Is this world magical?

[Sapphire Lightning 784]

Ok, I have been thinking about this for years. Is the world we live in (by your definition) magical?

 

Even the word technology might be construed to mean magic. (technos plus logy) We have the tools incorporated in to our very lives to translate text in real time (with the app using the same font!). We have a distribution system that works like magic (although there is a lot of real work needed for it to work.) I could spout out for days how awesome this world really is: how people past would have trouble grasping the very concept of what we do every day. We take this world for granted, but my question still remains: is this world magical?

Edited February 25, 2015 by GreatAndPowerfulKaty

[StitchandMLPlover 930]

It's not the same as pomy magic but I think nature,friendship and family in this world are magical. My friends and I even think movement is magic. 

[[NULL] 906]

This is what first came to mind when I read this.

 

 

Anyway, I always though magic was something that doesn't follow the laws of physics.

Edited February 25, 2015 by SpaceOnion

[Elegron 168]

anything that cannot be described or explained by science is magic. there is magic. any time you see "scientists still dont know why...." its  magic.

[#1FluttershyFan 206]

I think the world is magical but i a different way than the pony magic. The technology and intelligence as a form of creating something out of nothing is a form of magic. The love people have for each other is a type of magic. Not the kind of love like "Oh, I have a crush on her." kind of love, although I guess it could be like that but more so the love you feel towards your friends or family, like you would do anything for them is you had to kind of love. That is its own kind of magic and I don't think the 'magic of friendship' gives that magic the credit it deserves.

[Pastel 7,630]

I'm not sure to understand the question. It entirely depends on how you define "magical"...

[Bizarre Wizard 5,005]

Sure!

 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

© Arthur C. Clarke

 

[Invincible 2,091]

Look at it this way. Science and technology, are the human understanding of various rules and principles in existence and the tools crafted acting upon this knowledge.

 

The definition of magic to me is something fuzzy and unclear which cannot be understood or even researched and by extension i don't really believe in such. If this world is indeed magical, that would make me a sorcerer.

[VitalSpark 1,830]

Gravity is pretty magical. The effect of gravity that most people are familiar with is that when you drop something, it falls.

 

More generally though, gravity is the force that attracts every object with mass (i.e. something heavy) to every other object with mass. So if I'm near the Earth (or more likely, on it) and I let go of a cup, the cup and the Earth are attracted to each other. The cup falls towards the Earth, and the Earth falls towards the cup. (But because the Earth is so massive, it only falls an undetectably small distance — the cup does most of the falling!)

 

But this is where the magic comes in. How does the cup "know" that the Earth is there?

 

Physicists have proposed gravitational waves, or particles that transmit gravity. But no-one's actually detected such things.

Edited February 25, 2015 by VitalTwilightSparkle

[DATA EXPUNGED 324]

There is no "magic" in our world. There is only the conservation and conversion of energy. 

[Roughshod 719]

I'd rather not live in an actual world with magic. It sounds to unstable. Better to keep that in the realm of fantasy.

 

There is no "magic" in our world. There is only the conservation and conversion of energy. 

 

Yeah!

[DATA EXPUNGED 324]

 

 

  Physicists have proposed gravitational waves, or particles that transmit gravity. But no-one's actually detected such things.

You are referring to Gravitons, the elementary hypothetical sub-atomic particle that mediates gravitational attraction, right? 

[Mesme Rize 15,683]

Do you know what Arthur C. Clarke once said?

 

"Magic is science that we don't understand yet."

[TheJLeeTeam 914]

We may not have unicorn magic, we do have a special powerful kind of magic:

 

THE MAGIC OF:

 

 

[SCS 7,537]

I do believe that the world is magical, and anyone who had taken even the slightest of peaks into things like quantum mechanics and advanced mathematical analysis, topology, geometry, number theory, and so on wouldn't be as readily inclined to disagree with me. 

 

Do I think it's magical in the traditional sense? Hell yeah. What is magic, anyway? It's power that comes from a non-physical source, like thoughts. When you think about it, what is the origination point of everything in our world? Thought. In fact, I think life itself was born out of thought: perhaps a sort of unified consciousness. 

 

We may not be able to wave a magic wand and make things appear out of thin air (yet), but that doesn't change the fact that, fundamentally, we are transforming thought into tangible reality.

[Taviscratch 453]

No. I do not believe this world is magic. The laws of physics govern everything and all can be explained through logical reasoning. It's just like miracles, to quote Dr Manhattan "Miracles, by their very definition, are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen."

Gravity is pretty magical.

Gravity is SCIENCE!

 

More generally though, gravity is the force that attracts every object with mass (i.e. something heavy) to every other object with mass.

Correction: More generally though, gravity is the force that attracts every object to every other object.

 

Every object has mass, not just the "heavy" ones. The only things without mass are waves. Even light has mass as it is both a wave and a particle. You weigh more with the light on.

 

But this is where the magic comes in. How does the cup "know" that the Earth is there?

The cup doesn't "know" where the Earth is. It doesn't "know" anything. It is nothing but a collection of atoms, those atoms are governed by a set of laws and so the cup moves towards the Earth (and vice versa) simply because of the laws of physics. They are within each other's gravitational fields and so they move toward each other because the laws of physics demand it. Physics is the original autocrat.

Edited March 21, 2015 by Taviscratch

[PonyPal123 47]

You people are all WRONG! This world is not magical it is spiritual and i am 1000% sure of that seriously take a look around 

1 word SPIRITUAL 

[Idris 241]

I find the world magical. Not just the interaction of its parts in some form of chaos theory, but the way that it does it on a daily basis. I love the way it all behaves, with rules like radio waves passing through concrete when light doesn't, but both pass through glass, unless the glass has lead in it, then radiation doesn't pass through. It's super usefull if you want to build an x Ray machine and it's the sort of stuff that is magical to me as an engineer.

[VitalSpark 1,830]

Every object has mass, not just the "heavy" ones. The only things without mass are waves.

 

Photons and gluons are generally believed to be massless.

 

The cup doesn't "know" where the Earth is. It doesn't "know" anything.

 

Obviously it doesn't know anything. I don't believe inanimate objects have brains. But gravity is still knowledge. If I don't know the earth exists, I can detect its existence from the gravitational force it exerts on its surrounding objects.

 

If an incredibly massive object appeared one light minute (a convenient measure of distance for this example) behind me, then would I start being attracted to it instantly (in which case it's a form of faster-than-light communication)? Or would it take a minute before I fell towards it? Less? More? Some kind of signal is reaching me from that object to tell me to fall towards it.

Edited March 23, 2015 by Vital Spark

[marshmallowminish 183]

There is no "magic" in our world. There is only the conservation and conversion of energy. 

This times a million. Although magic sounds nice sometimes, it wouldn't be stable nor healthy for the planet we live on. 

[Vemillia Nightshade 2,247]

You people are all WRONG! This world is not magical it is spiritual and i am 1000% sure of that seriously take a look around 

1 word SPIRITUAL 

 

You are on the right track but magic, in a sense, does exist in us all. It requires knowing your own lifeforce and controlling the energy within you to create a external energy. It's much more complex than that, but I made a grossly simplified explanation of it. In truth, there is phenomena all over the world that is far beyond explanation. Have you ever considered the stories of beings such as the Rake or Slanderman as real? It would be impossible, right? That is up to speculation and personal opinion or belief. Extra dimensional beings, however; are very much a real thing. Though with Slenderman, the evidence of his existence is hit and miss at best. Allot of beings in myth do exist in more spiritual sense, all it takes is opening your mind to the unknown. I know that such a thing isn't for everyone, but those who are fearless and wish to find more answers to the worlds beyond your own, the first step is to except the spiritual as fact and open yourself to it.

Edited March 23, 2015 by Vemillia Nightshade

[Ice Fox 1,145]

Not by my defintion. I think 'magic' is something that is not scientifically explainable. That said, I feel some things ( such as music, ) are indeed magic. Honestly, music may be the closest humans will ever come to making magic.

[Hocus Pocus 636]

*raises hoof*

 

I believe in magic... o3o... like magical magic with spells and stuff, not just technology and physics....

 

....no? ....nopony else...?

 

..... okay, I'll sit back down......

 

*quietly takes a seat*

Edited March 23, 2015 by Hocus Pocus

[GearheadWilliams 64]

Well, it really depends on your point of view.

Is this world magical to me? Yes, but only in a very specific way. Not in the way of how everything is connected and the very element of chaos, since I consider that an entirely different thing. I believe this world is "magical" because of how we control the events.

From what I've seen through the fictions I've seen where magic is real as it is, I concluded that magic is the generation of an event through the explotation of energy. This event or condition could be anything possible between the given universal laws, from making a source of light to causing someone's death. It's like typing a command in a game's console.

We do that, but in a different way from what we see in tales about magicians and mystical stuff. We exploit the laws of physics as we know them to make our own events, just that with larger limitations. This limitations are usually the product of not knowing enough about such laws to make a certain event possible or simply lacking the capability to generate enough energy to make it happen, whatever it is. In a way, you could say that magic is limitless technology.

Is this world magical? Yes, just that it's not the kind of magic you see in fiction; just like the fact that robots exist but they're different from what we see in movies or just the general media about them.

TL;DR: Any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic. Therefore, our world could be considered magical but limited.

Edited March 23, 2015 by GearheadWilliams

[Felix 1,363]

It's magical in perhaps a modern way. The things we've accomplished and can do are extraordinary. We, as far as anyone is concerned, are the only living things in the universe with these accomplishments. When you really think about life, it's almost insane to think about. So in a way you could say it's magical. Not in the sense of spells and witchcraft though.