science or magic?
I actually saw Jessica Hagy’s “indexed” card before hearing the news of Arthur C. Clarke’s death:
and it had made me think. Clarke’s 3rd law, from Wikipedia, states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Yes? No?
I recalled an earlier conversation with a non-friend that angered me so. She stated that magic was meant to be unexplainable, that as soon as it is explainable it ceases to be magic. (She also went on to say that magic “is of the self,” whatever that means, I only take it to be from some whimsy voodoo New Age garbage.) I countered with, “Well, the sun’s been shining for billions of years, warming the planet and making plants grow. People couldn’t explain that phenomenon back then, therefore it must have been magic.”
Maybe she’s hung up on the word “magic” itself, maybe she likes the romanticized notion of having mysterious things happen. Perhaps finding a logical or scientific explanation for them ruins her sense of wonder, like a kid being told there’s no Santa Claus. All right, if people want to live in blissful ignorance, that’s their choice-but to me it still means closed-minded foolery, a refusal to approach or consider new ideas. And that line of dogmatic thinking is dangerous, especially since we’ve had several millennia of ideological clashes and wars fought in the name of X or Y.
Personally, I don’t think that finding out the sun is a ball of hydrogen diminishes the wonder of its existence. The same way I marvel at how our bodies’ immune systems manage to fight off attackers worthy of the grandest epic adventure, or how computers manage to do the things they do by taking combinations of 1’s and 0’s. I’m not afraid of learning the techniques of magic tricks-even though The Prestige maintains that we “want to be fooled,” I still believe that having the explanation makes it more magical. I like having things explained, I am a person who will always ask why and how along with the what. History has repeatedly supported the notion that today’s magic is tomorrow’s science, for those, like Arthur C. Clarke, who have the audacity to speculate. It is the human condition to both pursue and apply knowledge, and it is the nature of science to be uncertain. But at least with science are people willing to look for explanations, where the only wrong answer is not asking the question.
Which brings me to Clarke’s second law, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” So no, maybe intergalactic space travel isn’t possible in this lifetime, but hoo, he did predict that geostationary satellites would work for communications purposes.
I’m not sure if I can ever persuade the non-friend that the pursuit of knowledge isn’t fruitless. Age-old philosophers have tried to answer the age-old questions of “Who are we?” and “Why are we here?” with no more concrete results than maybe asking the right questions. You think that she, planning to be a lawyer, would at least understand that much.