Science vs Magic

Can science beat magic?
Is the way magic works kinda bullshit at times?
Or is magic just some super advanced form of science we don't understand? As said by Marvel.

Forgot to include a pic of Raven, my bad.

Plebeian.

I feel like science has been tainted by the reddit SCIENCE!™ crowd

How do you fuck up science?


I've never seen any media combine the two in any real way. Although isn't alchemy basically chemistry?

It is like a combination of the two, but research into chemistry dominated alchemy as it is more reproducible since it doesn't rely on the influence of the alchemist to work. It is mostly legend, but there is some evidence to suggest that the glass in some Templar built churches and the gold created by Francis Bacon were legit and did involve some form of subtle influence by the men themselves.

Does it really matter? Both are commonly used as plot devices that are only as consistent and effective as writers want them to be. So yes, science can beat magic, but only if the writer wants/needs it to.

Depict it as being essentially a superpower instead of a realistic skill set in a specific field

Pre-modern societies didnt have any major differences between what you call magic, science, and religion. Even ignoring alchemy. Just look up Isaac Newton's work.

The pictured one does. Guy uses a computer program to automate complicated summoning rituals.

...

Stupid meme that no real scientist would do, real scientists would try and understand how magic works, because that's the point of science.

And magic is tainted by tumblr and hipsters. Books like Sorcery 101, Rat Queens, and that comic about hipsters and their magical music are pure cancer. Even Kate Leth has her own comic about witches. I blame Harry Potter for all of that.

I thought it was the Wiccans fault in the 90's for fucking it up.

That's a very vague question that depends entirely on the rules and mechanics of the universe in question. You can write it any way you want based on your whim.
It can be extremely arbitrary, as can science when things are 'handwaved'. Neither is a good way to write it if you want it to be taken seriously.
Science as we know it is composed of understanding natural forces in our world. Theoretically you could have magic down to a 'science', and a case could be made that wizards and magicians technically do have it down to a science. But that science differs very greatly from the majority of sciences as we know them.

The point of magic is to have a system that does not follow any easily understandable rules and conventions, with magnificent scale and a nature that is intended to be beyond the ability to understand.

Science therefore cannot be magic.

You can learn things about magic, but you can never understand it.

That is the priest's approach to magic, they like to operate on "black box theory", they don't care how it works as long as their God delivers. Kind of like the average Microsoft user.
A wizard is more like the hacker who pulls everything apart and reads the guides. He wants to know how everything works, and writes his own programs.
The difference between the wizard and the scientist is the wizard and the scientist both understand how it works, but the wizard keeps it a secret. The scientist wants to be published so everybody knows how clever he is, the wizard just wants an edge over the competition.

What is scarer gandalf riding shadowhax and wielding his staff or gandalf driving a tank wielding an ak47

is harry potter immune to nukes?

That's a pretty silly question since most writers don't understand anything about science and treat it as effectively magic anyway. Moreover science is just a system of thinking and testing to gain incite into how work. Technology is just an application of information gained through scientific methodology making the correct question 'can technology beat magic?'. Which isn't a great question in and of itself since you have to establish how the magic works and what limits it has like are we talking reality warping bullshit or just some faggot casting fireballs since I'm pretty sure some dude with a gun can just shoot that latter.

Really it depends on the context but from what I understand most comics don't operate on any actual scientific basis apart from 'radiation' or 'mutant gene' or 'nonsense that doesn't exist under any natural law of nature'. You can get cool shit like Digital Devil Story by playing around with abstract concepts getting fucked around with by technology though.

*insight into how things work.

I miss the edit button

Like Uncle once said…Magic can defeat Magic.

Vid related

Ask a diabetic.

To answer your question seriously though, I believe magic would have the upper hand. While science can be used to handwave shit into letting it do unnatural stuff (Nanomachines seem to be a favorite for this) they are still ultimately limited by what humans know are possible. Magic can do whatever the fuck it feels like it since it's fucking magic and magic has rules so lax that it makes Holla Forums look heavily moderated by comparison. To describe it breifly:


Science at least requires writers to vaguely know how something works before they use it to explain something. Magic allows writers to pull as much shit out of their ass as they feel like.

Some episodes of Adventure Time do. Pic related.

Science and Magic are the same thing in any fiction that Magic exists in.

Discworld has a weird computer called Hex that does all the complex magic for the wizards.

What if you had 2 stardust tier super geniuses+wizards fight eachother?


I think writers should still make magic consistent enough for the reader to be able to think about what might happen next.

What about gandalf driving flying panzer?

STARDUST CANNOT BE DUPLICATED OR DESTROYED. IF IT SHOULD BE FOUND THAT THERE ARE TWO STARDUSTS EXISTING AT THE SAME TIME, THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM WOULD RESET AND RESTART UNTIL SUCH A PARADOX DOESN'T EXIST.

SUCH IS THE POWER OF STARDUST.

You underestimate the true extent of the power of Stardust

Rowling stated that if anyone had brought a gun, Voldemort wouldn't stand a chance. I imagine a nuke would be right out

Stardust is like the Getter Emperor…you can't have two of them in the same space for fear of one consuming the other and becoming even more powerful…wiping out all existence in the process.

Is there a good source on that? It seems totally out of line with her views.

Does anyone have the part where he captures some villain and inserts his head onto a planet?

Science is a method used to understand natural laws. It seeks to create models that can effectively make accurate predictions. The power science provides comes from understanding nature as well as possible, and then using the rules and laws drawn out of nature to bend it to the will of humanity, that is, creating technology.
One thing people tend to miss when it comes to science, is that at it's core it's not a body of knowledge, a set of technologies, or an ideology, it's a way of looking at something and figuring out what inputs result in what outputs. It ignores what people say about how something works and through experimentation it finds out how that thing actually works.

Magic is about tradition and mysticism. It deals with the supernatural and obeys laws outside of normal nature. The idea of magic is that in order to truly bend the world to our will, we have to follow "The Rules" of magic, rules outside of the natural world. For someone to become good at using magic they must follow what they are taught and focus on improving themselves above all else through hard work and practice. Creating a new spell or potion is either trial and error or done through intuition, not through calculation, logic, or reason.

However, if magic follows a set of rules then science can take those rules, break them down, built predictive models and provide the scientists with a deeper understanding than the magicians who rely on intuition and tradition. If magicians are building predictive models based on experimentation already, then they're scientists in the first place, just under a different name. If you can't make accurate predictive models for magic then that magic is as useless as any other unpredictable thing. Relying on magic that breaks down when you try to apply predictive models to it is like relying on cosmic rays hitting your hard drive to give you a functioning operating system.

The only way magic can win is through plot fiat and authorial favoritism.

magic, by its very natureas a concept, is deus ex machina bullshit.

then again, fiction treats 'science' as deus ex machina bullshit so they might as well be the same.

Science is deus ex machina bullshit to people who don't understand it.