'perfectly realistic' system. There are a lot of bounds in physics, thermodynamics, information theory, etc that will restrict your system in ways that are fairly tricky to take into account, much less actually apply during a game session. Most of these limits only really come into play if you try to force things in ways that they don't naturally go, like trying to achieve fusion in a lump of material or causing a rock to spontaneously jump to the left. Its much easier to cause the rock to fuse by compressing it and heating it to a billion degrees.

Well wind can push rocks, if you want to push a rock, manipulating gravity or wind is easier than manipulating the rock, and that's certainly possible in a real world system.



But if you just say, in my universe there's the Reizsh Interaction that catalyzes fusion, thats good enough for tabletop gaming.

Certainly, and that's probably what I'm looking for, I'm just saying that it is possible to create a system that is not inconsistent with physical laws, while of course it's going to be vastly improbable, and it won't exist in real life but such a thing is certainly possible.

Edit: Anyhoo, I think we're off topic, as I think we have different bounds for what may be realistically possible in a system, let's say we want a system that doesn't grossly violate the laws of physics, or if transferred could theoretically work in an Earth like system how would you go about that?


Glad to help.
And it'll have wizards take up the motto: "The easier it is, the less likely they'll find you." or some such...
I wonder what that is in latin...
Hmm, "Facilius est facere, ut minus sint tibi" would work for a motto, might want to fiddle with the meaning a little.

Or to steal from someone else, Si deus est proprie officium nemo certus officium fecit. [If god does his job properly, no one is sure he has done his job.]


I'm not sure the book is still in print if you wish to look at the actual system, the copy I have is so old it's pages have changed colour and it's falling apart from age, however I could detail the important parts if you'd like [grading, how it decides it's penalties/why the penalties are those numbers etc]

That would be excellent, thank you!

Grek
2014-01-04, 07:45 AM
If you want magic that is "realistic" you pretty much have to have your setting be the fantasy version of the Matrix. Reality is a dream by the Gods and magic is cheat codes that let you be Agent Smith for a while.

Alroy_Kamenwati
2014-01-04, 07:53 AM
I can only think of one idea of magic as physics is Full Metal Alchemist but I'm not the best at science. Check out their law of equivalent exchange it might be what you're looking for, I hope I helped some. If not I'm sorry, I'm sure there are smarter people than me who can help you more.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 08:10 AM
If you want magic that is "realistic" you pretty much have to have your setting be the fantasy version of the Matrix. Reality is a dream by the Gods and magic is cheat codes that let you be Agent Smith for a while.

Again not necessarily and in the matrix they could change the rules, I'm saying that I'd like to have magic where there is no direct conflict with laws of physics, which again is certainly possible on the onset.

NichG
2014-01-04, 08:22 AM
I don't think that is necessarily provable impossible, and besides which that could be the point of handwaving. We're arguing for something that is theoretically impossible, not actually impossible.


What I mean by provably is that it is both theoretically and actually impossible. If you need 10^-30 m and 10^-30 m/s resolution on an electron to achieve an effect, that particular method to achieving the effect is impossible because you cannot do better than delta-x * delta-v = hbar/2, and hbar is about 10^-34 J.s.

Does that mean you can't achieve the effect some other way? No, of course not. As you pointed out, you can blow a rock around with the wind pretty easily, even if you can't achieve the same result by 'manipulating the probability of its individual particles'.

In your lava examples, for instance, the effect of 'exploding rock' is achieved by pumping energy in from other sources - in the first case, due to geological pressures and stresses; in the second case, its the thermal gradient between the pre-heated rock and the ice. These methods work along lines which are easy within the physical and mathematical laws of the universe.

Serpentinization would be another good example - its rock that has readily accessible chemical energy with a very small (relative to fusion) energy barrier. Because there is energy available and accessible, the rock can 'burn' chemically and release that energy. But if you take, e.g., a cup of liquid helium, while it has a lot of potential energy due to the possibility of completing a fusion pathway towards iron, that energy is inaccessible at conditions on earth. If you take that helium, vaporize it and shoot it with lasers to compress it to the conditions of the inside of the sun, then you get fusion. But you actually have to do those things, or something equivalent at least, to get at that energy.



Those are however not laws, and if the computational engine exists in another space, or throughout time then there are theoretically ways to exceed that bound.

Its not so much that you exceed the bound, but rather that you're pay for the bound in some way. This basically comes back to the 'framework' suggestion - there is a supply of energy/entropy that has been put in place to be tapped via an interface, which appears as 'magic' to those who do not understand the interface; one can then tap it to achieve an effect.

I would still say though that its better to go for the easy solutions than the hard ones, or you're going to have something that is 'unrealistic' by virtue of how far you have to go out of your way to make it work. Its a lot easier to justify people bouncing electrical signals off of the ionosphere, using their spine as an antenna than it is to justify each person having a wormhole in their head.



Edit: Anyhoo, I think we're off topic, as I think we have different bounds for what may be realistically possible in a system, let's say we want a system that doesn't grossly violate the laws of physics, or if transferred could theoretically work in an Earth like system how would you go about that?


Well, the main unrealistic thing about magic systems tends to be 'spurious sentience'. Actually I kind of take that to be one of two defining aspects of 'magic vs technology'. Magic is almost always 'personal power', as opposed to 'externalized power'; its also almost always something that makes cognitively complex tasks simple while at the same time often having a hard time with cognitively simple tasks.

Let me give you an example of this - take something like 'this spell harms only people who feel guilty'. Its a very complex task to determine and evaluate the feeling of guilt - it requires basically that the spell be able to read out people's emotions at the very least, and also requires a fairly complex targeting system. If you have something like that in the system, but not a spell that 'lets you read emotions', then it seems odd. Furthermore, if you do have a spell that reads emotions, it should conceivably be far far more complex than a spell that, e.g., starts a fire.

Something like Wish is perhaps the worst offender - its a spell that understands 'what you mean' and then figures out a way to make the world 'that way'. It basically requires the equivalent of a sentience to process how the spell should actually take effect. For a 'physical magic', you don't want to have that sort of spurious sentience. So you're looking for much more basic effects.

The next thing I would do is to make sure that the magic works consistently and originates from a small set of principles. Rather than saying 'can I do this in the system?', build the system outwards from the principles. For example, lets posit a single change to 'our physics':

- It is possible to connect two points in space as if they were adjacent, and disconnect them, as an act of will.

We will also require:

- This process obeys energy and momentum conservation by generating forces at the point of connection in order to preserve those laws.

From this basic change, you can derive an entire magic system. Creating a portal with one end up high and the other at ground level will create a repulsive force around the portal mouth, because you have to pay the momentum and energy change due to the change in altitude to cross the portal mouth - that lets you make a spontaneous kinetic shield. Creating a portal with one end in a hot place and the other in a cold place can create winds, be used as the basis of an engine. Creating a portal on either side of a spinning object would similarly have interesting effects due to the momentum change incurred by passing through, which could be used to fling things around.

Edit: Basically, you're looking for 'consistency' and for magic that 'looks like physics'.

Osiris
2014-01-04, 08:26 AM
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

So I guess in view of this the answer is either: Yes, magic is possible. Fireball? firearms, explosives, rockets: check! Sending? radiocommunication: check! Illusions? parabolic loudspeaker, (holographic) projectors, stage magic: check! Creation? Advanced chemistry/ nuclear physics, 3d printers: check! Charm person? Sodium Pentothal, hypnotics, brainwashing combined with advanced (future) neuro science and technology: check(ish)!

Or the answer is: No, magic is doing something unexplainable by or opposed to natural laws. So by it's very definition it's in opposition, it is incompatible, it is the opposite of science.

Yup. Magic and Physics don't mix.
http://agc.deskslave.org/comic_viewer.html?goNumber=369
See the third panel

AMFV
2014-01-04, 08:40 AM
What I mean by provably is that it is both theoretically and actually impossible. If you need 10^-30 m and 10^-30 m/s resolution on an electron to achieve an effect, that particular method to achieving the effect is impossible because you cannot do better than delta-x * delta-v = hbar/2, and hbar is about 10^-34 J.s.

Well we're arguing impossibility based on incapability still, which may or may not be something that's restricted, certainly we're looking at something that's probably impossible, so it should probably not be in the system.



Does that mean you can't achieve the effect some other way? No, of course not. As you pointed out, you can blow a rock around with the wind pretty easily, even if you can't achieve the same result by 'manipulating the probability of its individual particles'.

True, I wasn't arguing for manipulation at a particle level, which I think may have been the source of our arguments. I was arguing for manipulation at a macro level.



In your lava examples, for instance, the effect of 'exploding rock' is achieved by pumping energy in from other sources - in the first case, due to geological pressures and stresses; in the second case, its the thermal gradient between the pre-heated rock and the ice. These methods work along lines which are easy within the physical and mathematical laws of the universe.


The second example was more to show that humans could produce similar effects. The exploding rock is actually volatiles from the rock in the first example. In the Magma you have actual volatiles so you can have an explosion from that, it's actually the reduction in pressure that creates the explosion.



Serpentinization would be another good example - its rock that has readily accessible chemical energy with a very small (relative to fusion) energy barrier. Because there is energy available and accessible, the rock can 'burn' chemically and release that energy. But if you take, e.g., a cup of liquid helium, while it has a lot of potential energy due to the possibility of completing a fusion pathway towards iron, that energy is inaccessible at conditions on earth. If you take that helium, vaporize it and shoot it with lasers to compress it to the conditions of the inside of the sun, then you get fusion. But you actually have to do those things, or something equivalent at least, to get at that energy.

Well obviously the biggest problem in the system is the presence of energy, so that would probably be our area of handwaving, no?



Its not so much that you exceed the bound, but rather that you're pay for the bound in some way. This basically comes back to the 'framework' suggestion - there is a supply of energy/entropy that has been put in place to be tapped via an interface, which appears as 'magic' to those who do not understand the interface; one can then tap it to achieve an effect.


I think I was agreeing with that or arguing for something similar a few posts ago, this whole thing has gotten kind of confusing to be honest. I like this idea, although I'm not sure I liked the original nanite suggestion (mostly because it smacks too much of the Phantom Menace). So we could add an extra source of energy, kind of like the ether, or an alternate dimension source of energy, or even some kind of religious entity.



I would still say though that its better to go for the easy solutions than the hard ones, or you're going to have something that is 'unrealistic' by virtue of how far you have to go out of your way to make it work. Its a lot easier to justify people bouncing electrical signals off of the ionosphere, using their spine as an antenna than it is to justify each person having a wormhole in their head.

Maybe, although neither are really that unrealistic in the end. Although the wormhole thing could work if we work around certain things. Mostly I'm looking for the handwaving being that we make things exist instead of that we alter the rules of things.



Well, the main unrealistic thing about magic systems tends to be 'spurious sentience'. Actually I kind of take that to be one of two defining aspects of 'magic vs technology'. Magic is almost always 'personal power', as opposed to 'externalized power'; its also almost always something that makes cognitively complex tasks simple while at the same time often having a hard time with cognitively simple tasks.

Well we could argue for a system of magic where it's channeling some kind of force, that works like a lot of systems, such as the wheel of time system, or other things. Particularly if we have a sentient energy source. Perhaps some kind of God Computer, which could explain the massive computational power.



Let me give you an example of this - take something like 'this spell harms only people who feel guilty'. Its a very complex task to determine and evaluate the feeling of guilt - it requires basically that the spell be able to read out people's emotions at the very least, and also requires a fairly complex targeting system. If you have something like that in the system, but not a spell that 'lets you read emotions', then it seems odd. Furthermore, if you do have a spell that reads emotions, it should conceivably be far far more complex than a spell that, e.g., starts a fire.

Agreed. I agree with this 100%. In a system such as I am proposing Detect Guilt would likely not exist.



Something like Wish is perhaps the worst offender - its a spell that understands 'what you mean' and then figures out a way to make the world 'that way'. It basically requires the equivalent of a sentience to process how the spell should actually take effect. For a 'physical magic', you don't want to have that sort of spurious sentience. So you're looking for much more basic effects.

Well if we have a "God Computer" or other powerful force that can interpret we could have that sort of thing then, so would we need this for this sort of system or do you think we could have something else for this to work?



The next thing I would do is to make sure that the magic works consistently and originates from a small set of principles. Rather than saying 'can I do this in the system?', build the system outwards from the principles. For example, lets posit a single change to 'our physics':

- It is possible to connect two points in space as if they were adjacent, and disconnect them, as an act of will.

We will also require:

- This process obeys energy and momentum conservation by generating forces at the point of connection in order to preserve those laws.

From this basic change, you can derive an entire magic system. Creating a portal with one end up high and the other at ground level will create a repulsive force around the portal mouth, because you have to pay the momentum and energy change due to the change in altitude to cross the portal mouth - that lets you make a spontaneous kinetic shield. Creating a portal with one end in a hot place and the other in a cold place can create winds, be used as the basis of an engine. Creating a portal on either side of a spinning object would similarly have interesting effects due to the momentum change incurred by passing through, which could be used to fling things around.

Edit: Basically, you're looking for 'consistency' and for magic that 'looks like physics'.

Fairly similar, I'm mostly looking for magic that doesn't directly violate the laws of physics. Or "If Aliens Showed Up with This as Technology," it wouldn't seem completely impossible.


Yup. Magic and Physics don't mix.
http://agc.deskslave.org/comic_viewer.html?goNumber=369
See the third panel

Well D&D and Physics don't, I'm trying to create a system that will, for ****s and giggles.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 09:16 AM
Well we're arguing impossibility based on incapability still, which may or may not be something that's restricted, certainly we're looking at something that's probably impossible, so it should probably not be in the system.

If you're going to toss out the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, might as well toss out most of the rest of science. The support for it is very, very solid. There's a fundamental limit to how small and consistently you can manipulate or measure matter.

It's tempting to think of probability as something easy to manipulate, but it isn't. Not when you are talking about actual physical uncertainty. It's one thing to talk about how you don't know what exactly you'll write on the computer in an hour or how many errors you'll make. That's perhaps a chaotic system...though the brain might be a lot more knowable than that, hard to say with our limited capabilities today. However, it is a totally different thing when you talk about manipulating over a hundred thousand, billion, billion, atoms....figure out what they are doing, and figure out how to adjust them so they do what you want (e.g. explode outward).

It's ok if you don't know a lot about thermodynamics and quantum physics. But rather than give the guy who does a hard time, maybe you should be trying to get some insight from him.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-04, 09:25 AM
I'd suggest maybe looking into the Dresden Files, there is a Fate setting based on it iirc. Magic is essentially manipulation of already existing energies, either through storage and release or redistribution (okay, not all of their magic works like this, but anything involving fire or cold or force does). Want to blast a ton of fire at something? You redirect the heat from everything around you into a blast, leaving everything behind you frozen over while everything you aim at gets blasted by fire. The main character has a ring that builds up kinetic energy as he swings his arm, making walking/running unnoticably harder, but building up a decent amount of force over a few days that he can release to enhance a punch.

The comic Unsounded works on something interesting as well, in that magic draws "aspects" from things nearby and redirects them. You can take the sound of a waterfall away from it temporarily and release it as a sonic blast, or use the edge of a sword to cut through something.

In both of these systems energy is neither created nor destroyed, just redirected, stored, moved. I think this sort of magic system might be easier to justify under your proposal. Just handwave some sort of advancement that allows people to detect/manipulate existing energies in a new way via sixth sense (how many senses do we have these days? I feel like last I heard it was 7?).

AMFV
2014-01-04, 09:29 AM
If you're going to toss out the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, might as well toss out most of the rest of science. The support for it is very, very solid. There's a fundamental limit to how small and consistently you can manipulate or measure matter.

It's tempting to think of probability as something easy to manipulate, but it isn't. Not when you are talking about actual physical uncertainty. It's one thing to talk about how you don't know what exactly you'll write on the computer in an hour or how many errors you'll make. That's perhaps a chaotic system...though the brain might be a lot more knowable than that, hard to say with our limited capabilities today. However, it is a totally different thing when you talk about manipulating over a hundred thousand, billion, billion, atoms....figure out what they are doing, and figure out how to adjust them so they do what you want (e.g. explode outward).

It's ok if you don't know a lot about thermodynamics and quantum physics. But rather than give the guy who does a hard time, maybe you should be trying to get some insight from him.

Well he's talking about manipulation on a particle level, which is I think our point of confusion as I pointed out. I do know something about physics and thermodynamics, not a lot, but a little bit. I know enough to know that things spontaneously combusting is a thing that happens. If you're arguing that something that happens is impossible then that's probably a flawed argument.

And again assuming computational power is limited by our current ability is a little bit challenging, as I've point out we could use a "God in The Machine" type thing. We could have a force that allows to shift probability in ways that are complex. Just because you can't manipulate atoms or model atoms, does not mean that it's impossible. A computer can model more complicated systems than the human brain can, so a more advanced computer could model even more complex things than that.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 09:49 AM
Well he's talking about manipulation on a particle level, which is I think our point of confusion as I pointed out. I do know something about physics and thermodynamics, not a lot, but a little bit. I know enough to know that things spontaneously combusting is a thing that happens. If you're arguing that something that happens is impossible then that's probably a flawed argument.

Things don't combust without reason. A D&D-like Fireball spell is not something that is physically possible without the necessary potential energy that can be released.


And again assuming computational power is limited by our current ability is a little bit challenging, as I've point out we could use a "God in The Machine" type thing. We could have a force that allows to shift probability in ways that are complex. Just because you can't manipulate atoms or model atoms, does not mean that it's impossible. A computer can model more complicated systems than the human brain can, so a more advanced computer could model even more complex things than that.

It's not a matter of computational power at all. It's a matter of the essential nature of reality. It is that we can't make such changes today. It is that the ability to EVER do something like that seems to be about as likely as gravity suddenly disappearing. It is not theoretically possible to gather the information necessary to even begin a manipulation like that. It is more realistic to talk about making a wormhole appear and depositing an explosive where you want an explosion -- but given the energies needed for a wormhole (which itself is a hypothetical entity) that would be a bit crazy.

Fundamentally you're going to have to decide what parts of physics you are willing to break. Right now it seems like you're willing to toss all of quantum mechanics out the window. Not necessarily a bad choice in some respects, but as far as reality goes it is perhaps the are area of physics that has the most solid experimental support.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 09:59 AM
Things don't combust without reason. A D&D-like Fireball spell is not something that is physically possible without the necessary potential energy that can be released.

Actually a D&D fireball results from a small particle being shot at something. Which seems pretty realistic...

Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_explosion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_combustion

Lots of things have the potential energy to combust. Things like rocks as was shown in the Volcano example, things like dust, things like Potatoes... Are you saying that applying energy to something is impossible? Why couldn't the Mage use magic to apply energy to something? I mean you can use a bomb to apply energy to things, or a microwave, or the sun, or your hand, or a fan, or any number of things.

You are arguing for the impossibility of something that happens, which is kind of ludicrous if you think of it.

Furthermore, explosion from a projectile...

http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/rpg-7-launcher.gif

There you go. Since in 3.5 they use a smaller projectile, it's just a matter of getting more efficient explosive, but, hey, magic. That's certainly a realistic thing comparatively.



It's not a matter of computational power at all. It's a matter of the essential nature of reality. It is that we can't make such changes today. It is that the ability to EVER do something like that seems to be about as likely as gravity suddenly disappearing. It is not theoretically possible to gather the information necessary to even begin a manipulation like that. It is more realistic to talk about making a wormhole appear and depositing an explosive where you want an explosion -- but given the energies needed for a wormhole (which itself is a hypothetical entity) that would be a bit crazy.

We manipulate macro scale probability everyday, I change dozens of probabilities to a hundred percent chance of occurring. You're talking about manipulating probability on a particulate scale, which is probably impossible, or at the very least very difficult. Of course you can model particles, which means that a certain degree of information is possible. Again the energies required is going to be the largest problem, but it's certainly not an insurmountable thing.

Also gravity, being a fundamental law of the universe seems more set in stone, than assuming that we'd be unable to manipulate things on a macro scale. Which occurs on Earth. See: Earthquakes caused by Fracking, Holes in the Ozone layer, global climate change. There is clearly some macro change that is attainable, so your argument regarding probabilities only applies to manipulation on a particulate scale.

Grek
2014-01-04, 10:36 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_explosion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_combustion
Why couldn't the Mage use magic to apply energy to something? I mean you can use a bomb to apply energy to things, or a microwave, or the sun, or your hand, or a fan, or any number of things.
http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/rpg-7-launcher.gif
We manipulate macro scale probability everyday, I change dozens of probabilities to a hundred percent chance of occurring.
Earthquakes caused by Fracking, Holes in the Ozone layer, global climate change.

The problem with these examples isn't that the physics of them (they are obviously physically possible), but that they aren't magic. A rocket launcher does not make you a wizard. Fracking is not a magical ritual to produce earthquakes. It doesn't take a Mage to bring light to a room with lightbulbs.

Can a scientific sounding explanation be given for any particular power displayed by characters from your RPG of choice? Certainly. The problem is that once you give that explanation, you've moved from the Fantasy genre into the Science Fiction genre, and the mage has to be an highly advanced alien or a human scientist now.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 10:36 AM
I'm honestly not sure how relevant most of my response is, so I put it in spoilers.


There you go. Since in 3.5 they use a smaller projectile, it's just a matter of getting more efficient explosive, but, hey, magic. That's certainly a realistic thing comparatively.

I'm quite familiar with what you posted, but there are clearly aspects you have not considered. Yes, Fireball has a projectile...that comes from nowhere. There's not much a difference between that and not having a projectile at all really. Fireball violates the conservation of energy and a host of other laws. If you propose a magic plane of existent to explain where this energy comes from, then you're basically back to violating physics.


We manipulate macro scale probability everyday, I change dozens of probabilities to a hundred percent chance of occurring. You're talking about manipulating probability on a particulate scale, which is probably impossible, or at the very least very difficult. Of course you can model particles, which means that a certain degree of information is possible. Again the energies required is going to be the largest problem, but it's certainly not an insurmountable thing.

Not "probably impossible" but "IS IMPOSSIBLE." For someone who admits to know very little about this stuff you certainly seem to like acting like you know what you are talking about. No offense, but you don't. Modeling random behavior is easy, because you don't have to care about what the particles in the actual system are doing; you just need to have the model do something roughly equivalent. Do not confuse being able to model a phenomenon with actually being able to measure every aspect of that phenomenon. It doesn't matter if you have infinite energy, you are not going to be able to manipulate probability here like you think you can. Reality does not work that way at the quantum scale.


Also gravity, being a fundamental law of the universe seems more set in stone, than assuming that we'd be unable to manipulate things on a macro scale. Which occurs on Earth. See: Earthquakes caused by Fracking, Holes in the Ozone layer, global climate change. There is clearly some macro change that is attainable, so your argument regarding probabilities only applies to manipulation on a particulate scale.

And anything on a macro scale is going to require a lot of work that can't be done with a simple wave of a wand as best we understand it. There's a world of difference between saying that things can happen one way via vast infrastructure and/or machines, and then going on to saying that any yahoo can do the same with a stick. Anyhow, I was specifically referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle before.

You do seem a bit confused whether you are talking about magic or simply advanced science. There's a pretty huge difference, because technology sufficiently advanced is still technology, however a primitive might interpret it. Seems like you might just be going at technology disguised by a real world stage magician's completely mundane illusions.

I don't see how advanced technology with a bit of stage magic is actual Magic.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 10:49 AM
I'm honestly not sure how relevant most of my response is, so I put it in spoilers.

I'm quite familiar with what you posted, but there are clearly aspects you have not considered. Yes, Fireball has a projectile...that comes from nowhere. There's not much a difference between that and not having a projectile at all really. Fireball violates the conservation of energy and a host of other laws. If you propose a magic plane of existent to explain where this energy comes from, then you're basically back to violating physics.


Why does the existence of a magical plane violate physics? Obviously we're going to have to add some things to make magic work, but you could still have magic that doesn't exist. Fireball certainly doesn't violate the conservation of energy if you construct the projectile out of energy that the mage channels. That one is one that could work.



Not "probably impossible" but "IS IMPOSSIBLE." For someone who admits to know very little about this stuff you certainly seem to like acting like you know what you are talking about. No offense, but you don't. Modeling random behavior is easy, because you don't have to care about what the particles in the actual system are doing; you just need to have the model do something roughly equivalent. Do not confuse being able to model a phenomenon with actually being able to measure every aspect of that phenomenon. It doesn't matter if you have infinite energy, you are not going to be able to manipulate probability here like you think you can. Reality does not work that way at the quantum scale.

Well you can still manipulate reality at a macro scale, as I've said. I'm not sure why you continue to make a quantum argument when I've pointed out that the quantum argument isn't what I'm arguing. Being able to model a phenomena does however allow one to examine how certain things could affect it. Since we don't need to understand the entirety of the system to alter it. You don't need to have a complete model to predict how certain things would change the system.



And anything on a macro scale is going to require a lot of work that can't be done with a simple wave of a wand as best we understand it. There's a world of difference between saying that things can happen one way via vast infrastructure and/or machines, and then going on to saying that any yahoo can do the same with a stick. Anyhow, I was specifically referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle before.

Well you can have a magical infrastructure... I'm not sure why you'd simply wave that out of possibility. I'm asking what we would need to add to have a magical infrastructure. As I've established we need to have some source of magical energy, also the "God Machine" type thing might work a lot, which would work towards that whole conceptual idea.



You do seem a bit confused whether you are talking about magic or simply advanced science. There's a pretty huge difference, because technology sufficiently advanced is still technology, however a primitive might interpret it. Seems like you might just be going at technology disguised by a real world stage magician's completely mundane illusions.

I don't see how advanced technology with a bit of stage magic is actual Magic.

Well any magic could be advanced technology for it to work, or you could add something that would make it work, as I'm saying you could add a "God Machine" type thing, or a force that the mage accesses and can channel, that sort of thing. Which can manipulate things.

I'm not sure when there was a definition of actual magic that worked a specific way that would be opposed to what I'm proposing was introduced. I think that any magical system that works in physics and works with other things is likely to be very similar to a technological system, probably almost entirely indistinguishable as Arther C. Clarke pointed out.


The problem with these examples isn't that the physics of them (they are obviously physically possible), but that they aren't magic. A rocket launcher does not make you a wizard. Fracking is not a magical ritual to produce earthquakes. It doesn't take a Mage to bring light to a room with lightbulbs.

Can a scientific sounding explanation be given for any particular power displayed by characters from your RPG of choice? Certainly. The problem is that once you give that explanation, you've moved from the Fantasy genre into the Science Fiction genre, and the mage has to be an highly advanced alien or a human scientist now.

I disagree with that, there's a lot of systems that have you channel some sort of magical energy to affect the world, having that would make it magic. To my thinking, obviously if you're aiming for consistency it might move in that direction. But I don't think it would move to be science fiction unless it specifically is, I don't think it moves us out of fantasy.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-01-04, 10:57 AM
AMFV, just for clarification, I'm curious? What is the difference between the kind of magic you're looking for, and 'hard' science fiction? I honestly have a hard time seeing what your distinction is.

Maybe you're just interested in hard science fiction.

Grek
2014-01-04, 11:01 AM
If you're "channeling magical energy", than either that energy is coming from somewhere else (in which case you're not doing magic any more than you would be by "channeling electrical energy" to operate a flashlight) OR it comes from nowhere (in which case you're violating the laws of physics).

AMFV
2014-01-04, 11:01 AM
AMFV, just for clarification, I'm curious? What is the difference between the kind of magic you're looking for, and 'hard' science fiction? I honestly have a hard time seeing what your distinction is.

Maybe you're just interested in hard science fiction.

Well the setting for one. Also in a hard science fiction setting there is typically an understanding of the system the characters are using, by the characters. For example if you use a space ship you normally understand how they work. In this proposed setting that understanding might not be complete. It would be Arcane and people might understand the ritual of it, but not it's actual workings. To be honest some people might consider it science fiction, but it would certainly be magical. It'd be like having a psychic access to the technology. Or access to a divine entity or somesuch.


If you're "channeling magical energy", than either that energy is coming from somewhere else (in which case you're not doing magic any more than you would be by "channeling electrical energy" to operate a flashlight) OR it comes from nowhere (in which case you're violating the laws of physics).

In what sense is that true? If I call it magical energy and say I'm channeling it how does that stop working. Do you consider the magical system in Wheel of Time to be "magical" because it works by channeling and includes no energy from nowhere. so by your definition that system isn't magic either.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 11:52 AM
So are you ok with an alternate plane that may have laws different than our universe and a super intelligent machine that can monitor and respond for all manner of requests faster than light?

Is that correct?

AMFV
2014-01-04, 01:01 PM
So are you ok with an alternate plane that may have laws different than our universe and a super intelligent machine that can monitor and respond for all manner of requests faster than light?

Is that correct?

The alternate plane doesn't necessarily need different laws, and depending on the machines degree of omniscience or omnipresence it may not need to have an FTL response. Extracting energy from an infinite series of other planes or possibilities is certainly one way you could go that would allow for large energy extraction without violating the laws. If a God-Machine thing is omnipresent then it wouldn't need to have an FTL response (which is questionably possible anyways) if it is omniscient, then it might not, since it could predict your wish before it was made. Both of those are reasonably scientific options that don't require violations of the sort you're implying my system should require.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 01:03 PM
In that case, everything in D&D is probably fair game for spells.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-01-04, 01:06 PM
If you want something that makes sense and doesn't require a hand wave, you want a realistic game. If you want something that has a sciency sounding dose of handwavium, you're playing sci-fi. If you don't bother with the handwavium, save for calling it magic, then you have fantasy.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 01:14 PM
If you want something that makes sense and doesn't require a hand wave, you want a realistic game. If you want something that has a sciency sounding dose of handwavium, you're playing sci-fi. If you don't bother with the handwavium, save for calling it magic, then you have fantasy.

That's not exactly true... on all counts the science fiction - fantasy divide isn't measured by degree of realism. Not even a little bit, it's certainly possible to have realistic fantasy, as such it should be possible to have realistic fantasy with spells.


In that case, everything in D&D is probably fair game for spells.

I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion. Since D&D spells create matter, which is against the laws of conservation of matter, although not all of them do. Fabricate is a particularly egregious example. Fireball as you've pointed out could be considered to be an example. It's possible that the alternate dimension plan isn't the best one in this case, but D&D's abuses of reality are manifold, see the whole catgirl's thread for that.

I'm not sure why you're so opposed to the idea of creating a more realistic system of magic. First, rejecting the idea out of hand because you can't necessarily manipulate things at a particle level, which I think is a hurdle that others and I had already hashed out, then attacking my idea of what qualified as magic. Would you feel better if I called it Psionics, or Psychic manipulation? Some kind of energy manipulation, perhaps?

Because that could certainly exist in the real world in some sense, manipulating probability on a macro scale is definitely possible, and perhaps possible from far enough away given enough control of the variables. Macro manipulation of the machines that make the world work is also possible. I don't see why you are resisting the idea as a whole, I'm not attacking any system of magic, merely asking how such a thing might theoretically be done, and it is certainly theoretically possible.

Since again as we've pointed out, if you can model something, you can model separate reactions to different things. No matter how much we are not able to be aware of quantum things, you can still model them, as such you can predict the effect that different things may have on them, if you couldn't there wouldn't be a branch of science dedicated to that end. While the computative power may be in question, I don't think that quantum states make a modeling system impossible.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 01:40 PM
I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion. Since D&D spells create matter, which is against the laws of conservation of matter, although not all of them do. Fabricate is a particularly egregious example. Fireball as you've pointed out could be considered to be an example. It's possible that the alternate dimension plan isn't the best one in this case, but D&D's abuses of reality are manifold, see the whole catgirl's thread for that.

Infinite Energy that can be applied anywhere via a link to another dimension mediated by an AI that is unfathomably complex. That's what you have been proposing.

Matter is energy. So matter can be added easily enough if energy can. Similarly matter can be taken away. Information can be stored. Mental processing moved off-site if necessary (say if you polymorph into a rat), etc, etc. Being able to interact everywhere with infinite energy also allows simulation of teleport and many other spells. I am not seeing anything it can't do or convincingly fake/simulate that is in D&D.

You've said "realistic" and then have proposed a few breakages of reality sufficient to completely rewrite how the universe works. Kind of problematic.


I'm not sure why you're so opposed to the idea of creating a more realistic system of magic. First, rejecting the idea out of hand because you can't necessarily manipulate things at a particle level, which I think is a hurdle that others and I had already hashed out, then attacking my idea of what qualified as magic. Would you feel better if I called it Psionics, or Psychic manipulation? Some kind of energy manipulation, perhaps?

I entered into the particle debate, I didn't bring it up. As far as I could tell you were and are acting like with sufficient computing power you can predict quantum system in a deterministic manner (you say something similar to this again below). You can't. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally random, and there's a proof showing that there's no set of hidden variables that is producing this randomness (and could be used to predict things if found out). All you can get predict probabilities. I am a bit irked that you feel so assertive about aspects of physics you know so little about. But whatever.

I think the bigger problem here is that you haven't defined what you want "realistic" to be in a meaningful way. Given that you are proposing elements that would be capable of bending reality like a pretzel (or faking it so well we wouldn't notice), this has only become less clear. You've left things too vague and then you went and made the options waaaaay too broad.


Since again as we've pointed out, if you can model something, you can model separate reactions to different things. No matter how much we are not able to be aware of quantum things, you can still model them, as such you can predict the effect that different things may have on them, if you couldn't there wouldn't be a branch of science dedicated to that end. While the computative power may be in question, I don't think that quantum states make a modeling system impossible

Quantum Mechanics makes it so that you are limited in how useful those predictions are since all you get are probabilities. Even if you ignore QM, Chaos Theory is all about how there are completely deterministic systems that can't be predicted because their future states are too sensitive to the initial state (you'd need infinite precision to predict them).

Which gets us to the second problem with this thread. When people talk about the limits of physics and math you don't seem to try to understand the underlying issue you just handwave "lots of computing power!" as is that will solve all issues. It won't. Seems like you want technology to do everything magic can....but you aren't happy if it can do all of D&D magic and you aren't happy when people point out limits.

So what exactly do you want?

AMFV
2014-01-04, 01:57 PM
Infinite Energy that can be applied anywhere via a link to another dimension mediated by an AI that is unfathomably complex. That's what you have been proposing.

Matter is energy. So matter can be added easily enough if energy can. Similarly matter can be taken away. Information can be stored. Mental processing moved off-site if necessary (say if you polymorph into a rat), etc, etc. Being able to interact everywhere with infinite energy also allows simulation of teleport and many other spells. I am not seeing anything it can't do or convincingly fake/simulate that is in D&D.

You've said "realistic" and then have proposed a few breakages of reality sufficient to completely rewrite how the universe works. Kind of problematic.






I entered into the particle debate, I didn't bring it up. As far as I could tell you were and are acting like with sufficient computing power you can predict quantum system in a deterministic manner (you say something similar to this again below). You can't. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally random, and there's a proof showing that there's no set of hidden variables that is producing this randomness (and could be used to predict things if found out). All you can get predict probabilities. I am a bit irked that you feel so assertive about aspects of physics you know so little about. But whatever.


Predicting probabilities is certainly enough to model things. Here is where we are having a break as far as I can tell, you are arguing that perfect prediction is impossible (true, at least as far as we are currently aware, although to assume that this sort of thing is absolute is a pretty big leap, since new sorts of things are discovered fairly frequently, over the last few hundred years or so). I am stating that you can still model the systems and come up with fairly good predictions.

Certainly probability can be altered on a macro-scale, for example I could write this sentence or not, but since I have, the probability of me not writing it shrinks to zero and the probability of me writing it is now a hundred, or thereabouts. That's the sort of problem you're creating by stating that modeling is impossible.

Also while I may not know Quantum Physics that well, I know that Quantum Mechanics is a field, and there are people that model those interactions, since that is the case there must be predictive capacity in that field, probabilities are more than enough to get likely outcomes and see the field. Perhaps it's me that should be irked that you are claiming that an entire scientific field is without merit, since by arguing that Quantum things can't modeled that is what you are stating regarding quantum physics.



I think the bigger problem here is that you haven't defined what you want "realistic" to be in a meaningful way. Given that you are proposing elements that would be capable of bending reality like a pretzel (or faking it so well we wouldn't notice), this has only become less clear. You've left things too vague and then you went and made the options waaaaay too broad.


Very well, let's have no meaningful violations of physical laws, so no free lunch, no energy created or removed, we can accomplish as much as is possible without accessing other dimensions or whatnot, D&D is fairly clearly right out for this sort of thing, the goal is just to create a magic system that feels more real.



Quantum Mechanics makes it so that you are limited in how useful those predictions are since all you get are probabilities. Even if you ignore QM, Chaos Theory is all about how there are completely deterministic systems that can't be predicted because their future states are too sensitive to the initial state (you'd need infinite precision to predict them).


Modeling systems are often predictive, if you can predict a macro system you can alter it if you have sufficient energy or manipulative ability. Besides which we aren't looking for perfect results, only good enough ones to cause things



Which gets us to the second problem with this thread. When people talk about the limits of physics and math you don't seem to try to understand the underlying issue you just handwave "lots of computing power!" as is that will solve all issues. It won't. Seems like you want technology to do everything magic can....but you aren't happy if it can do all of D&D magic and you aren't happy when people point out limits.

So what exactly do you want?

So far as I can tell the limits of physics here were applicable only to manipulating probabilities at a particulate scale, which is something we've discussed. Furthermore, if computing power and modeling power is the area of problem then that's one that can be solved.

If something can happen then it has to be possible to replicate it. That's the goal here, to create a system of magic that produces no impossible phenomena, causing something to explode isn't an impossible phenomena, it happens. Causing something to move isn't an impossible phenomena it happens. Creating something out of thin air, impossible phenomena it never happens. Maybe if I phrase it this way, a system of magic that produces no effects that are impossible. Let's not worry about the actual mechanics so much, since first off those would need to be fairly handwaved anyways, and those are by our technology impossible to understand.

Edit: Also the quantum manipulation is possible in reality, at least to some degree, manipulating the chaos effect is clearly possible since we do this, if the issue is controlling that manipulation, then that's a matter of sufficient computing power, which could definitely be covered by the whole magic thing, since it's not an impossibility, just a difficult scenario.

Grek
2014-01-04, 04:54 PM
As an aside, Landauer's Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) forbids getting information for free (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy). If you can get perfect information without paying the cost, Chaos Theory would indeed let you violate (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon) the Second Law of Thermodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics), but avoiding the cost in the first place still requires actual supernatural intervention. Saying that you're going to use Chaos Theory to do the dirty work only moves the physics violations up a level.


In what sense is that true? If I call it magical energy and say I'm channeling it how does that stop working. Do you consider the magical system in Wheel of Time to be "magical" because it works by channeling and includes no energy from nowhere. so by your definition that system isn't magic either.

Completely laying aside the fact that stuff in the Wheel of Time blatantly violates the laws of physics by having objects be composed of five elements, having things teleport about and letting you retroactively destroy things with balefire, there is definitely magic going on whenever someone channels the One Power. When Rand burns some trollocs up, nothing in the world cools down to match the heat he creates to do so. Energy just appears from nowhere, willed into existence by the One Power. That is magic and that is a violation of the laws of physics.

AMFV
2014-01-04, 05:17 PM
As an aside, Landauer's Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) forbids getting information for free (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy). If you can get perfect information without paying the cost, Chaos Theory would indeed let you violate (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon) the Second Law of Thermodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics), but avoiding the cost in the first place still requires actual supernatural intervention. Saying that you're going to use Chaos Theory to do the dirty work only moves the physics violations up a level.


Quite possibly, but in any case the point being that the actual mechanism is less important than the results in this case. Also increasing entropy in the system may or may not render the result unusable, we still have information and computing even though there is entropy in the system.

I'm suggesting that a sufficiently advanced computer could model such a system, but that's really the point, since our models don't have to be that precise, only precise enough, since we can model macro things we might be able to figure out what an alteration on a macro scale would do to something.

I'm not arguing the particle argument, as I'm not knowledgeable enough. But clearly the mechanism is going to have to be handwaved because magic does not exist in our setting, in the real world, to our knowledge, as such the system is going to have to be an invented one.



Completely laying aside the fact that stuff in the Wheel of Time blatantly violates the laws of physics by having objects be composed of five elements, having things teleport about and letting you retroactively destroy things with balefire, there is definitely magic going on whenever someone channels the One Power. When Rand burns some trollocs up, nothing in the world cools down to match the heat he creates to do so. Energy just appears from nowhere, willed into existence by the One Power. That is magic and that is a violation of the laws of physics.

The Wheel of Time is not a physical system, but it does involve channeling and creating energy that doesn't come from nothing. Which violates your previous definition of magic.

I think that we're all focusing too much on the mechanism, which is clearly an impossible problem, since such a mechanism is not known to exist in our reality at the present time, let's instead focus on the consequences. If magic doesn't result in anything impossible, then the mechanism itself could be handwaved fairly easily, or could exist, since there are more things in heaven and Earth than are written of in our philosophy.

Since we are dealing with magic and fantasy, there is going to be some break from reality, the mechanism is probably the best place, since that obviously does not exist. Instead I suspect the results is a better place to start.

Grek
2014-01-04, 05:38 PM
The gist of the links above is that if you use Chaos Theory to cast a fireball, the computers you used to do the calculations need to be supplied with at least one fireball's worth of electricity. But OK. Let's assume you have a magic computer that runs on magic and gets to ignore rules like that. It uses advanced technology to peer into your brain, listen to what you say and watch the way you waggle your fingers. And it's programmed to produce fireballs whenever you say the right words, wave your hands the right way and visualize people being burnt to a crisp.

Is that magic?

AMFV
2014-01-04, 06:01 PM
The gist of the links above is that if you use Chaos Theory to cast a fireball, the computers you used to do the calculations need to be supplied with at least one fireball's worth of electricity. But OK. Let's assume you have a magic computer that runs on magic and gets to ignore rules like that. It uses advanced technology to peer into your brain, listen to what you say and watch the way you waggle your fingers. And it's programmed to produce fireballs whenever you say the right words, wave your hands the right way and visualize people being burnt to a crisp.

Is that magic?

Sure it is! If it's called that, but again let's not getting hung up on the mechanism. Since that's the part that doesn't exist. If we were to figure out how to created a mechanism that produced a magical effect, we'd have magic in our own world. The mechanism itself is open to a little bit of handwaving.

Instead I think we aught to be looking towards the results, if it can be possible in the real world, then magic should be able to replicate that, so what sort of magic would this prohibit that might not be normally seen? What sort of magic might this enable that wouldn't be seen normally?

NichG
2014-01-04, 08:17 PM
AMFV, the principle you're applying - 'if I can see an example of it happening in the real world then its fair game for magic' is the problem. That doesn't actually work, because in the real world the way something happens is actually important to whether or not it can happen at all.

You use examples like a dust explosion, but in a dust explosion there are two important factors in play - the energy stored in the dust (flour has something like half the chemical potential energy density of gasoline) and the large surface area meaning that interactions that release this energy are common enough for the process to go runaway. So basically there's both an energetic component and a probabilistic (entropic) component to the event that have to be satisfied.

If you have a pile of flour on your countertop and stick a match it in, it won't blow up because the entropic component isn't satisfied - there isn't enough access to an oxidizer. If you dump liquid oxygen on it first, then you're good to go. That oxidizer (either in the form of dispersing the flour in air, or adding concentrated oxidizer) is necessary because it basically acts as the 'gate' to the pathway by which the potential energy in the flour can be released. Just because there can be a situation that the energy is released with the oxidizer present doesn't mean its realistic to release the energy in the absence of that oxidizer.

In the case of the RPG (the projectile kind), it similarly has all the necessary components present in the projectile - there is a compound with a high available degree of chemical potential energy, an oxidizer (or the compound itself decomposes to create its own oxidizer in a runaway process, which is common in explosives), a specific triggering mechanism (which must be sufficiently difficult or the thing will just blow up in storage), etc. All of these are necessary elements to the function of an explosive projectile. If you just 'summon it out of nowhere' then thats where the physics violation comes from. If you 'turn something into it' then you're violating other physics. Etc.

Now, when it comes to the 'infinite energy plane' powering magical effects, basically Drachasor's point holds - once you go that far, more or less everything becomes equally plausible. I mean, there are similar, even less severe release valves in physics that you could use to permit 'any effect', but they're all fairly unrealistic in the sense of 'we would not expect aliens to be able to have this technology'. If there were some infinite source of energy that could be tapped, the evidence would be present in observations of the expansion rate of the universe and things like that.

There is a principle in physics 'if it isn't forbidden, its mandatory'. This is basically an observation that the universe is really big and the energy scales out there are far higher than anything we can produce on earth, so if there is some physical process by which something can happen, then statistically it does happen, and it happens all the time. This is e.g. why you can always rule out doomsday scenarios that involve 'if X happened, it would destroy the universe!' and the like - because if it can happen, it does happen. So if there is some infinite (or cosmically large) source of energy that couples to the dynamics of matter in the universe, that source of energy will 'show up' in the expansion curve of the universe. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily have to be cosmically large - you could get away with something that has about 3x as much matter/energy as the 'bright' universe and fit it into the known fraction of dark matter, though galaxy rotation curves suggest that it would need to be much more diffuse than visible matter, so in practice there wouldn't be much there to tap at any given point on the planet's surface.

Anyhow, this is all why I'd suggest if you want a physics-like magic system, start from a single modification and move outwards, rather than start from an endpoint and move inwards. If you can show to the players that everything that can be done in the system derives from a single principle it will seem more plausible than if you use the kinds of 'analogy' explanations you've been using. Even better if the players themselves have to derive it.

For example, I played in a World of Darkness campaign where the DM basically said 'okay, you're a physicist, and you're playing a mortal, so I'm just going to give you things with weird properties to play with'. There were 'etheric essences' in various things that could be distilled down, stored, compressed, etc. These different essences would bind to specific elemental metals, and could then be activated with a specific kind of energy input that at first was just specific to our environment but which I later learned to carry with me.

So I had for my powers a metal that could heat up, a metal that could cool down, a metal that could change the inertial mass of things around it, etc. The last one we used to make momentum-deconserving airships. Did it violate known physics? Yes. But in its own system, it was self-consistent, so you could do engineering with it and actually come up with stuff much more complex than the base elements.

I would say that system, despite violating energy and momentum conservation, was more 'realistic' than the things that have been discussed in this thread, because it had a very strong self-consistency and causality.

You could propose a magic system that basically says - there is an entity outside the universe that gets to 'decide' which way each quantum-mechanical 'measurement' goes at the beginning of time, and so any time someone 'uses' magic, its just that that entity predicted the situation and decided to select a highly improbable outcome to occur for its own motivations. But in such a system there is no actual causality between the 'magic user' and the effect - its not really a system anymore. Its not something that is 'believable' as an alien technology.

Drachasor
2014-01-04, 10:31 PM
FYI AMFV, I studied QM in college. You don't really know what you are talking about, but going into that in detail seems like it would largely be a waste of time.

I'm still not seeing how you aren't just taking a ray gun and calling it a magic wand. Then you declare this to be "magic." I mean, basically light-bulbs seem to be "magic" by this standard. I'm not really seeing the magic in tossing a grenade and calling it a fireball or giving someone antibiotics and calling it "cure disease."

Devils_Advocate
2014-01-04, 11:21 PM
I remember reading that some of the Discworld's magic follows some physical laws. E.g. if you turn someone into a toad there's like this big pile of flesh left over because of conservation of mass, or something like that.


My computers can be as good as I want them to be, because I'm inventing them, it's magic.
You're using magic to invent arbitrarily powerful computers? Wow, sounds pretty neat! Can I see them when you're done?


I can have computers that are capable of almost impossible things, just not impossible things
... So you're saying you don't want computers capable of impossible things? Okay then.


But are you arguing that it is impossible to push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt? Because I would argue that it isn't.

I don't think that is necessarily provable impossible, and besides which that could be the point of handwaving. We're arguing for something that is theoretically impossible, not actually impossible.
But you asked in the OP about phenomena "roughly contained within the laws of nature as we understand them today". Here you seem to be saying that... you don't care about the Uncertainty Principle, because you disbelieve it? That seems to be what "theoretically impossible, not actually impossible" means here.


Those are however not laws, and if the computational engine exists in another space, or throughout time then there are theoretically ways to exceed that bound. We're not talking laws here, but rather theoretical maximums, which are different things. You can theoretically exceed a theoretical maximum.
What do you mean by "law" in this context?

An upper or lower bound may be mandated by a theory of physics. The theory of relativity predicts that you can't accelerate to faster-than-light speed, for example.

You theoretically can't exceed a theoretical maximum. That's what "theoretical maximum" means.


Well the setting for one.
What specific setting difference are you referring to?


Also in a hard science fiction setting there is typically an understanding of the system the characters are using, by the characters. For example if you use a space ship you normally understand how they work.
WUT. Are you seriously saying that most space travelers in hard sci-fi are basically spaceship engineers? Because if so, I'm pretty sure that you're either using a very strange definition of "hard science fiction" or you've read a distinctly peculiar collection of books.


In this proposed setting that understanding might not be complete. It would be Arcane and people might understand the ritual of it, but not it's actual workings.
Yeah, that's pretty much what's typical, both in sci-fi and in real life.

Put gasoline in car make car go. How work? Burning fuel turn wheels something something. Me think? Not my job understand that. Me no need understand that. Me just need know turn key make car turn on and off, gas pedal make car go, brakes make car stop, steering wheel make car turn. Me outsource automotive engineering and maintenance to other human beings. Division of labor invisible hand free market something something. Not my job understand that, me outsource economics to economists.


To be honest some people might consider it science fiction, but it would certainly be magical.
Are you saying there's a difference? If so, what is it?


It'd be like having a psychic access to the technology.
So, neural implants?


In what sense is that true?
Well, by the law of excluded middle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle), something either comes from somewhere or doesn't come from somewhere.


If I call it magical energy and say I'm channeling it how does that stop working.
Um, it doesn't. You can call a flashlight magic and it will still work just fine. What's your point?


The alternate plane doesn't necessarily need different laws, and depending on the machines degree of omniscience or omnipresence it may not need to have an FTL response. Extracting energy from an infinite series of other planes or possibilities is certainly one way you could go that would allow for large energy extraction without violating the laws. If a God-Machine thing is omnipresent then it wouldn't need to have an FTL response (which is questionably possible anyways) if it is omniscient, then it might not, since it could predict your wish before it was made. Both of those are reasonably scientific options that don't require violations of the sort you're implying my system should require.
What's scientific about the concepts of an "alternate plane", omniscience, omnipresence, "an infinite series of other planes", and/or "extracting energy from possibilities"?

Just what are you suggesting here? That there's evidence of these things? That their existence is theoretically falsifiable? What?


That's not exactly true... on all counts the science fiction - fantasy divide isn't measured by degree of realism. Not even a little bit, it's certainly possible to have realistic fantasy
Could you give an example of realistic fantasy? Could you explain what you mean by "realism", "fantasy", and "science fiction"?


If something can happen then it has to be possible to replicate it.
So, you'd say that if the universe can be destroyed, it can definitely be destroyed twice?

AMFV
2014-01-05, 02:05 AM
AMFV, the principle you're applying - 'if I can see an example of it happening in the real world then its fair game for magic' is the problem. That doesn't actually work, because in the real world the way something happens is actually important to whether or not it can happen at all.

Well the argument that something will happen or could happen is important I think. Clearly we can't have a realistic mechanism since no such thing exists. But we can argue if something could exist that could have a perceptibly magic effect.



You use examples like a dust explosion, but in a dust explosion there are two important factors in play - the energy stored in the dust (flour has something like half the chemical potential energy density of gasoline) and the large surface area meaning that interactions that release this energy are common enough for the process to go runaway. So basically there's both an energetic component and a probabilistic (entropic) component to the event that have to be satisfied.

This is true. Although I'm saying that any sort of magic where you can alter those things would be able to create certain effects, so logically those things would have to be the things that are altered.



If you have a pile of flour on your countertop and stick a match it in, it won't blow up because the entropic component isn't satisfied - there isn't enough access to an oxidizer. If you dump liquid oxygen on it first, then you're good to go. That oxidizer (either in the form of dispersing the flour in air, or adding concentrated oxidizer) is necessary because it basically acts as the 'gate' to the pathway by which the potential energy in the flour can be released. Just because there can be a situation that the energy is released with the oxidizer present doesn't mean its realistic to release the energy in the absence of that oxidizer.

Well I'm saying that certain things are possible, while they may require certain conditions, they are possible, it is a difficult proposition admittedly, but if we focus on the mechanism, we're focusing on something that can't be repaired since magic doesn't exist.



In the case of the RPG (the projectile kind), it similarly has all the necessary components present in the projectile - there is a compound with a high available degree of chemical potential energy, an oxidizer (or the compound itself decomposes to create its own oxidizer in a runaway process, which is common in explosives), a specific triggering mechanism (which must be sufficiently difficult or the thing will just blow up in storage), etc. All of these are necessary elements to the function of an explosive projectile. If you just 'summon it out of nowhere' then thats where the physics violation comes from. If you 'turn something into it' then you're violating other physics. Etc.


I'm not sure why turning something into something would be violating of physics, it can certainly happen in chemistry, although again the mechanism isn't as important I don't think.



Now, when it comes to the 'infinite energy plane' powering magical effects, basically Drachasor's point holds - once you go that far, more or less everything becomes equally plausible. I mean, there are similar, even less severe release valves in physics that you could use to permit 'any effect', but they're all fairly unrealistic in the sense of 'we would not expect aliens to be able to have this technology'. If there were some infinite source of energy that could be tapped, the evidence would be present in observations of the expansion rate of the universe and things like that.

I agree, which is why I'm suggesting that we shouldn't touch on the mechanism, since again if we do then we could invent magic, which seems improbable.



There is a principle in physics 'if it isn't forbidden, its mandatory'. This is basically an observation that the universe is really big and the energy scales out there are far higher than anything we can produce on earth, so if there is some physical process by which something can happen, then statistically it does happen, and it happens all the time. This is e.g. why you can always rule out doomsday scenarios that involve 'if X happened, it would destroy the universe!' and the like - because if it can happen, it does happen. So if there is some infinite (or cosmically large) source of energy that couples to the dynamics of matter in the universe, that source of energy will 'show up' in the expansion curve of the universe. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily have to be cosmically large - you could get away with something that has about 3x as much matter/energy as the 'bright' universe and fit it into the known fraction of dark matter, though galaxy rotation curves suggest that it would need to be much more diffuse than visible matter, so in practice there wouldn't be much there to tap at any given point on the planet's surface.




Anyhow, this is all why I'd suggest if you want a physics-like magic system, start from a single modification and move outwards, rather than start from an endpoint and move inwards. If you can show to the players that everything that can be done in the system derives from a single principle it will seem more plausible than if you use the kinds of 'analogy' explanations you've been using. Even better if the players themselves have to derive it.

Well certainly that is true, I was agreeing with this I believe by the end of the last post, which is mostly why I was trying to avoid further mechanism arguments, since they seem difficult.



For example, I played in a World of Darkness campaign where the DM basically said 'okay, you're a physicist, and you're playing a mortal, so I'm just going to give you things with weird properties to play with'. There were 'etheric essences' in various things that could be distilled down, stored, compressed, etc. These different essences would bind to specific elemental metals, and could then be activated with a specific kind of energy input that at first was just specific to our environment but which I later learned to carry with me.

So adding something like the Ether to the world could resolve the problem then?



So I had for my powers a metal that could heat up, a metal that could cool down, a metal that could change the inertial mass of things around it, etc. The last one we used to make momentum-deconserving airships. Did it violate known physics? Yes. But in its own system, it was self-consistent, so you could do engineering with it and actually come up with stuff much more complex than the base elements.

I would say that system, despite violating energy and momentum conservation, was more 'realistic' than the things that have been discussed in this thread, because it had a very strong self-consistency and causality.

Well that's an interesting, although I'm not sure if that's exactly what I'm looking for.



You could propose a magic system that basically says - there is an entity outside the universe that gets to 'decide' which way each quantum-mechanical 'measurement' goes at the beginning of time, and so any time someone 'uses' magic, its just that that entity predicted the situation and decided to select a highly improbable outcome to occur for its own motivations. But in such a system there is no actual causality between the 'magic user' and the effect - its not really a system anymore. Its not something that is 'believable' as an alien technology.

Well then I'd be looking for that sort of thing magic as technology I would guess.


FYI AMFV, I studied QM in college. You don't really know what you are talking about, but going into that in detail seems like it would largely be a waste of time.

I'm still not seeing how you aren't just taking a ray gun and calling it a magic wand. Then you declare this to be "magic." I mean, basically light-bulbs seem to be "magic" by this standard. I'm not really seeing the magic in tossing a grenade and calling it a fireball or giving someone antibiotics and calling it "cure disease."

Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.

Furthermore if you're not seeing the magic of that, then that's fine, but it's still a workable system, no? If I create it with magic energy, it's magic. Any arguments regarding what kind of genre it is, is probably going to create more problems than its going to solve, furthermore it's probably going to be impracticable.

Drachasor
2014-01-05, 02:21 AM
Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.

I'm a physics major. So yes, I studied it quite a bit.


Furthermore if you're not seeing the magic of that, then that's fine, but it's still a workable system, no? If I create it with magic energy, it's magic. Any arguments regarding what kind of genre it is, is probably going to create more problems than its going to solve, furthermore it's probably going to be impracticable.

Yes, I suppose if you want to relabel "electricity" as "magic" then you can pretend it is magic.

AMFV
2014-01-05, 02:24 AM
I'm a physics major. So yes, I studied it quite a bit.

Fair enough, but there is modelling of it, correct? That's a thing that people do, as I understand it.



Yes, I suppose if you want to relabel "electricity" as "magic" then you an pretend it is magic.

Well magic isn't really well defined in most settings, varies, and has about a billion definitions when it is defined. Arthur C. Clarke is probably the most accurate in that he defines it as any technology that cannot be sufficiently explained, which is completely a workable definition for a game.

NichG
2014-01-05, 02:54 AM
Well certainly that is true, I was agreeing with this I believe by the end of the last post, which is mostly why I was trying to avoid further mechanism arguments, since they seem difficult.


I've omitted my counter-arguments to the rest of your post then, since it'd be a big side-track. Lets just agree to forget about 'physically plausible' as a goal, and focus more on a magic system that behaves 'like a science' - e.g. internally consistent, engineerable - while maintaining the 'personal power' aspect of magic.



So adding something like the Ether to the world could resolve the problem then?


I don't know what you mean by 'resolve the problem' here. But generally, adding something like one or two simple interactions to the base physics is enough to create a number of interesting applications that derive from those interactions.

It does require a very 'nitty-gritty first' style of building a game. Because of the constraint that everything follow logically, the mechanics basically have to come last, so its hard to balance. The other thing is that players in such a system will build up a library of tricks, and if you want to run multiple campaigns you'll have to deal with the metagame issue of players coming in with tricks from previous characters that still work, because they're something you could do. But that's to be expected to some degree. Modern rifles are OP compared to flintlocks in real life, after all. My advice there would be, advance the setting by 100 years between successive campaigns so you can say that the tricks the PCs discovered during the first campaign became commonplace in the next 100 years...

Anyhow, I think the 'connect two points' magic system is a good example of what to expect from this kind of approach. Another good example might be the Allomancy system in the Mistborn series of novels, which is pretty solid as far as deriving complex workings from a small set of fundamental rules.

(Feruchemy, from the same books, I feel violates the 'no spurious sentience' limitation - the ability to 'store health' for example doesn't really mesh with how complex an issue a person's health actually is. One could argue that Pewter Allomancy has that issue too, actually.)



Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.


I have a PhD in Physics and as far as I can tell, Drachasor hasn't said anything incorrect about QM so far in this conversation.

Drachasor
2014-01-05, 05:47 AM
Fair enough, but there is modelling of it, correct? That's a thing that people do, as I understand it.

Yes, but when you start dealing with multiple particles it gets very complicated very quickly. It's also inherently probabilistic (unlike say ballistics). And just because you can model something equivalent to a system doesn't mean you know the exact state the system is in. Fundamentally you cannot determine the exact state of a quantum system, because any attempt to precisely measure it will alter it. Take an electron. Want to figure out where it is? Shoot a photon at it and wait for a response. Problem is, when the photon hits the electron, it gives it energy, so its momentum is changed. Use a more energetic photon and you'll know better where the electron is, but its momentum is less clear. Use a less energetic photon and you'll have a fuzzier idea of the location, but the momentum can be known more precisely. Roughly speaking. There's no fancy trick around this, and momentum/position is just one of many pairs that have this relationship.

Point is, don't confuse modeling a system with knowing everything about the system. Models have limits. Manipulating an actual system has limits too.

That's not to say manipulating small stuff is impossible. Certainly arranging atoms is achievable in certain conditions (life does it for one). But imperfection is going to be an inherent part of the system and precise manipulation of many systems is likely going to be impossible. Direct manipulations of "probability" doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you are taking about atomic trajectories. This is especially true in a noisy system like you'd find in real life.


Well magic isn't really well defined in most settings, varies, and has about a billion definitions when it is defined. Arthur C. Clarke is probably the most accurate in that he defines it as any technology that cannot be sufficiently explained, which is completely a workable definition for a game.

There's a difference between it being unexplained to the populace, and being unexplained from a game design perspective. You seem to be playing fast and loose with the latter. It's hard to tell exactly where you are going since you seem to be moving from one extreme to another, back, and taking stops at various points in the middle.

Anyhow, it isn't a very good approach to say "X happens in highly specific circumstances, therefore X in general is possible" and use that as the basis of a magic system. It's not going to get something that feels realistic, imho. It's going to get something that feels random and arbitrary.

I think you need to do a few things to make meaningful progress.
1. Define the difference between magic and technology in the setting precisely.
2. If magic breaks any standard laws of physics, be precise about it and carefully work out the consequences.
3. If this magic is going to incorporate anything beyond what we currently know exists, then state exactly what it is and how its relationship to known reality.

That's at least a starting point.

AMFV
2014-01-05, 06:18 AM
Yes, but when you start dealing with multiple particles it gets very complicated very quickly. It's also inherently probabilistic (unlike say ballistics). And just because you can model something equivalent to a system doesn't mean you know the exact state the system is in. Fundamentally you cannot determine the exact state of a quantum system, because any attempt to precisely measure it will alter it. Take an electron. Want to figure out where it is? Shoot a photon at it and wait for a response. Problem is, when the photon hits the electron, it gives it energy, so its momentum is changed. Use a more energetic photon and you'll know better where the electron is, but its momentum is less clear. Use a less energetic photon and you'll have a fuzzier idea of the location, but the momentum can be known more precisely. Roughly speaking. There's no fancy trick around this, and momentum/position is just one of many pairs that have this relationship.

Certainly true. The modeling relationship is quite complex.



Point is, don't confuse modeling a system with knowing everything about the system. Models have limits. Manipulating an actual system has limits too.


Certainly true, and I think we'd need to establish how the manipulation would work for this type of thing.



That's not to say manipulating small stuff is impossible. Certainly arranging atoms is achievable in certain conditions (life does it for one). But imperfection is going to be an inherent part of the system and precise manipulation of many systems is likely going to be impossible. Direct manipulations of "probability" doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you are taking about atomic trajectories. This is especially true in a noisy system like you'd find in real life.

Which is why I was suggesting some kind of God-Machine type thing, there'd have to be some kind of complex system to model that sort of thing or affect it, certainly beyond anything we've ever done, since there are things that have some sorts of modeling though, that means that if life can do it, then magic should be able to do something similar in that way.



There's a difference between it being unexplained to the populace, and being unexplained from a game design perspective. You seem to be playing fast and loose with the latter. It's hard to tell exactly where you are going since you seem to be moving from one extreme to another, back, and taking stops at various points in the middle.

To be fair, I am kind of jumping back and forth, I'm mostly trying to figure out the scenario.



Anyhow, it isn't a very good approach to say "X happens in highly specific circumstances, therefore X in general is possible" and use that as the basis of a magic system. It's not going to get something that feels realistic, imho. It's going to get something that feels random and arbitrary.

Well "X Happens in highly specific circumstances so X in general is possible" is a true assertion. The problem with something that feels realistic is that you're going to have some acceptable breaks from reality, and those are going to arbitrary in any system that would involve magic, since we're inventing laws that aren't consistent with the laws of reality.



I think you need to do a few things to make meaningful progress.
1. Define the difference between magic and technology in the setting precisely.
2. If magic breaks any standard laws of physics, be precise about it and carefully work out the consequences.
3. If this magic is going to incorporate anything beyond what we currently know exists, then state exactly what it is and how its relationship to known reality.

That's at least a starting point.

1.) I think that I'm going to say that no discernible difference needs to exist in the system between magic and high technology. If that makes the end result "science fiction" or "science fantasy" or any number of other genres that it might push it into.

2.) Well it would depend on the way that magic is affecting things which rules we're going to have to play fast and loose with. Since we're going to be exerting influence over distance then we'd need some sort of magical force. I think adding a magical force to the system could help. You could have a magical energy that can be manipulated by magic, which could have specific exemptions, although I'm not sure what the assumptions of that system will be as of yet.

3.)Well, I think I briefly touched on that in the previous answer. We could definitely add a magical force, which could involve some kind of cognizant magical particles. Which naturally is impossible, but it certainly could exist.

Lorsa
2014-01-05, 07:38 AM
What was wrong with my idea of using mages as some form of energy-distributer-conduit? As long as [whatever] is conserved then it's possible to do?

If you're just looking to have a system where magic can do anything that could be seen or observed as being done by any other mechanism in the universe, then magic can do a lot.

Skyscrapers can be built, and if you don't care about the mechanism in which they are then magic might as well summon one from nothing.

Since there are particles that can travel at light speed, so should magic be able to make something travel that fast (which is more or less equivalent to teleportation).

Muscles are controlled by electrical impulses through the nervous system, so magic should be able to control muscles in others (which means you can move around with people against their will).

Etc.

If you don't care about which conservation laws and in turn which menchanisms cause various effects then you could do almost anything.

Hey! There's a universe that exists! So magic should be able to create another universe!

AMFV
2014-01-05, 07:46 AM
What was wrong with my idea of using mages as some form of energy-distributer-conduit? As long as [whatever] is conserved then it's possible to do?

I liked your idea, actually. Almost everything I've been proposing since then has been some variation on it. I'm not sure if I responded directly to that since I was caught up in other stuff.



If you're just looking to have a system where magic can do anything that could be seen or observed as being done by any other mechanism in the universe, then magic can do a lot.

Well we are probably going to have to put into place some kind of arbitrary limitation on what can be done, or how much can be done. But I'm saying that sweating the details on the mechanism is only going to create headaches since that section is naturally invented.



Skyscrapers can be built, and if you don't care about the mechanism in which they were then magic might as well summon one from nothing.

Well summoning one from nothing is producing a result that doesn't occur in the natural world, since skyscrapers don't spontaneously exist.



Since there are particles that can travel in light speed, so should magic be able to make something travel that fast (which is more or less equivalent to teleportation).

Muscles are controlled by electrical impulses through the nervous system, so magic should be able to control muscles in others (which means you can move around with people against their will).

Etc.

If you don't care about which conservation laws and in turn which menchanisms cause various effects then you could do almost anything.

Hey! There's a universe that exists! So magic should be able to create another universe!

Maybe magic can...

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, what if instead of trying to make magic conform to the physics of our real world, breaking it induced some kind of strain, so the more you do the more strain it takes.

How do the physicists in the thread feel about that, what sort of things would be doable with less strain, to your thinking, and what sort of things would be doable with more strain, ergo more egregious breaks. I know that this isn't a standard line of thinking, but it's an idea. So basically the more far-fetched something is, the more likely it is to be impossible for any given mage.

NichG
2014-01-05, 08:44 AM
I'm not sure I can actually answer the question... I think its pretty hard (impossible?) to define without reference to 'how' you're straining physics.

Consider something like a coin toss. For a fair coin, we can say a given result has a 50% chance of occurring, so it seems like altering the toss shouldn't be too improbable a change to reality. But once the coin is in the air, if I e.g. measured the rotation and velocity of the coin with a high-speed camera, I could predict the outcome with a far higher certainty than 50%. I can't really easily tell you what the maximum possible certainty one could achieve down to e.g. thermodynamic or quantum mechanical bounds would be, but its going to be pretty high.

So influencing that coin toss by, e.g., literally seeing the future and then spilling a drink on the guy's shoe and hoping it goes differently would scale in improbability differently than influencing the coin toss by microscopically manipulating the particles in the air, or by being able to change the gravitational constant in the area slightly. I'm not actually sure how to say which is really creating the 'worse' strain.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to use the following mechanism for magic:

- Practitioners of magic can see 'the future as it will be prior to looking'. More skilled practitioners can see further ahead, though of course two practitioners looking at the same event interfere with each-other. Your average mage can see about 5-10 seconds ahead. When looking, they are always looking at a specific moment - they don't get the entire 10 seconds in an instant.

- Practitioners of magic can 're-look' at a rate of about once per second, so long as they are only looking for easily-distinguishable outcomes (like the result of a coin-flip). The more difficult it is to understand the outcome, the fewer 're-looks' they get.

- A practitioner of magic learns to compartmentalize what they have seen, so that they can choose to 'lock in' a result and not let it be influenced by their future knowledge. The consequence is that they are unaware of whether or not their manipulation succeeded until they actually experience the outcome in their present. They always remember all but the 'last' time they chose to look at the future.

- Practitioners can 'strain' themselves to compress their perceptual time, allowing them to re-look more often in a shorter span. So they can watch 1 second of the future in half a second of real-time, and so on. This is highly taxing.

This system has the advantage that the improbabilities/probabilities are all macroscopic. You don't have to do a 30 minute calculation of the partition function of copper atoms to figure out how hard it is to alter a coin flip in flight. Instead, chaos theory actually comes to the rescue here - as long as you look at the outcome early enough, you can bump an elbow, shift the table, etc, to alter the coin toss to a new random result, and then just stop when it's the result you want.

So in this system, a 10-second mage could modify the probability of the coin flip from a 1/2 chance of the wrong result down to a 1/1024 chance of the wrong result (since they can look 10 times and 2^10 is 1024). Or they could take something with a 1/1024 chance and raise it up to about a 50/50 shot.

In this system, mages would be very good snipers and gun-users, okay at physical combat (since the future-sight could easily distract them from an important 'now'), and would be very good early warning systems for things that are about to happen.

This system basically lets mages violate the second law of thermodynamics but should preserve all 'material' conservation/etc laws. This does technically mean that a group of mages could theoretically 'reuse' energy to an arbitrary degree, but the actual rate of accumulation would be pretty slow (microscopic amounts - I think it'd be something like ~ 10^(-20) J/s at room temperature, but I'd have to do the calculation out in detail)

AMFV
2014-01-05, 08:54 AM
I'm not sure I can actually answer the question... I think its pretty hard (impossible?) to define without reference to 'how' you're straining physics.

True, and I'll admit that my definition isn't probably the best. I was actually kind of hoping that you guys could help with defining exactly that might work, since again I'm not the most knowledgeable on the subject.

My original idea was something to do with how unbelievable the result was, kind of a magical system powered by belief and understanding basically.



Consider something like a coin toss. For a fair coin, we can say a given result has a 50% chance of occurring, so it seems like altering the toss shouldn't be too improbable a change to reality. But once the coin is in the air, if I e.g. measured the rotation and velocity of the coin with a high-speed camera, I could predict the outcome with a far higher certainty than 50%. I can't really easily tell you what the maximum possible certainty one could achieve down to e.g. thermodynamic or quantum mechanical bounds would be, but its going to be pretty high.

So influencing that coin toss by, e.g., literally seeing the future and then spilling a drink on the guy's shoe and hoping it goes differently would scale in improbability differently than influencing the coin toss by microscopically manipulating the particles in the air, or by being able to change the gravitational constant in the area slightly. I'm not actually sure how to say which is really creating the 'worse' strain.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to use the following mechanism for magic:

- Practitioners of magic can see 'the future as it will be prior to looking'. More skilled practitioners can see further ahead, though of course two practitioners looking at the same event interfere with each-other. Your average mage can see about 5-10 seconds ahead. When looking, they are always looking at a specific moment - they don't get the entire 10 seconds in an instant.

- Practitioners of magic can 're-look' at a rate of about once per second, so long as they are only looking for easily-distinguishable outcomes (like the result of a coin-flip). The more difficult it is to understand the outcome, the fewer 're-looks' they get.

- A practitioner of magic learns to compartmentalize what they have seen, so that they can choose to 'lock in' a result and not let it be influenced by their future knowledge. The consequence is that they are unaware of whether or not their manipulation succeeded until they actually experience the outcome in their present. They always remember all but the 'last' time they chose to look at the future.

- Practitioners can 'strain' themselves to compress their perceptual time, allowing them to re-look more often in a shorter span. So they can watch 1 second of the future in half a second of real-time, and so on. This is highly taxing.

This system has the advantage that the improbabilities/probabilities are all macroscopic. You don't have to do a 30 minute calculation of the partition function of copper atoms to figure out how hard it is to alter a coin flip in flight. Instead, chaos theory actually comes to the rescue here - as long as you look at the outcome early enough, you can bump an elbow, shift the table, etc, to alter the coin toss to a new random result, and then just stop when it's the result you want.

So in this system, a 10-second mage could modify the probability of the coin flip from a 1/2 chance of the wrong result down to a 1/1024 chance of the wrong result (since they can look 10 times and 2^10 is 1024). Or they could take something with a 1/1024 chance and raise it up to about a 50/50 shot.

In this system, mages would be very good snipers and gun-users, okay at physical combat (since the future-sight could easily distract them from an important 'now'), and would be very good early warning systems for things that are about to happen.

This system basically lets mages violate the second law of thermodynamics but should preserve all 'material' conservation/etc laws. This does technically mean that a group of mages could theoretically 'reuse' energy to an arbitrary degree, but the actual rate of accumulation would be pretty slow (microscopic amounts - I think it'd be something like ~ 10^(-20) J/s at room temperature, but I'd have to do the calculation out in detail)


Well since the second of law of thermodynamics is general, then maybe we could even fix that by having there be an increase in entropy around the Practitioner or as a result of the practitioner, which would present a really interesting dilemma in using the magical powers to enhance themselves or to shift things might have unpredictable results. Would that be a workable fix as far as Entropy goes, or are we still in hot water with that. Basically they're reducing the Entropy with regards to one thing and distributing that increased Entropy elsewhere as a kind of dissipation, which I think might be a workable solution but I'm just talking out of my ass here, so if it's not let me know.

Also what other parameters regarding the strain of things might you want to implement and the like? Because while I really like that system I'm mostly trying to find out if we can get more workable systems, although I really do like that idea.

Lorsa
2014-01-05, 09:28 AM
I liked your idea, actually. Almost everything I've been proposing since then has been some variation on it. I'm not sure if I responded directly to that since I was caught up in other stuff.

Oh, good.


Well we are probably going to have to put into place some kind of arbitrary limitation on what can be done, or how much can be done. But I'm saying that sweating the details on the mechanism is only going to create headaches since that section is naturally invented.

The limitation would probably be how much energy the mage can transfer, the assumption with just about any system is that there are varying degrees of power.



Well summoning one from nothing is producing a result that doesn't occur in the natural world, since skyscrapers don't spontaneously exist.

Yes I know. What I meant to say was that explosions don't spontanously exist either. There are mechanisms behind them and if you don't care about those mechanisms at all, then why bother as far as skyscrapers are concerned?


Maybe magic can...

Maybe a mage in another universe created this one? It would certainly explain a lot of things...


Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, what if instead of trying to make magic conform to the physics of our real world, breaking it induced some kind of strain, so the more you do the more strain it takes.

How do the physicists in the thread feel about that, what sort of things would be doable with less strain, to your thinking, and what sort of things would be doable with more strain, ergo more egregious breaks. I know that this isn't a standard line of thinking, but it's an idea. So basically the more far-fetched something is, the more likely it is to be impossible for any given mage.

The WoD Mage systems have something called "Paradox", where if the magic tries to alter the world too much some strain occures and it can cause bad things to happen to the mage (including the summoning of demons that want to kill him/her).

Under my proposed system, where you just channel energy from one place to another but the sum always stays the same, the mage could choose where to place the reverse effect (the oppossed momentum, or reduction of heat or loss of mass or whatever) or simply let it be decided randomly by the universe itself. Creating effects without deciding a "drain" so to speak would be much easier and more energy could be channeled this way. However, the effects could be detrimental as there is no control at all where the drain goes (probably somewhere in the vicinity though).

So you could have 3 levels of "easeness" by which powers were channeled:

1. Hardest: Choose the drain as some external object, either something you can see or if you want to allow something you have a magical connection to (easily abuseable though).

2. Slightly easier/more power: Choose the drain as yourself. It has the potential to channel more energy as you are more intimately connected to you, but can potentially be very lethal to you depending on what you are trying to do.

3. Easiest/most power: Don't choose the drain and let the universe work it out. Can end up decidedly bad (perhaps some form of table can be constructed to see just how bad).

NichG
2014-01-05, 09:36 AM
True, and I'll admit that my definition isn't probably the best. I was actually kind of hoping that you guys could help with defining exactly that might work, since again I'm not the most knowledgeable on the subject.

My original idea was something to do with how unbelievable the result was, kind of a magical system powered by belief and understanding basically.


'Mage' kinda does this. Its not that the magic system is powered by belief, but rather Mage suggests 'there is no such thing as physics or physical law, only the belief of mundanes that force everyone to play by the same, boring rules'. Thus, if you as a Mage show a mundane something that they cannot deal with, their (dis)belief smacks you in the face and does awful things to you. The more overt your magic, the more harm befalls you.

Edit: Ninja'd



Well since the second of law of thermodynamics is general, then maybe we could even fix that by having there be an increase in entropy around the Practitioner or as a result of the practitioner, which would present a really interesting dilemma in using the magical powers to enhance themselves or to shift things might have unpredictable results. Would that be a workable fix as far as Entropy goes, or are we still in hot water with that. Basically they're reducing the Entropy with regards to one thing and distributing that increased Entropy elsewhere as a kind of dissipation, which I think might be a workable solution but I'm just talking out of my ass here, so if it's not let me know.


The good news is that the amounts are vanishingly small. Even if, e.g., that civilization made a computer that had the precognitive power of these mages and had it make 're-views' of reality at 100GhZ, we're talking a billionth of a joule per second. Which is much less energy than the computer itself would use.

So its quite possible that the entropy cost of what the mage is doing is being paid by the increased brain activity needed to process both the present and future at the same time. In fact, that increased brain activity will probably pay for it a billion-fold.

What I can't guarantee is that there isn't some clever way to leverage this. I think the amount of recycled energy you get out scales with the temperature of the thing you're manipulating, so there might be some issues with e.g. a mage manipulating a high energy event in a particle accelerator. Still, even in that case, its not likely to produce 'useful' amounts of energy recycling compared with the investment in resources needed to build and run the particle accelerator.



Also what other parameters regarding the strain of things might you want to implement and the like? Because while I really like that system I'm mostly trying to find out if we can get more workable systems, although I really do like that idea.

Well, my main issue with the 'strain' is that its really hard to give an answer independent of mechanism. Really it keeps coming back to mechanism. If I have a given mechanism to look at, then I can tell you roughly how easy or hard it would be to do something with that mechanism. But the answer will depend almost entirely on the particular mechanism chosen.

The portal/connection-based system I previously mentioned, for example, could easily crack the foundations of buildings (portal in a boulder from the opposite side of the world and force the building foundation to act as the source of the change in angular momentum), etc. But it couldn't (easily) control a coin flip or heal a wound or convince someone to accept a business deal. The precognitive magic system could easily mess with a coin flip or even get someone to accept a business deal (see 10 variations on things you could say, and always get to keep the best version), but it also couldn't heal a wound and it couldn't boil water or harm a building.

AMFV
2014-01-05, 09:56 AM
The limitation would probably be how much energy the mage can transfer, the assumption with just about any system is that there are varying degrees of power.

Definitely. I was more interested in where those cut offs are at all.





Yes I know. What I meant to say was that explosions don't spontanously exist either. There are mechanisms behind them and if you don't care about those mechanisms at all, then why bother as far as skyscrapers are concerned?

The point I was making is that creating a certain suspension of disbelief is easier where we have to create something wholesale, it might be possible to create a magic that violates physics or natural laws in an explained way.

I'm mostly interested in a system that's consistent and then can be applied without breaking the natural laws too much.



Maybe a mage in another universe created this one? It would certainly explain a lot of things...

True, although discussing that might get too much into real world religion.




The WoD Mage systems have something called "Paradox", where if the magic tries to alter the world too much some strain occures and it can cause bad things to happen to the mage (including the summoning of demons that want to kill him/her).


I'm familiar with it, I think W40k has a similar thing, although theirs is even crappier and less pleasant.



Under my proposed system, where you just channel energy from one place to another but the sum always stays the same, the mage could choose where to place the reverse effect (the oppossed momentum, or reduction of heat or loss of mass or whatever) or simply let it be decided randomly by the universe itself. Creating effects without deciding a "drain" so to speak would be much easier and more energy could be channeled this way. However, the effects could be detrimental as there is no control at all where the drain goes (probably somewhere in the vicinity though).

So you could have 3 levels of "easeness" by which powers were channeled:

1. Hardest: Choose the drain as some external object, either something you can see or if you want to allow something you have a magical connection to (easily abuseable though).

2. Slightly easier/more power: Choose the drain as yourself. It has the potential to channel more energy as you are more intimately connected to you, but can potentially be very lethal to you depending on what you are trying to do.

3. Easiest/most power: Don't choose the drain and let the universe work it out. Can end up decidedly bad (perhaps some form of table can be constructed to see just how bad).

Certainly, although the energy drain would eventually get to be quite a bit, and could have a lot of unseen effects, through mostly the aforementioned chaos theory.


'Mage' kinda does this. Its not that the magic system is powered by belief, but rather Mage suggests 'there is no such thing as physics or physical law, only the belief of mundanes that force everyone to play by the same, boring rules'. Thus, if you as a Mage show a mundane something that they cannot deal with, their (dis)belief smacks you in the face and does awful things to you. The more overt your magic, the more harm befalls you.

Edit: Ninja'd

I'm actually familiar with it, although it doesn't try to play by any reality at all really, although it's pretty fun and of its own respect, the whole strain idea and belief was kind of cribbed from them. Although in our case it'd be how much what you did was against the natural order and not it's apparent level of magic.




The good news is that the amounts are vanishingly small. Even if, e.g., that civilization made a computer that had the precognitive power of these mages and had it make 're-views' of reality at 100GhZ, we're talking a billionth of a joule per second. Which is much less energy than the computer itself would use.

So its quite possible that the entropy cost of what the mage is doing is being paid by the increased brain activity needed to process both the present and future at the same time. In fact, that increased brain activity will probably pay for it a billion-fold.

That is actually kind of a little bit disappointing, I was hoping for something that was more detrimental to the Mage (Wizard, Practitioner whatever). But in a related note... Since we are using dramatically more brain power that could have some nasty effects. Mages could start to go gradually more and more insane. Suffering from various ailments as they channel magic from the brain being over strained. Actually that's pretty interesting, meaning that it is both more and less difficult to work with magic.



What I can't guarantee is that there isn't some clever way to leverage this. I think the amount of recycled energy you get out scales with the temperature of the thing you're manipulating, so there might be some issues with e.g. a mage manipulating a high energy event in a particle accelerator. Still, even in that case, its not likely to produce 'useful' amounts of energy recycling compared with the investment in resources needed to build and run the particle accelerator.

Fair enough, although the extra energy going through the brain could still have a very nasty effect on said mage.



Well, my main issue with the 'strain' is that its really hard to give an answer independent of mechanism. Really it keeps coming back to mechanism. If I have a given mechanism to look at, then I can tell you roughly how easy or hard it would be to do something with that mechanism. But the answer will depend almost entirely on the particular mechanism chosen.

Fair enough, we could definitely look at the mechanism, since we're not going for direct realism as much anymore just a system that takes reality into account. I was actually looking for some ideas as to what mechanisms might present different strain, or what that associated strain might be.

So far we have your two proposed mechanisms, the probability altering one with precognition, and the linking one, which you address shortly thereafter. We also have Lorsa's recommended energy channeling which alters some physical laws as well, and would therefore create a difference in strain, although I'm not savvy enough to actually compute it.



The portal/connection-based system I previously mentioned, for example, could easily crack the foundations of buildings (portal in a boulder from the opposite side of the world and force the building foundation to act as the source of the change in angular momentum), etc. But it couldn't (easily) control a coin flip or heal a wound or convince someone to accept a business deal. The precognitive magic system could easily mess with a coin flip or even get someone to accept a business deal (see 10 variations on things you could say, and always get to keep the best version), but it also couldn't heal a wound and it couldn't boil water or harm a building.

So healing is almost impossible under our systems in really any of the proposed systems, that's actually kind of sensible, and it would fit with having a general prohibition against using magic on living things directly, or to directly influence living things, meaning the 10 things you could say is okay, but altering somebody's brain chemistry might not be. That's also a fairly standard law in magic.

My next question would be, could we integrate those systems in some way, or do you think they should stand alone. We could call it the three pillars of magic, The Energy Channeling thing, The Precognitive, and the Connection (Although there'd be interesting interplay between them) do you feel that'd be a good method for a fairly realistic or giving a semblance of realism form of magic?

NichG
2014-01-05, 10:39 AM
I think having multiple of these systems in play at once is going to be kind of dissonant. This is getting outside of what is demonstrable in physics and goes more to an intuition about how physics works, but basically the tendency of physical law is to get simpler and simpler the more fundamental you get.

What I mean by that is, it looks as though all of physics might derive from a number of underlying 'properties' of the universe that you could count on one hand. The more you know, the more you can unify things that seemed to be different into a single underlying thing combined with a spontaneous symmetry-breaking event. For example, at first it looks like there are four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, gravity, nuclear strong, nuclear weak; but we can actually show how those forces all mathematically 'fall out' of a single underlying symmetry that underwent a process of freezing out as the universe cooled.

So if you have several different systems of 'these are added to the world', it makes sense from the point of view of trying to make them 'sciencey' that you should try to unify their origins. In other words, the existence of multiple systems should come not from the fact that there are in fact 3 or 4 new forces in the cosmos, but instead they should be 3 or 4 facets of some underlying 'thing', which have just been interpreted by people to actually be different because they don't understand the underlying principle (yet).

Incidentally, thinking about the precog-mage, it may be a little worse than my initial estimates on entropy, because the mage is in principle gaining information about other events than just the coin flip - and can in principle take more complex actions in response than to just 'change the random number seed of the universe'. I don't think it should be too much more, but there may be ways that it can be leveraged which would cause it to be quite a bit more. Probably the best way to estimate it is to look at the information bandwidth of the sum total of the human senses and just use that as the bitrate instead of the 1 bit per second based on distinct 'observations'.

So maybe thats something like a factor of ten million (human eyes evidently process about 10 megabits/sec and they have the highest bitrate of the various senses). It'd still be such a small amount of energy that you wouldn't really notice it - something on the order of the energy involved in a single synapse firing (give or take a few orders of magnitude).

QNLA
2014-01-05, 10:44 AM
So I'll preface this by saying that I've studied theoretical physics as a major for my undergrad and am currently a PhD student. Prior to getting into things I'd like to straighten out a comment that AMFV said about Theories and Laws. For science its best to think of the two as near intechangable, the main thing that seems different to me is that laws seem to imply more mathematics, less discription. An example is General theory of relativity is more correct then Newton's law of universal gravitation.

The next question that we have to pin down is what do you mean by "realistic" and "magic" which is slightly ambiguous at the moment. Probably safe to assume that "realistic" means that the system doesn't violate any currently generally accepted theory of science, though we are allowed to change the initial composition of the universe (change the shape of spacetime, change the chemical composition of the air we breath, ect.)

Magic is weird but I'm assuming the best way to describe what you want is:

an action someone can do along the lines of magic in fantasy stories which uses no devices/equiptment which are both detectable with their technology/magic and non-natural appearing.

which leaves a lot of leeway.

If you do make your meanings more specific, maybe edit the OP to include your exact definitions as people are likely to skip posts (especially this one as it is long).


For Quantum Mechanics modeling, yes you can model it, but you are modeling the probability of the system being in each possible state/orientation. So its still probabilistic.

The Sentient computer idea seems very much like advanced technology to me, though to be completely realistic you have to ask about how the computer reads in data about the universe as well as modifies it to bias the future towards the one wanted by the spell. And you'd have to be able to communicate with the spellcaster in the first place.

I like the idea of the reading the future and choosing if they want that one or not, but to be realistic I don't like it as you can't violate causility in physics (no sending things through time). You could maybe get around that by having a universe which has lots of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in the spacetime (in layman's terms they are wormholes which link different times together). But then you run into issues with self-consistancy principles or the fact that general relativity (GR) is deterministic so you can't change what you do. I can't tell you how such a universe would be different to ours but it would be, the changing the future is probably more philosophy of physics then actual physics but if GR is combined with quantum mechanics then there may be a way around.

Another idea is there is something called the inflaton field which is what caused the initial expansion of the universe (right after the big bang). Which you may be able to obtain energy from, or could modify to cause accelerations which could destroy things. But I only really see this idea working for some sort of envoca type and you couldn't do much which was constructive with this.

Lorsa
2014-01-05, 10:56 AM
Definitely. I was more interested in where those cut offs are at all.

That's going to take a while to work out. :smallsmile:



The point I was making is that creating a certain suspension of disbelief is easier where we have to create something wholesale, it might be possible to create a magic that violates physics or natural laws in an explained way.

I'm mostly interested in a system that's consistent and then can be applied without breaking the natural laws too much.

It's that vagueness in the "too much" that most physicists will have a problem with. How much is too much to you? I'm a physics major too (nanophysics), and for most parts that leads to having to ignore basically everything I know about the world to play in any sci-fi game, so it gets hard to judge what appropriate suspension of disbelief is for non-physicists.

I mean, in Eclipse Phase, my character once ended up on an object (through a Pandora gate) that was traveling in near light-speed and managed to have an instant quantum-entangled communication with someone back in our solar system. Ignoring the fact that QEC doesn't actually work, my mind immedietely wondered what happened to time dilation and how that would affect the communication. The GM of course didn't care about this, or even knew what it was so I just ignored it.

I have no problem suspending my disbelief in most roleplaying games, but it does get tricky understanding what is acceptable to someone else.


True, although discussing that might get too much into real world religion.

Yeah, let's not do that. :smallsmile:


Certainly, although the energy drain would eventually get to be quite a bit, and could have a lot of unseen effects, through mostly the aforementioned chaos theory.

And all those unseen effects is what makes it interesting! Also, there will probably be some social laws in place that says a mage isn't allowed to use a random energy drain for their effects. So you'd have an organisation that is trying to police mages that abuses this, perhaps including registration as practitioner etc. Just an idea, I always think it's fun with authorative organisations that can mess the characters up.


Fair enough, we could definitely look at the mechanism, since we're not going for direct realism as much anymore just a system that takes reality into account. I was actually looking for some ideas as to what mechanisms might present different strain, or what that associated strain might be.

So far we have your two proposed mechanisms, the probability altering one with precognition, and the linking one, which you address shortly thereafter. We also have Lorsa's recommended energy channeling which alters some physical laws as well, and would therefore create a difference in strain, although I'm not savvy enough to actually compute it.

So healing is almost impossible under our systems in really any of the proposed systems, that's actually kind of sensible, and it would fit with having a general prohibition against using magic on living things directly, or to directly influence living things, meaning the 10 things you could say is okay, but altering somebody's brain chemistry might not be. That's also a fairly standard law in magic.

My next question would be, could we integrate those systems in some way, or do you think they should stand alone. We could call it the three pillars of magic, The Energy Channeling thing, The Precognitive, and the Connection (Although there'd be interesting interplay between them) do you feel that'd be a good method for a fairly realistic or giving a semblance of realism form of magic?

I'm quite sure they can be integrated. Also, there's a possibility of getting healing if you allow mages to manipulate matter on a nanoscale. Tissue is basically carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with some added other elements like phosphor, sulfur, cloride etc, and if you have say a batch of those elements, it could be possible to apply it to a wound and use magic to rearrange them into nice ordered structures. Or steal them from other tissue that is closeby (which would cause the person to be diminished in some other way, or the mage himself). The actual organisation require fairly small amounts of momentum and energy, as you're organising them into molecules that are energetically favorable, so the "drain" under my system would be minimal. It depends on if you want the mage to be able to do it simply be "magic" without micromanaging the actual movements themselves. It's possible if you want it.

NichG
2014-01-05, 11:21 AM
I like the idea of the reading the future and choosing if they want that one or not, but to be realistic I don't like it as you can't violate causility in physics (no sending things through time). You could maybe get around that by having a universe which has lots of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in the spacetime (in layman's terms they are wormholes which link different times together). But then you run into issues with self-consistancy principles or the fact that general relativity (GR) is deterministic so you can't change what you do. I can't tell you how such a universe would be different to ours but it would be, the changing the future is probably more philosophy of physics then actual physics but if GR is combined with quantum mechanics then there may be a way around.


Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

It does seem like it would allow for FTL communication and basically the ability to send messages arbitrarily far back into the past though. That is a pretty big problem. I guess you could hack it and say that the precog mage only sees the consequences of things within their light-cone, but that could get weird - it basically implies that the precog mage is somehow computing the future rather than reading it out, and that computation isn't really believable.

So okay, I think that answers the question as to what you need to change for that system. You basically need a non-relativistic universe to run the precog mage without it introducing some big problems.

Drachasor
2014-01-05, 11:29 AM
Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

It does seem like it would allow for FTL communication and basically the ability to send messages arbitrarily far back into the past though. That is a pretty big problem. I guess you could hack it and say that the precog mage only sees the consequences of things within their light-cone, but that could get weird - it basically implies that the precog mage is somehow computing the future rather than reading it out, and that computation isn't really believable.

So okay, I think that answers the question as to what you need to change for that system. You basically need a non-relativistic universe to run the precog mage without it introducing some big problems.

Even within their lightcone has problems, since things outside his lightcone can affect the outcome.

The other option for predicting the future is cheating of course. If you go with some sort of hidden "god machine" then it can force the predictions it makes to come true. In fact, "predictions" would really just be mislabeled plans. Though, you could toss on some short term and localized prediction as well, I suppose.

NichG
2014-01-05, 12:03 PM
Well, 'within his lightcone' meaning 'information which he could have received up to that point in time'. But its weird because the constancy of certain things from outside of the light-cone is important, so there would almost have to be some sort of 'gentle boundary conditions' assumptions or the future would always look pitch black.

So yeah, I think its no good unless you use a non-relativistic universe.

QNLA
2014-01-05, 08:21 PM
Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

You'd basically have to perform complete destructive interference with the outcomes that you don't want, we can't control the collapse of the wavefunction according to our current knowledge of quantum mechanics. Also if you look into the future with the precog mage then you'd be measuring the future, I'd imagine this would cause some sort of entanglement between you and the outcome future, so all the other prefered outcomes would no longer be possible under the many-worlds theory.

However you could use something which has been named "time loop logic" which is outlined here on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle#Time_loop_logic). This would just set up a situtation where if your magic works then your desired outcome is the only logical outcome. The magic would work something like this:

1) recieve message from the future.
2) wait until your spell is suppose to happen.
3) Check if your spell happened as you wanted.
4A) If yes, send back same message.
4B) If no, send back different message.

without some sort of loop then the only consistant future is where your spell worked. If the spell failed then either the algorithm never ran or something went wrong in the mind of the person trying to perform the spell. I'd imagine it would be hard to figure out this and keep your mind performing the algorithm properly which could be why it fails sometimes and why not everyone would be able to do it even if everyone physically has the signal generators/recievers.

The only differences between this and real life is that you'd need the universe to be scattered with CTCs and humans able to send some signal through them. The CTC space-time fabric could change a lot about how the universe works, though in some reigmes I'd imagine the differences would be negligable and you'd probably have to be able to detect quantum mechanics before seeing anything particually different to how the universe works if this wasn't the case. I'm now tempted to see if there are any solutions to einstein's equations like this and if so simulate it to see what it looks like.

Delwugor
2014-01-05, 09:23 PM
Magic is often put into terms of cause and their intended effects. This is not unusual for gaming as that is what is most important in terms of play. In reality the cause and effects are just part of what goes into work, the other portion is the process that takes the causes and generates the specific effect.


What was wrong with my idea of using mages as some form of energy-distributer-conduit? As long as [whatever] is conserved then it's possible to do?
This falls under what I'd consider a realistic (relatively) magic system based off the simple Carnot Engine. This magical Carnot Engine would take inputs (matter/energy, biological, space-time, probability and so forth) plus extra energy to run, be processed through the MC Engine and the desired results are obtained. I'd throw a "controller" on top of the engine to provide variations to achieve desired effects.

For example take space-time (around target) and energy into the MC Engine, use the controller called Dimensional Door and your target ends up displaced 50 ft (or 10 million light years).
Replace the Dimensional Door controller with a Time Travel controller and now your target is 10 minutes in the future (or walking with the dinosaurs).

Take energy through the MC with a Fireball controller and poof someone becomes toast. Aim at pigs and you get bacon.
Now use the controller Lightning and someone is going to get an explosive charge, as well as permanent bad hair days.

Take the probability in a scene and the True Strike controller and the MCE manipulates the chance that the person swinging a sword (or fish) solidly hits the target. Sushi for all survivors.
Switch to a Luck controller and other probabilistic effects are achieved, finding barrels of dark ale is really lucky.

Take away the controller and you get Wild Magic, watch out cause crazy **** will happen somewhere and sometime.

In general a controlled magical process comes across as more realistic and consistent than just the cause and effects.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-01-05, 09:32 PM
Just as something to add, I'm entirely okay with a science fiction setting where everything in the world follows logical, consistent rules, is consistent (within a few obvious limits) with modern science, and in which the characters of the story have no idea how it works. They just know it works.

As far as I'm concerned, that would be basically the same thing as a fantasy setting.

Also, isn't it weird that a lot of fantasy settings have some idea of modern scientific principles such as germ theory? And mention things like space-time, whereas such things have no real reason to even be true in a medieval time period type of setting? Maybe bad smells really do cause illness? Maybe it's bad spirits?

I think it's mostly a nod to a modern audience's understanding of basic scientific principles. Everyone now knows there's something called spacetime, germs, and that rocks can fall from the sky, so they expect those things to exist in an arbitrary setting as well. It's basic knowledge everyone has now, but there's no reason such things even need to be true in a fantasy setting.

But I think the interesting thing about fantasy in particular is that virtually anything can be true about the world. Science fiction, (particularly 'hard' science fiction) just tries to trick someone with some basic knowledge into thinking that its fantastic magic is consistent with modern scientific knowledge.

In an objective sense, the only real difference I've ever noticed is one of setting. Fantasy is 'the past' and science fiction is 'the future'. Anything else is purely flavor meant to make the distinction 'more real'.

Delwugor
2014-01-05, 10:54 PM
Science fiction, (particularly 'hard' science fiction) just tries to trick someone with some basic knowledge into thinking that its fantastic magic is consistent with modern scientific knowledge.
I'm not sure what hard science fiction you are familiar with, but there is much more than basic science that goes into it. I'd recommend reading some of Atomic Rockets (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php) and Rocketpunk Manifesto (http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/) sites to see how much work goes into getting things correct (or at least very consistent).
Caveat that FTL is usually given some pass as needed for the setting, but there is also lots of analysis and recommendations on potential theories that are consistent.

Sorry for the derail, I'll turn everyone back to their regularly scheduled discussion.

The Oni
2014-01-05, 11:26 PM
Guys, what if magic really exists and humans are just ****ty wizards

NichG
2014-01-06, 02:54 AM
You'd basically have to perform complete destructive interference with the outcomes that you don't want, we can't control the collapse of the wavefunction according to our current knowledge of quantum mechanics. Also if you look into the future with the precog mage then you'd be measuring the future, I'd imagine this would cause some sort of entanglement between you and the outcome future, so all the other prefered outcomes would no longer be possible under the many-worlds theory.


Well, this kind of thing is why I was trying to convince AMFV to move from the 'perfectly realistic' goal to simply 'what can we add that creates for science-y magic but may require modifying the universe to achieve'. We can't achieve a 'perfectly realistic' magic because then it would exist, but we can achieve a system where we know what we've had to change to make it happen.

QM measurement is a convenient place to hide things because measurement causes QM to be overspecified - the time evolution of the wave equation contains a 'complete' description of how psi(t) should depend on psi(t0). At that level, there is no such thing as measurement as a 'physical process'.

However, because you can't in practice model the entanglement of the (small number of particles that are theoretically accessible) with the (measurement device, brains of the scientists, etc), we have 'measurement' as a way to handle what happens when the microscopic system interacts with a macroscopic system whose degrees of freedom we don't have knowledge of. The over-specification inherent in this step, combined with the relative importance of the step for how we perceive the world, means its potentially a good place to sneak things in without having to change the underlying equations of motion (e.g. we get to preserve all our conservation laws for free).

That said, because of the 'future knowledge' aspect of this, you probably do have to change the equations of motion. The 'easiest' way to do this would probably be to say that in this universe, the Schroedinger equation is actually non-linear. That means that the time-evolution of psi can actually destroy probability (e.g. violate the rule that integral psi^2 = 1), which corresponds to the property of a measurement process. So basically you're taking measurement from a computational tool used to cover interactions with large sets of unknown degrees of freedom and turning it into something that is actually part of the equation of motion of the universe. Once you allow that non-linearity, then basically an object in the equation can be the cause of a wave-function collapse.

Since approximate/coarse-grained QM theories used in many-body physics tend to introduce non-linear terms (e.g. the non-linear Schroedinger Equation, which is used to model Bose-Einstein condensates), this isn't so bad.

The 'future sight' is the most disruptive part of this, and I think in order for this to be usable in practice in a game, you have to throw out relativity because of it. Which is a fairly large change, but fortunately it doesn't do _too_ much at human scales. Our biology would be a little different when it came to transition metal complexes, and gold would be a grey metal. We might use a different element than iron in our hemoglobin, for example, and plants might not use magnesium in chlorophyll.



However you could use something which has been named "time loop logic" which is outlined here on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle#Time_loop_logic). This would just set up a situtation where if your magic works then your desired outcome is the only logical outcome. The magic would work something like this:

1) recieve message from the future.
2) wait until your spell is suppose to happen.
3) Check if your spell happened as you wanted.
4A) If yes, send back same message.
4B) If no, send back different message.


The 'if you see the future you can't help but change it' aspect of the precog mage idea basically implements this as a consequence of the actual future sight, rather than as an underlying property of physical reality. The issue with doing it as underlying reality is that Novikov requires a lot of legwork to set up, from the point of view of the mage. You need 'obligate timetravel' or what tends to happen is that 'the message is simply never sent' is the path of least resistance.

What I mean by 'obligate timetravel' is that you have something where 'an object that passes through this macroscopic region will send a temporal signal, no matter what else'. In relativity, these would be wormhole mouths. The obligate nature of wormhole mouths means that you can set up a situation where the only valid solutions involve objects traversing them, so you can 'force' the universe to allow your signal to exist.

Otherwise you have the issue that e.g. the users of this technique always have brain aneurysms rather than ever successfully sending back a message.

Its also really hard to run predestination paradoxes with PCs, but thats a side-issue.


The only differences between this and real life is that you'd need the universe to be scattered with CTCs and humans able to send some signal through them. The CTC space-time fabric could change a lot about how the universe works, though in some reigmes I'd imagine the differences would be negligable and you'd probably have to be able to detect quantum mechanics before seeing anything particually different to how the universe works if this wasn't the case. I'm now tempted to see if there are any solutions to einstein's equations like this and if so simulate it to see what it looks like.

From what I've seen, linear PDEs at least with closed-timelike-curves tend to be susceptible to the introduction of exponentially growing/shrinking solutions even if their usual solutions are periodic. Try, for example, solving the wave equation in 1D with the boundary condition that psi(L,t)=psi(0,t-delta)

You'll find that when delta>c*L, the solutions have an imaginary component in their frequency.

This of course doesn't mean that a non-linear PDE will have this problem, but it does mean that you'll probably have to search for the solutions computationally, and I think that computational problem is fairly non-trivial (you could e.g. try to relax the full solution such that it minimizes the degree to which it violates the PDE, but you aren't guaranteed that there won't be local minima that you can easily get trapped in).

It may be easiest with a weakly non-linear PDE that limits the growth of the exponential terms - you might be able to do perturbation theory and then fix up the fact that it'd be a singular perturbation with RG or something.

No brains
2014-01-07, 11:01 PM
Just so I'm sure, what are the laws of physics, thermodynamics, probability, etc. that I can't break in creating a satisfying system of magic for you?

Additionally, what should this system of magic be capable of doing? Should there still be a spell similar to Fabricate that actually describes from where the matter comes, or should effects like that be omitted entirely? Should I try to explain how Wish, Miracle, and Reality Revision work, or just avoid explaining them due to their extreme potential?

I could possibly ratify something for you, but I just need to know what I need to do and what I shouldn't bother doing.

Aside, I'm a fan of the idea of magic being unknowable to some degree. Including the Landauer's Principal could be interesting; any form of measurement fine enough to decipher magic ruins the process. It can never be fully known, and indeed sometimes it helps to actively not think about it.

My spit-balling snowballs: what if the rationale for wisdom-based will saves is that a creature is able to perceive, and thereby instantly remove, a vital component particle of the spell's 'mechanism', 'shape', or 'whatever'. I don't know higher physics that well.

AKA_Bait
2014-01-07, 11:16 PM
I skipped the thread and am responding to the OP only. Sorry for any overlap.

I don't know of any fictional magic system that would fit. Peter Carroll's "real" magick system might work well for a setting.

Jakodee
2014-01-08, 06:15 PM
I once ran a game with magic being glitches in reality, so if a certain "program" is run weird things happen. But anyway... if it has rules and can be repeatedly used it is not magic it is science. Petting elephants could give birth to galaxies but that would not be magic because that is how thing work. Magic is only when something happens "for no reason". But usually their is a reason we haven't figured out yet.

Jakodee
2014-01-08, 06:26 PM
"That's not necessarily true to be honest. Magic can exist without creating something from nothing, or without working wholesale against entropy, or without changing the laws of superimposition (Geology has slightly less exciting laws, but they're mine). Magic is doing something through magical energy, not expressly violating the laws of physics, at least to my thinking."

We'll actually magic is the violation or ingnoration of physics. So when you speak of "arcane" energy, you just mean mysterious and weird new forms of energy. Also, every read the latter books in the ender series. I can just imagine what people would do with advanced anaisable manipulation tech.

Deremir
2014-01-08, 06:52 PM
While im not sure its exactly what your looking for there is the option of adding new laws of physics that dont interfear with what they really are, for example i once postulated a system where the dispersion and transfer of energy was controlled by a sort of 3d grid system across the universe the bigger the boxes are the more energy in that spot, and vise versa, the magic part is where certain people have the ability to move these grid lines. I thaught this up as a form of magic system that could come up with new spells within the system that i hadnt thaught of, this grid system dosent (to my knoledge) conflict with the current laws of physics, you know until people start moving the lines

NichG
2014-01-09, 04:01 AM
Having a fixed grid underlying the universe breaks rotation symmetry, local translational symmetry, and also potentially Lorenz invariance/Galilean invariance (since the grid would have its own reference frame and therefore represent a 'special velocity'). So it'd let you violate conservation of angular and linear momentum, mess with relativity, and would likely cause certain large-scale anisotropy effects that would be visible in the cosmic microwave background.

Delta
2014-01-09, 04:24 AM
Even though I guess most people won't understand the specifics of what NichG wrote, it points out a very important point about "adding new laws of physics", unless you have a very solid, deep understanding of our current understanding of physics, you can be very sure that your new law will break a ton of stuff we already know. It's just not that simple.

That's not to say that you can't make visionary "enhancements" to physics while still keeping true to the spirit of science, if you want an example for this, read some novels by Alistair Reynolds, for example, even though he does tend to go a bit overboard in his later novels, there's a lot of really great, visionary "hard" science fiction in there.

So yes, you could create "magic" that doesn't "break" physics, but to do so in a manner that's actually compatible with our understanding of physics, you actually need to have such an understanding yourself.

Deremir
2014-01-09, 09:11 AM
Having a fixed grid underlying the universe breaks rotation symmetry, local translational symmetry, and also potentially Lorenz invariance/Galilean invariance (since the grid would have its own reference frame and therefore represent a 'special velocity'). So it'd let you violate conservation of angular and linear momentum, mess with relativity, and would likely cause certain large-scale anisotropy effects that would be visible in the cosmic microwave background.

Showoff:smalltongue:

NichG
2014-01-09, 09:22 AM
Well perhaps :smallbiggrin:

Anyhow, Delta made my point in a much more comprehensible way.

Don't get me wrong though - I love 'self-consistent' magic systems. But the cool thing about them is seeing how the changes to physics impact the world, rather than the idea that 'they could actually be consistent with our understanding of physics'. That is to say, I know what a world described by the physics of our universe looks like - I just have to look around me; the cool thing is to see how a small change from that could propagate, see how someone can construct a 'science' and 'technology' on the basis of different underlying rules.

We can't really go back and experience what it must have been like to live in Newton's time or the industrial revolution or whatever, but thats part of the fantasy of a new, self-consistent system - we can apply the insights from living in the modern era (that things are reproducible, predictable, usable to create technology) to a 'fresh' system that hasn't already been worked so heavily. It means there's going to be a lot of low-hanging fruit - cool things you can discover without having to study for 10 years and work for another 5.

Icewraith
2014-01-09, 05:38 PM
I skipped the middle pages.

What seems to be asked for is a magic system that's non magical. The whole point of magical effects is they violate one or more of the physical laws that we've discovered the universe appears to follow.

The point of magic is it does things we could do if we expended a massive amount of energy and time in doing them.

Most often, what magic appears to be on a fundamental level is a sort of warp principle as applied to work instead of space. When you perform work, such as pushing a block, the path you take to move the block determines how much work you do and how much energy you expend (and lose to frictional forces etc.). Magic bends the universe such that you do little to no physical work moving the block from point a to point b. In fact, theres suddenly enough energy in the universe that the block moved from point a to point b on its own.

Do you need all of the air molecules in the room to spontaneously migrate to the upper left hand corner? Moving from a normally distributed state to a highly ordered state violates entropy, and so normally there would be a large amount of energy expended moving air molecules into the desired corner of the room and ensuring they stay there. You could do it without magic by sealing off the room, using a vacuum pump to suck the vast majority of the air into an air tank, sealing the air tank, and physically placing the air tank in the desired corner of the room. You overcome the entropy violation through the expenditure of time and energy (and associated larger entropy gain) in the process of sealing the room, creating the vacuum pump and pressure vessel, and moving the pressure vessel from one distance to another.

Magic bends the universe such that the air molecules naturally congregate in the upper left hand corner of the room, bypassing the energy expenditure and entropy violation involved in such a thing happening spontaneously. Or alternatively, it supplies the universe with enough energy to exert a force on the air molecules that shoves them into the upper corner.

Do you need a 40 foot radius ball of fire to appear in a specific location? You can do this nonmagically, but you have to make a fuel air explosive and deploy it yourself to that location.

The concept of material components is actually pretty interesting, because even nuclear reactions result in a very small conversion of mass into energy. There's probably more than enough energy in a matter-antimatter reaction to make the equations for some of these tasks balance out, but the other trick is the entropy violation in how you get the energy to do what you want- if you spontaneously convert the mass of any nonmicroscopic object completely into energy, the energy will then distribute itself according to the second law of thermodynamics. The end result of that will be unpleasant for you and everyone else on your particular continent.

Therefore, magic is the transition of a closed system from a disordered state to an ordered state without a corresponding work expenditure or net increase in entropy in the overall state of the system.

Raimun
2014-01-09, 06:46 PM
Well... it's magic.

Magic is by definition a supernatural phenomenon. Ie, magic spells are impossible supernatural forces that can not exist... unless they do, in which case they aren't supernatural forces anymore but in fact perfectly natural forces. Supernatural forces are by definition impossible to exist.

Point being that in D&D-world a Fireball-spell is as natural force as a matchstick is in ours.

Your examples of "realistic magic" are as impossible as any D&D-spells, since you would still need to control natural forces through supernatural means. The basic idea is still neat, though. I guess it would be doubly impossible to control supernatural forces through supernatural means than it would be to control natural forces through supernatural means.

Devils_Advocate
2014-02-09, 08:04 PM
The supernatural isn't by definition non-existent, just not part of the material universe. Which seems to apply to plenty of things. You can't scoop up a cup full of gravity, now can ya?

Of course, it's become rather standard to respond that anything that interacts with matter is also a part of the material universe. In which case of course nothing we observe is supernatural in nature, as the supernatural can have no influence on us. But that's a bit "no true Scotsman", innit?

This gets to my earlier point: If you remove from a definition of "magic" the requirement that it not actually exist, you're liable to find that magic is all around you. We live in an amazing universe. But such is the perversity of human nature that things can be less interesting to us because they're real.

Fire-breathing dragons might well be less exciting were they rare, exotic beasts rather than entirely fictional. And if one lived on every street corner, they'd be downright boring. Although not affording them any special attention would be appropriate, I suppose, as producing a flame is no more impressive than many things life does already.

Or at least it seems to me that life should impress, and all the more so for its abundance.


you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.
It's my understanding that "wave function collapse" is itself a big ol' handwave that the many-worlds interpretation doesn't use, and that this is one of the points in favor of many-worlds.


if it has rules and can be repeatedly used it is not magic it is science. Petting elephants could give birth to galaxies but that would not be magic because that is how thing work.
I'm pretty sure that most people would consider spellcasting to be magic, so you're going against common usage here.

Also, how would you even apply that? Do you think that electricity "is science"? Or that it "doesn't have rules or can't be repeatedly used"?

Science is a process by which phenomena are investigated and explained. The phenomena themselves are typically not science. Although some of them may be. No reason why you can't scientifically investigate the phenomenon of science. Mmm, meta-science. (In a similar vein, see Eliezer Yudkowsky's technical explanation of technical explanation (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/).)


Magic is only when something happens "for no reason".
How many people would ever consider anything "magical", by that standard? I could accept the sudden and unexplained appearance of a unicorn, given sufficient evidence, but I can't imagine anything that could convince me that its appearance was uncaused. I would wonder how it appeared, without ever considering "there not being a 'how'". This strikes me as the typical perspective.

(Of course, that anything should exist, rather than nothing existing, itself seems to be a violation of the principle of sufficient reason (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason). But causality seems to reliably hold within the universe, even if the universe as a whole is uncaused. Which maybe is pretty odd when you think about it? But there ya go.)


magic is the violation or ingnoration of physics.
YEESH, MAKE UP YOUR MIND. :P

Jay R
2014-02-10, 10:19 AM
I mean not in violation of the laws of nature. Energy and kinetics don't violate the laws of nature. In terms of what really could happen there are lots of things. Things can explode, they can be moved, those are certainly possibilities. I think your definition of possibility is fairly narrow. Sometimes things spontaneously explode, which means that it's certainly within the realm of possibility.

I'm saying that a magic system that doesn't do anything outside of the realm of possibility could exist.

That depends on what you mean by "in violation of the laws of nature" or "outside of the realm of possibility."

In one sense, if it has any force other than gravity, electro-magnetism, or the strong and weak nuclear forces, then it is in violation of the laws of nature. Obviously, any magic system is in violation in that sense.

So you need to be more precise in your requirements. I suspect that you could establish a continuum of magical effects, based on how much it violates the laws of nature.

Here are a few starting points:
Are you willing to violate laws of motion (conservation of momentum, angular momentum, etc.)? This affects telekinesis, flight levitation and the like.

Are you willing to violate conservation of mass? This affects polymorph, Wall of Stone, Wall of Iron, etc.

Are you willing to violate conservation of energy? Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, Wall of Fire, etc.

Are you willing to violate the increase of energy? Mending, Raise Dead, etc.

Possibly the least violation you could have is to invent a fifth force, magic, which can be manipulated mentally. But there are still a lot of equations you will have to violate, adjust, or just ignore.

Ozfer
2014-02-10, 12:01 PM
Have you ever read The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott? It has a magic system that sounds very similar to what your are describing, where magic lines up with scientific disciplines and is governed by scientific rules.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-02-10, 02:27 PM
Just a couple of things to say.

The supernatural isn't by definition non-existent, just not part of the material universe. Which seems to apply to plenty of things. You can't scoop up a cup full of gravity, now can ya?
Did you just suggest that gravity is supernatural? :smallamused: Anyway, I seem to recall a science article I read describing the Higgs boson experiment as the process of 'scooping up' a piece of gravity. I know that's not actually true, I just couldn't help but think of it.

Anyway, the supernatural is non-existent, at least to a point. If something happens on a consistent basis, you can use the process of science to understand the rules by which it operates. This works whether wiggling your fingers causes a massive explosion or that weird drifter guy turns into a wolf every full moon. It may not be fully understood, but the practice of science can be used to investigate any repeating phenomenon, and thus categorize it as a 'natural' phenomena.

If the supernatural is random, unique and impossible to generalize formal rules for, then that's a thing you can't poke with science to understand. It could exist, but in a story universe it's usually just a sign of bad writing. In the real world, saying that the supernatural doesn't exist is similar to asserting that science can poke everything. It's not necessarily true, but there's no real reason to assert otherwise. And in the meantime, scientists are busy trying to poke everything.

Though, in my experience, people don't usually mean the latter when they talk about supernatural phenomena. What people usually mean by 'supernatural' is several things that commonly appear to not exist in the real world (and thus, have no history of scientific discovery associated with them), but definitely do still have rules associated with them. Any rules would be those things that are established about the 'supernatural' phenomena being considered. Ghosts, werewolves, demons, etc... All have rules, and names to distinguish them from one another.

Delta
2014-02-10, 03:29 PM
Anyway, the supernatural is non-existent, at least to a point.

Not even only to a point. The original point was absolutely correct, the supernatural IS by its very definition non-existent, because nature is everything that exists in our universe.

NichG
2014-02-10, 03:34 PM
You could in principle use the term 'supernatural' to things which should be random, but which exhibit correlations that are statistically unexpected, but cannot be predicted or reproduced.

For example, if you observed that thermal random noise used to feed a cryptographic function on your computer had the right mean, variation, etc, but in one particular case it contrived to cause your random number generator to output the random password 'password' five times in a row, then never again, then that wouldn't be something you could really apply a scientific method to (its a one-time event), its something which has no apparent cause, and its something you cannot in response act back upon.

It would only be supernatural in that case if there were not some explanation contained within the dynamics of the universe for why that particular thing happened. That is to say, there could be an actual reason, but it would have to be asymptotically un-knowable and un-investigable (e.g. there is no set of experiments you can do to discover the reason, ever).

Thats a pretty large way away from the colloquial use of the word though.

Zale
2014-02-10, 04:45 PM
Being able to move and rearrange energy at will without any explanation is not really any more realistic than simply pulling things out of nothing.

Honestly, any form of magic that tries to comply with physical laws tends to cause more suspension of disbelief problems than one that doesn't.

As long as your system follows a set of consistent rules, most people will readily adopt it without any problems.

But if realism is your game, you have to ask how realistic do you want things to be. Because full realism means no magic at all.

Jay R
2014-02-10, 07:25 PM
Honestly, any form of magic that tries to comply with physical laws tends to cause more suspension of disbelief problems than one that doesn't.

Oooh - very nice point.

I tend to let players know that the laws of nature aren't the same in my world. My introduction to a game a few years ago included the following paragraph:


A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally.

In fact, the first quest involved the fact that the earth was the center of the universe, the seven planets rotated around it, all within the fixed celestial sphere, just as Ptolemy described.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-02-10, 07:47 PM
Not even only to a point. The original point was absolutely correct, the supernatural IS by its very definition non-existent, because nature is everything that exists in our universe.
Consider:

You could in principle use the term 'supernatural' to things which should be random, but which exhibit correlations that are statistically unexpected, but cannot be predicted or reproduced.

For example, if you observed that thermal random noise used to feed a cryptographic function on your computer had the right mean, variation, etc, but in one particular case it contrived to cause your random number generator to output the random password 'password' five times in a row, then never again, then that wouldn't be something you could really apply a scientific method to (its a one-time event), its something which has no apparent cause, and its something you cannot in response act back upon.

It would only be supernatural in that case if there were not some explanation contained within the dynamics of the universe for why that particular thing happened. That is to say, there could be an actual reason, but it would have to be asymptotically un-knowable and un-investigable (e.g. there is no set of experiments you can do to discover the reason, ever).

Thats a pretty large way away from the colloquial use of the word though.
That's exactly the sort of situation I was thinking about. Such a thing, if it happened would be supernatural. And there wouldn't really be any way to distinguish between it and just an unfamiliar unexplained phenomena (you can't say for certain the event will remain un-knowable and un-investigable in the future, only that it might be right now).

Though if you like you could make assertions one way or the other. The assertions would be kind of pointless, though, because the assertion would only really express how confident you are in what the future will hold for possible inquiry into the event. Although if you assert that the phenomena IS a supernatural event, you could possibly be shown to be wrong. But even so, asserting that it isn't a supernatural event isn't a position that is possible to defend, either. It's an assertion either way you go, just one of the assertions can (theoretically) possibly be proven wrong.

Philosophically speaking, in as pure-logic terms as possible, saying that supernatural events don't happen is an unfounded assertion.

That said, I'm generally okay with asserting supernatural events don't happen, but that's just because with informal language use, the former isn't really how most people use the word. More often, it just seems to be a sloppy excuse for why the repeatable, falsifiable claims someone makes about the world around them isn't verifiable through the usual process we have to examine repeatable, falsifiable claims. (Science!)

Normally, I'd let this kind of minor point slide, but what's the Internet for if not to engage in minor, technical pedantry?

Delta
2014-02-11, 05:58 AM
You could in principle use the term 'supernatural' to things which should be random, but which exhibit correlations that are statistically unexpected, but cannot be predicted or reproduced.

You could make a case for that, but I wouldn't agree with it. Would it be a freak incident? Most definitely. But it's not supernatural in my opinion, since it happened within our universe so it is by that very definition part of "nature". Nature is everything that exists within our universe, so everything that happens here is natural.

Just to make this clear: I understand your point, I just don't agree with it. But we're really just arguing semantics here.

Jay R
2014-02-11, 11:21 AM
Two comments on the supernatural:

1. The definition of "supernatural" as anything which should be random but isn't includes all physical results that you do not understand, including which way the needle points when a lodestone is near it, making metal by heating ore, the movement of the planets, even the results of die-rolling, the first time you see loaded dice.

2. It seems to me that it's pretty difficult to give a reasonable, consistent definition for "supernatural" that includes everything we want it to include without also including free will.

NichG
2014-02-11, 01:28 PM
Two comments on the supernatural:

1. The definition of "supernatural" as anything which should be random but isn't includes all physical results that you do not understand, including which way the needle points when a lodestone is near it, making metal by heating ore, the movement of the planets, even the results of die-rolling, the first time you see loaded dice.


No, rather this is a statement that it is impossible to every conclude that something is supernatural under the definition I gave.

You can always conclude that something wasn't supernatural once you've developed an explanation that it can be checked against. There are a lot of ways to do this. For things that are repeatable, while you can never hit 100% certainty that it wasn't supernatural, you can asymptotically approach 100% certainty by repeating the test as many times as you like.

For things that aren't repeatable, your maximum achievable certainty may be bounded, and you have to be very careful about doing proper statistics with respect to fitting parameters and even the forms of functions you use to predict the phenomena (for example, epicycles can produce any sort of curve). If I were to try to generalize this, what I might try to do is use the concept of Kolmogorov Complexity - calculate the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data associated with the event and the Kolmogorov Complexity of all experimental data known to mankind. If by combining the data sets you can create a model whose Kolmogorov Complexity is lower than the sum of the disjoint data sets, that measures the degree of 'naturalness' of the event (e.g. it tells you the degree to which understanding of the event and understanding of the rest of the universe comprise an understanding of a shared system).

Of course, that's only really good for deterministic models. In some sense you need to be able to perform statistical abstraction as well, and I don't actually know what the equivalent to Kolmogorov Complexity would be in that case.



2. It seems to me that it's pretty difficult to give a reasonable, consistent definition for "supernatural" that includes everything we want it to include without also including free will.

'Not understood' is not the same as 'not understandable'. In some sense, any definition of supernatural will be subject to things that were 'possibly supernatural' becoming 'not supernatural' over time as explanations and understanding are developed.

The reverse wouldn't happen though - you wouldn't understand something as non-supernatural and then decide later 'oh, it was supernatural after all'.

Jay R
2014-02-11, 02:19 PM
No, rather this is a statement that it is impossible to every conclude that something is supernatural under the definition I gave.

Correct, and I withdraw my statement. From omniscient point of view of the DM working out the physics of his universe, the definition works perfectly. Only from the within-world view of the player does my statement have any meaning.


'Not understood' is not the same as 'not understandable'. In some sense, any definition of supernatural will be subject to things that were 'possibly supernatural' becoming 'not supernatural' over time as explanations and understanding are developed.

The reverse wouldn't happen though - you wouldn't understand something as non-supernatural and then decide later 'oh, it was supernatural after all'.

But now you've switched to the player view while I was referring the DM's.

I repeat: "It seems to me that it's pretty difficult to give a reasonable, consistent definition for "supernatural" that includes everything we want it to include without also including free will."

People using free will can change what happens in a non-random way, so the definition based on randomness includes free will as supernatural. Free will and consciousness aren't observably physical, so the definition based on physics would include free will as supernatural.

Devils_Advocate
2014-04-02, 01:21 PM
Did you just suggest that gravity is supernatural?
Sure, why not?


Anyway, I seem to recall a science article I read describing the Higgs boson experiment as the process of 'scooping up' a piece of gravity.
Ah, right, force-carrying particles. The universe can't be divided into particles and the forces between them if the forces are made of particles as well! It's particles all the way down! O_O

Still, isn't there a distinction drawn between ordinary particles and "virtual" particles that pop into and out of existence and may lack normal mass? C'mon, quasi-substantial thingies that lack ontological inertia are BASICALLY magic.


What people usually mean by 'supernatural' is several things that commonly appear to not exist in the real world (and thus, have no history of scientific discovery associated with them), but definitely do still have rules associated with them. Any rules would be those things that are established about the 'supernatural' phenomena being considered. Ghosts, werewolves, demons, etc... All have rules, and names to distinguish them from one another.
So saying that the supernatural must lack known rules goes against common usage, then, doesn't it?


It seems to me that it's pretty difficult to give a reasonable, consistent definition for "supernatural" that includes everything we want it to include without also including free will.
I don't think it has been established that we all want "supernatural" to mean the same thing.


People using free will can change what happens in a non-random way
Depends on what you mean by "free will" and "random".


Free will and consciousness aren't observably physical
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'd, uh... be surprised if there isn't any neuroscience that contradicts that statement.

NichG
2014-04-02, 02:10 PM
Sure, why not?

Ah, right, force-carrying particles. The universe can't be divided into particles and the forces between them if the forces are made of particles as well! It's particles all the way down! O_O

Still, isn't there a distinction drawn between ordinary particles and "virtual" particles that pop into and out of existence and may lack normal mass? C'mon, quasi-substantial thingies that lack ontological inertia are BASICALLY magic.


The distinction in the underlying equations is a lot murkier than one might think. In general, we don't do things like particle tracking at the lowest levels of description - most particle physics is 'How much energy and other conserved quantities do I have? Okay, now lets jumble everything up and make new particles that add up to the correct amounts, also taking into account the relative entropies of different ways things can be produced'. So basically, one treats everything as 'lacking ontological inertia' and only the conserved stuff really matters.

But the lowest levels of physics really jumble together a lot of things stranger than just particles and virtual particles. For example, a Wick rotation is a mathematical procedure that recognizes a commonality between the formulations of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics map, such that if you take QM and make time imaginary, you get stat-mech where the imaginary time is the inverse of the temperature. So really when it comes down to it, 'natural' theory can be pretty strange stuff.



I don't think it has been established that we all want "supernatural" to mean the same thing.


Yeah, this appears to be the problem. Coming back to the 'magic and physics' thing, what actually is the benefit of pivoting the concept around what is 'supernatural' and what is 'natural'? I think even though its possible to proceed forward with that distinction in particular, doing it rigorously becomes very esoteric very quickly.



Depends on what you mean by "free will" and "random".

I'm no expert on the subject, but I'd, uh... be surprised if there isn't any neuroscience that contradicts that statement.

Or even behavioral science. People respond to situations in ways that are statistically predictable even if they aren't absolutely predictable. If I make the guess that someone crossing a bridge isn't as likely to jump off it as continue across, that guess will be a very successful predictor of behavior. Can I predict what a random person will eat for breakfast given all data about their life to this moment? From the point of view of a theory I can write down and solve on paper, perhaps not (too many variables), but data-mining in the Internet age is starting to paint the picture that 'yes, you can, to an often creepy level of accuracy'.

Devils_Advocate
2014-05-03, 06:30 AM
So basically, one treats everything as 'lacking ontological inertia'
So what you're saying is that EVERYTHING is magic.

See, this is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about!

NichG
2014-05-03, 12:56 PM
So what you're saying is that EVERYTHING is magic.

See, this is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about!

Well it makes the term pretty weak if you want to define it that way. It doesn't really connect at all to how the term 'magic' is used by basically any other person. You end up with statements like 'Hey, that rock is magic because it exists but its components constantly change', or 'Hey, that beaker of water is magic because its in dynamic equilibrium!'.

Drachasor
2014-05-03, 04:19 PM
Yeah, I think you can have a magic system follow rules as elaborate as you like, but you can't rest it on something that makes sense and meshes with normal physical law.

A new particle that can be used to make wormholes or something like that isn't magic. It's just new physics.

Using a hair from someone's head in a ritual to make them sick, on the other hand, could follow a lot of rules. Age, amount, whether you got any living cells at the base of the hair, distance to the target, reagents, and so forth could all affect how powerful the effect is. Those rules don't change the fact that fundamentally this doesn't make sense given the rest of physical law. Not that it leads to a contradiction per se, but merely that HOW it works is inexplicable to normal physical law.

In this what a scientific approach to magic can doesn't mean that magic is just physics.

Of course, if you then decide that there is a very clear explanation that can then mesh with normal science, you undercut the supernatural feeling of it. That's why a lot of people dislike midichlorians.

Lord Raziere
2014-05-03, 04:43 PM
it is my belief that Physics is the body of the world, Magic the spirit of the world and Psychic is the mind of the world.

Physics gives the other two a body, a material universe for them to exist within.

Psychics gives the other two thought, logic and theory for them to understand things.

and finally Magic gives the other two a soul, purpose and a reason for existing.

all three are vital. keep in mind, the magic I speak of is probably not even arcane magic, but divine magic.

in DnD terms...... Physics would actually be the wizard. Psion would the Psychic and the Clerics would be the magic, as divine magic is a more accurate soul of the world. but they are not what I'm really talking about.

magic and physics thus interacting is much like how the soul interacts with the physical world. for the soul does not care about how things Really Are, but how Things Should Be In Spirit- Psychic is all about how Things Should Be In Theory, which is different.