Fiction
"Dear reader,
When you finish reading this sentence, you will no longer retain your full potential in the arcane arts. By the time you finish reading this page, you will only have nine tenth of the potential that was born with you. Such is the relationship between Magic and Knowledge - the more you know, the less your magical potential is. Anyone who fully understands Magic will completely lose the ability to perform it.
The most powerful practicioners of Magic are the ones who can simply cast their magic when they need to, without knowing how they did it. They can only be found in legends."
- The Art of the Arcane, Prologue
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That's a sci-fi style overview of Magic, for the fantasy world that I will probably never get around to fully setup. The best way to understand the Magic in that world would be through an analogy with quantum mechanics. Magic is the manifestation of quantum states in the macroscopic world, protected/purified/error-corrected by the brainwaves of the mage. However, possession of knowledge causes the memory braincells to perform certain measurements on the brainwave, which in the end causes the magic to be weaker.
When you finish reading this sentence, you will no longer retain your full potential in the arcane arts. By the time you finish reading this page, you will only have nine tenth of the potential that was born with you. Such is the relationship between Magic and Knowledge - the more you know, the less your magical potential is. Anyone who fully understands Magic will completely lose the ability to perform it.
The most powerful practicioners of Magic are the ones who can simply cast their magic when they need to, without knowing how they did it. They can only be found in legends."
- The Art of the Arcane, Prologue
----
That's a sci-fi style overview of Magic, for the fantasy world that I will probably never get around to fully setup. The best way to understand the Magic in that world would be through an analogy with quantum mechanics. Magic is the manifestation of quantum states in the macroscopic world, protected/purified/error-corrected by the brainwaves of the mage. However, possession of knowledge causes the memory braincells to perform certain measurements on the brainwave, which in the end causes the magic to be weaker.