Quote Originally Posted by Mastikator View Post
Because magic is supernatural and science is natural. It's mutually exclusive.
I do not necessarily agree. I'd point towards Shadowrun, where non-magician magical theorists have made strides in understanding how and why magic works, by observing the rules it follows and accurately predicting future discoveries. While magic doesn't fit into the current conception of the natural world, if it were a real, observable, manipulatable force in the universe, it's conceivable that someone taking a scientific approach to magic (i.e. hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, repeat) could learn quite a bit.

When you get right down to it, that's what D&D-style wizards DO. While most adventuring wizards are on the order of technicians or engineers (i.e. applying concepts that others have already perfected), anyone coming up with new styles of magic (q.v. Wild Mages in the Realms, immediately after the Time of Troubles) is going to wind up having to do a bit of experimentation to get things right, and anyone designing spells, even ones that rely on established theorems, is going to likewise have to experiment.

That's actually part of the reason that technology in D&D worlds tends to be retarded, IMO. They spend thousands of years at a medieval technical level because most of the people who would do physical experiments in the real world do metaphysical (i.e. magical) ones in a magical world.