Magic and Physics

[AMFV]

If you want something that makes sense and doesn't require a hand wave, you want a realistic game. If you want something that has a sciency sounding dose of handwavium, you're playing sci-fi. If you don't bother with the handwavium, save for calling it magic, then you have fantasy.

That's not exactly true... on all counts the science fiction - fantasy divide isn't measured by degree of realism. Not even a little bit, it's certainly possible to have realistic fantasy, as such it should be possible to have realistic fantasy with spells.

In that case, everything in D&D is probably fair game for spells.

I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion. Since D&D spells create matter, which is against the laws of conservation of matter, although not all of them do. Fabricate is a particularly egregious example. Fireball as you've pointed out could be considered to be an example. It's possible that the alternate dimension plan isn't the best one in this case, but D&D's abuses of reality are manifold, see the whole catgirl's thread for that.

I'm not sure why you're so opposed to the idea of creating a more realistic system of magic. First, rejecting the idea out of hand because you can't necessarily manipulate things at a particle level, which I think is a hurdle that others and I had already hashed out, then attacking my idea of what qualified as magic. Would you feel better if I called it Psionics, or Psychic manipulation? Some kind of energy manipulation, perhaps?

Because that could certainly exist in the real world in some sense, manipulating probability on a macro scale is definitely possible, and perhaps possible from far enough away given enough control of the variables. Macro manipulation of the machines that make the world work is also possible. I don't see why you are resisting the idea as a whole, I'm not attacking any system of magic, merely asking how such a thing might theoretically be done, and it is certainly theoretically possible.

Since again as we've pointed out, if you can model something, you can model separate reactions to different things. No matter how much we are not able to be aware of quantum things, you can still model them, as such you can predict the effect that different things may have on them, if you couldn't there wouldn't be a branch of science dedicated to that end. While the computative power may be in question, I don't think that quantum states make a modeling system impossible.

[Drachasor]

I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion. Since D&D spells create matter, which is against the laws of conservation of matter, although not all of them do. Fabricate is a particularly egregious example. Fireball as you've pointed out could be considered to be an example. It's possible that the alternate dimension plan isn't the best one in this case, but D&D's abuses of reality are manifold, see the whole catgirl's thread for that.

Infinite Energy that can be applied anywhere via a link to another dimension mediated by an AI that is unfathomably complex. That's what you have been proposing.

Matter is energy. So matter can be added easily enough if energy can. Similarly matter can be taken away. Information can be stored. Mental processing moved off-site if necessary (say if you polymorph into a rat), etc, etc. Being able to interact everywhere with infinite energy also allows simulation of teleport and many other spells. I am not seeing anything it can't do or convincingly fake/simulate that is in D&D.

You've said "realistic" and then have proposed a few breakages of reality sufficient to completely rewrite how the universe works. Kind of problematic.

I'm not sure why you're so opposed to the idea of creating a more realistic system of magic. First, rejecting the idea out of hand because you can't necessarily manipulate things at a particle level, which I think is a hurdle that others and I had already hashed out, then attacking my idea of what qualified as magic. Would you feel better if I called it Psionics, or Psychic manipulation? Some kind of energy manipulation, perhaps?

I entered into the particle debate, I didn't bring it up. As far as I could tell you were and are acting like with sufficient computing power you can predict quantum system in a deterministic manner (you say something similar to this again below). You can't. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally random, and there's a proof showing that there's no set of hidden variables that is producing this randomness (and could be used to predict things if found out). All you can get predict probabilities. I am a bit irked that you feel so assertive about aspects of physics you know so little about. But whatever.

I think the bigger problem here is that you haven't defined what you want "realistic" to be in a meaningful way. Given that you are proposing elements that would be capable of bending reality like a pretzel (or faking it so well we wouldn't notice), this has only become less clear. You've left things too vague and then you went and made the options waaaaay too broad.

Since again as we've pointed out, if you can model something, you can model separate reactions to different things. No matter how much we are not able to be aware of quantum things, you can still model them, as such you can predict the effect that different things may have on them, if you couldn't there wouldn't be a branch of science dedicated to that end. While the computative power may be in question, I don't think that quantum states make a modeling system impossible

Quantum Mechanics makes it so that you are limited in how useful those predictions are since all you get are probabilities. Even if you ignore QM, Chaos Theory is all about how there are completely deterministic systems that can't be predicted because their future states are too sensitive to the initial state (you'd need infinite precision to predict them).

Which gets us to the second problem with this thread. When people talk about the limits of physics and math you don't seem to try to understand the underlying issue you just handwave "lots of computing power!" as is that will solve all issues. It won't. Seems like you want technology to do everything magic can....but you aren't happy if it can do all of D&D magic and you aren't happy when people point out limits.

So what exactly do you want?

[AMFV]

Infinite Energy that can be applied anywhere via a link to another dimension mediated by an AI that is unfathomably complex. That's what you have been proposing.

Matter is energy. So matter can be added easily enough if energy can. Similarly matter can be taken away. Information can be stored. Mental processing moved off-site if necessary (say if you polymorph into a rat), etc, etc. Being able to interact everywhere with infinite energy also allows simulation of teleport and many other spells. I am not seeing anything it can't do or convincingly fake/simulate that is in D&D.

You've said "realistic" and then have proposed a few breakages of reality sufficient to completely rewrite how the universe works. Kind of problematic.

I entered into the particle debate, I didn't bring it up. As far as I could tell you were and are acting like with sufficient computing power you can predict quantum system in a deterministic manner (you say something similar to this again below). You can't. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally random, and there's a proof showing that there's no set of hidden variables that is producing this randomness (and could be used to predict things if found out). All you can get predict probabilities. I am a bit irked that you feel so assertive about aspects of physics you know so little about. But whatever.

Predicting probabilities is certainly enough to model things. Here is where we are having a break as far as I can tell, you are arguing that perfect prediction is impossible (true, at least as far as we are currently aware, although to assume that this sort of thing is absolute is a pretty big leap, since new sorts of things are discovered fairly frequently, over the last few hundred years or so). I am stating that you can still model the systems and come up with fairly good predictions.

Certainly probability can be altered on a macro-scale, for example I could write this sentence or not, but since I have, the probability of me not writing it shrinks to zero and the probability of me writing it is now a hundred, or thereabouts. That's the sort of problem you're creating by stating that modeling is impossible.

Also while I may not know Quantum Physics that well, I know that Quantum Mechanics is a field, and there are people that model those interactions, since that is the case there must be predictive capacity in that field, probabilities are more than enough to get likely outcomes and see the field. Perhaps it's me that should be irked that you are claiming that an entire scientific field is without merit, since by arguing that Quantum things can't modeled that is what you are stating regarding quantum physics.

I think the bigger problem here is that you haven't defined what you want "realistic" to be in a meaningful way. Given that you are proposing elements that would be capable of bending reality like a pretzel (or faking it so well we wouldn't notice), this has only become less clear. You've left things too vague and then you went and made the options waaaaay too broad.

Very well, let's have no meaningful violations of physical laws, so no free lunch, no energy created or removed, we can accomplish as much as is possible without accessing other dimensions or whatnot, D&D is fairly clearly right out for this sort of thing, the goal is just to create a magic system that feels more real.

Quantum Mechanics makes it so that you are limited in how useful those predictions are since all you get are probabilities. Even if you ignore QM, Chaos Theory is all about how there are completely deterministic systems that can't be predicted because their future states are too sensitive to the initial state (you'd need infinite precision to predict them).

Modeling systems are often predictive, if you can predict a macro system you can alter it if you have sufficient energy or manipulative ability. Besides which we aren't looking for perfect results, only good enough ones to cause things

Which gets us to the second problem with this thread. When people talk about the limits of physics and math you don't seem to try to understand the underlying issue you just handwave "lots of computing power!" as is that will solve all issues. It won't. Seems like you want technology to do everything magic can....but you aren't happy if it can do all of D&D magic and you aren't happy when people point out limits.

So what exactly do you want?

So far as I can tell the limits of physics here were applicable only to manipulating probabilities at a particulate scale, which is something we've discussed. Furthermore, if computing power and modeling power is the area of problem then that's one that can be solved.

If something can happen then it has to be possible to replicate it. That's the goal here, to create a system of magic that produces no impossible phenomena, causing something to explode isn't an impossible phenomena, it happens. Causing something to move isn't an impossible phenomena it happens. Creating something out of thin air, impossible phenomena it never happens. Maybe if I phrase it this way, a system of magic that produces no effects that are impossible. Let's not worry about the actual mechanics so much, since first off those would need to be fairly handwaved anyways, and those are by our technology impossible to understand.

Edit: Also the quantum manipulation is possible in reality, at least to some degree, manipulating the chaos effect is clearly possible since we do this, if the issue is controlling that manipulation, then that's a matter of sufficient computing power, which could definitely be covered by the whole magic thing, since it's not an impossibility, just a difficult scenario.

[Grek]

As an aside, Landauer's Principle forbids getting information for free. If you can get perfect information without paying the cost, Chaos Theory would indeed let you violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but avoiding the cost in the first place still requires actual supernatural intervention. Saying that you're going to use Chaos Theory to do the dirty work only moves the physics violations up a level.

In what sense is that true? If I call it magical energy and say I'm channeling it how does that stop working. Do you consider the magical system in Wheel of Time to be "magical" because it works by channeling and includes no energy from nowhere. so by your definition that system isn't magic either.

Completely laying aside the fact that stuff in the Wheel of Time blatantly violates the laws of physics by having objects be composed of five elements, having things teleport about and letting you retroactively destroy things with balefire, there is definitely magic going on whenever someone channels the One Power. When Rand burns some trollocs up, nothing in the world cools down to match the heat he creates to do so. Energy just appears from nowhere, willed into existence by the One Power. That is magic and that is a violation of the laws of physics.

[AMFV]

As an aside, Landauer's Principle forbids getting information for free. If you can get perfect information without paying the cost, Chaos Theory would indeed let you violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but avoiding the cost in the first place still requires actual supernatural intervention. Saying that you're going to use Chaos Theory to do the dirty work only moves the physics violations up a level.

Quite possibly, but in any case the point being that the actual mechanism is less important than the results in this case. Also increasing entropy in the system may or may not render the result unusable, we still have information and computing even though there is entropy in the system.

I'm suggesting that a sufficiently advanced computer could model such a system, but that's really the point, since our models don't have to be that precise, only precise enough, since we can model macro things we might be able to figure out what an alteration on a macro scale would do to something.

I'm not arguing the particle argument, as I'm not knowledgeable enough. But clearly the mechanism is going to have to be handwaved because magic does not exist in our setting, in the real world, to our knowledge, as such the system is going to have to be an invented one.

Completely laying aside the fact that stuff in the Wheel of Time blatantly violates the laws of physics by having objects be composed of five elements, having things teleport about and letting you retroactively destroy things with balefire, there is definitely magic going on whenever someone channels the One Power. When Rand burns some trollocs up, nothing in the world cools down to match the heat he creates to do so. Energy just appears from nowhere, willed into existence by the One Power. That is magic and that is a violation of the laws of physics.

The Wheel of Time is not a physical system, but it does involve channeling and creating energy that doesn't come from nothing. Which violates your previous definition of magic.

I think that we're all focusing too much on the mechanism, which is clearly an impossible problem, since such a mechanism is not known to exist in our reality at the present time, let's instead focus on the consequences. If magic doesn't result in anything impossible, then the mechanism itself could be handwaved fairly easily, or could exist, since there are more things in heaven and Earth than are written of in our philosophy.

Since we are dealing with magic and fantasy, there is going to be some break from reality, the mechanism is probably the best place, since that obviously does not exist. Instead I suspect the results is a better place to start.

[Grek]

The gist of the links above is that if you use Chaos Theory to cast a fireball, the computers you used to do the calculations need to be supplied with at least one fireball's worth of electricity. But OK. Let's assume you have a magic computer that runs on magic and gets to ignore rules like that. It uses advanced technology to peer into your brain, listen to what you say and watch the way you waggle your fingers. And it's programmed to produce fireballs whenever you say the right words, wave your hands the right way and visualize people being burnt to a crisp.

Is that magic?

[AMFV]

The gist of the links above is that if you use Chaos Theory to cast a fireball, the computers you used to do the calculations need to be supplied with at least one fireball's worth of electricity. But OK. Let's assume you have a magic computer that runs on magic and gets to ignore rules like that. It uses advanced technology to peer into your brain, listen to what you say and watch the way you waggle your fingers. And it's programmed to produce fireballs whenever you say the right words, wave your hands the right way and visualize people being burnt to a crisp.

Is that magic?

Sure it is! If it's called that, but again let's not getting hung up on the mechanism. Since that's the part that doesn't exist. If we were to figure out how to created a mechanism that produced a magical effect, we'd have magic in our own world. The mechanism itself is open to a little bit of handwaving.

Instead I think we aught to be looking towards the results, if it can be possible in the real world, then magic should be able to replicate that, so what sort of magic would this prohibit that might not be normally seen? What sort of magic might this enable that wouldn't be seen normally?

[NichG]

AMFV, the principle you're applying - 'if I can see an example of it happening in the real world then its fair game for magic' is the problem. That doesn't actually work, because in the real world the way something happens is actually important to whether or not it can happen at all.

You use examples like a dust explosion, but in a dust explosion there are two important factors in play - the energy stored in the dust (flour has something like half the chemical potential energy density of gasoline) and the large surface area meaning that interactions that release this energy are common enough for the process to go runaway. So basically there's both an energetic component and a probabilistic (entropic) component to the event that have to be satisfied.

If you have a pile of flour on your countertop and stick a match it in, it won't blow up because the entropic component isn't satisfied - there isn't enough access to an oxidizer. If you dump liquid oxygen on it first, then you're good to go. That oxidizer (either in the form of dispersing the flour in air, or adding concentrated oxidizer) is necessary because it basically acts as the 'gate' to the pathway by which the potential energy in the flour can be released. Just because there can be a situation that the energy is released with the oxidizer present doesn't mean its realistic to release the energy in the absence of that oxidizer.

In the case of the RPG (the projectile kind), it similarly has all the necessary components present in the projectile - there is a compound with a high available degree of chemical potential energy, an oxidizer (or the compound itself decomposes to create its own oxidizer in a runaway process, which is common in explosives), a specific triggering mechanism (which must be sufficiently difficult or the thing will just blow up in storage), etc. All of these are necessary elements to the function of an explosive projectile. If you just 'summon it out of nowhere' then thats where the physics violation comes from. If you 'turn something into it' then you're violating other physics. Etc.

Now, when it comes to the 'infinite energy plane' powering magical effects, basically Drachasor's point holds - once you go that far, more or less everything becomes equally plausible. I mean, there are similar, even less severe release valves in physics that you could use to permit 'any effect', but they're all fairly unrealistic in the sense of 'we would not expect aliens to be able to have this technology'. If there were some infinite source of energy that could be tapped, the evidence would be present in observations of the expansion rate of the universe and things like that.

There is a principle in physics 'if it isn't forbidden, its mandatory'. This is basically an observation that the universe is really big and the energy scales out there are far higher than anything we can produce on earth, so if there is some physical process by which something can happen, then statistically it does happen, and it happens all the time. This is e.g. why you can always rule out doomsday scenarios that involve 'if X happened, it would destroy the universe!' and the like - because if it can happen, it does happen. So if there is some infinite (or cosmically large) source of energy that couples to the dynamics of matter in the universe, that source of energy will 'show up' in the expansion curve of the universe. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily have to be cosmically large - you could get away with something that has about 3x as much matter/energy as the 'bright' universe and fit it into the known fraction of dark matter, though galaxy rotation curves suggest that it would need to be much more diffuse than visible matter, so in practice there wouldn't be much there to tap at any given point on the planet's surface.

Anyhow, this is all why I'd suggest if you want a physics-like magic system, start from a single modification and move outwards, rather than start from an endpoint and move inwards. If you can show to the players that everything that can be done in the system derives from a single principle it will seem more plausible than if you use the kinds of 'analogy' explanations you've been using. Even better if the players themselves have to derive it.

For example, I played in a World of Darkness campaign where the DM basically said 'okay, you're a physicist, and you're playing a mortal, so I'm just going to give you things with weird properties to play with'. There were 'etheric essences' in various things that could be distilled down, stored, compressed, etc. These different essences would bind to specific elemental metals, and could then be activated with a specific kind of energy input that at first was just specific to our environment but which I later learned to carry with me.

So I had for my powers a metal that could heat up, a metal that could cool down, a metal that could change the inertial mass of things around it, etc. The last one we used to make momentum-deconserving airships. Did it violate known physics? Yes. But in its own system, it was self-consistent, so you could do engineering with it and actually come up with stuff much more complex than the base elements.

I would say that system, despite violating energy and momentum conservation, was more 'realistic' than the things that have been discussed in this thread, because it had a very strong self-consistency and causality.

You could propose a magic system that basically says - there is an entity outside the universe that gets to 'decide' which way each quantum-mechanical 'measurement' goes at the beginning of time, and so any time someone 'uses' magic, its just that that entity predicted the situation and decided to select a highly improbable outcome to occur for its own motivations. But in such a system there is no actual causality between the 'magic user' and the effect - its not really a system anymore. Its not something that is 'believable' as an alien technology.

[Drachasor]

FYI AMFV, I studied QM in college. You don't really know what you are talking about, but going into that in detail seems like it would largely be a waste of time.

I'm still not seeing how you aren't just taking a ray gun and calling it a magic wand. Then you declare this to be "magic." I mean, basically light-bulbs seem to be "magic" by this standard. I'm not really seeing the magic in tossing a grenade and calling it a fireball or giving someone antibiotics and calling it "cure disease."

[Devils_Advocate]

I remember reading that some of the Discworld's magic follows some physical laws. E.g. if you turn someone into a toad there's like this big pile of flesh left over because of conservation of mass, or something like that.

My computers can be as good as I want them to be, because I'm inventing them, it's magic.

You're using magic to invent arbitrarily powerful computers? Wow, sounds pretty neat! Can I see them when you're done?

I can have computers that are capable of almost impossible things, just not impossible things

... So you're saying you don't want computers capable of impossible things? Okay then.

But are you arguing that it is impossible to push precisely on every particle in a pound of dirt? Because I would argue that it isn't.

I don't think that is necessarily provable impossible, and besides which that could be the point of handwaving. We're arguing for something that is theoretically impossible, not actually impossible.

But you asked in the OP about phenomena "roughly contained within the laws of nature as we understand them today". Here you seem to be saying that... you don't care about the Uncertainty Principle, because you disbelieve it? That seems to be what "theoretically impossible, not actually impossible" means here.

Those are however not laws, and if the computational engine exists in another space, or throughout time then there are theoretically ways to exceed that bound. We're not talking laws here, but rather theoretical maximums, which are different things. You can theoretically exceed a theoretical maximum.

What do you mean by "law" in this context?

An upper or lower bound may be mandated by a theory of physics. The theory of relativity predicts that you can't accelerate to faster-than-light speed, for example.

You theoretically can't exceed a theoretical maximum. That's what "theoretical maximum" means.

Well the setting for one.

What specific setting difference are you referring to?

Also in a hard science fiction setting there is typically an understanding of the system the characters are using, by the characters. For example if you use a space ship you normally understand how they work.

WUT. Are you seriously saying that most space travelers in hard sci-fi are basically spaceship engineers? Because if so, I'm pretty sure that you're either using a very strange definition of "hard science fiction" or you've read a distinctly peculiar collection of books.

In this proposed setting that understanding might not be complete. It would be Arcane and people might understand the ritual of it, but not it's actual workings.

Yeah, that's pretty much what's typical, both in sci-fi and in real life.

Put gasoline in car make car go. How work? Burning fuel turn wheels something something. Me think? Not my job understand that. Me no need understand that. Me just need know turn key make car turn on and off, gas pedal make car go, brakes make car stop, steering wheel make car turn. Me outsource automotive engineering and maintenance to other human beings. Division of labor invisible hand free market something something. Not my job understand that, me outsource economics to economists.

To be honest some people might consider it science fiction, but it would certainly be magical.

Are you saying there's a difference? If so, what is it?

It'd be like having a psychic access to the technology.

So, neural implants?

In what sense is that true?

Well, by the law of excluded middle, something either comes from somewhere or doesn't come from somewhere.

If I call it magical energy and say I'm channeling it how does that stop working.

Um, it doesn't. You can call a flashlight magic and it will still work just fine. What's your point?

The alternate plane doesn't necessarily need different laws, and depending on the machines degree of omniscience or omnipresence it may not need to have an FTL response. Extracting energy from an infinite series of other planes or possibilities is certainly one way you could go that would allow for large energy extraction without violating the laws. If a God-Machine thing is omnipresent then it wouldn't need to have an FTL response (which is questionably possible anyways) if it is omniscient, then it might not, since it could predict your wish before it was made. Both of those are reasonably scientific options that don't require violations of the sort you're implying my system should require.

What's scientific about the concepts of an "alternate plane", omniscience, omnipresence, "an infinite series of other planes", and/or "extracting energy from possibilities"?

Just what are you suggesting here? That there's evidence of these things? That their existence is theoretically falsifiable? What?

That's not exactly true... on all counts the science fiction - fantasy divide isn't measured by degree of realism. Not even a little bit, it's certainly possible to have realistic fantasy

Could you give an example of realistic fantasy? Could you explain what you mean by "realism", "fantasy", and "science fiction"?

If something can happen then it has to be possible to replicate it.

So, you'd say that if the universe can be destroyed, it can definitely be destroyed twice?

[AMFV]

AMFV, the principle you're applying - 'if I can see an example of it happening in the real world then its fair game for magic' is the problem. That doesn't actually work, because in the real world the way something happens is actually important to whether or not it can happen at all.

Well the argument that something will happen or could happen is important I think. Clearly we can't have a realistic mechanism since no such thing exists. But we can argue if something could exist that could have a perceptibly magic effect.

You use examples like a dust explosion, but in a dust explosion there are two important factors in play - the energy stored in the dust (flour has something like half the chemical potential energy density of gasoline) and the large surface area meaning that interactions that release this energy are common enough for the process to go runaway. So basically there's both an energetic component and a probabilistic (entropic) component to the event that have to be satisfied.

This is true. Although I'm saying that any sort of magic where you can alter those things would be able to create certain effects, so logically those things would have to be the things that are altered.

If you have a pile of flour on your countertop and stick a match it in, it won't blow up because the entropic component isn't satisfied - there isn't enough access to an oxidizer. If you dump liquid oxygen on it first, then you're good to go. That oxidizer (either in the form of dispersing the flour in air, or adding concentrated oxidizer) is necessary because it basically acts as the 'gate' to the pathway by which the potential energy in the flour can be released. Just because there can be a situation that the energy is released with the oxidizer present doesn't mean its realistic to release the energy in the absence of that oxidizer.

Well I'm saying that certain things are possible, while they may require certain conditions, they are possible, it is a difficult proposition admittedly, but if we focus on the mechanism, we're focusing on something that can't be repaired since magic doesn't exist.

In the case of the RPG (the projectile kind), it similarly has all the necessary components present in the projectile - there is a compound with a high available degree of chemical potential energy, an oxidizer (or the compound itself decomposes to create its own oxidizer in a runaway process, which is common in explosives), a specific triggering mechanism (which must be sufficiently difficult or the thing will just blow up in storage), etc. All of these are necessary elements to the function of an explosive projectile. If you just 'summon it out of nowhere' then thats where the physics violation comes from. If you 'turn something into it' then you're violating other physics. Etc.

I'm not sure why turning something into something would be violating of physics, it can certainly happen in chemistry, although again the mechanism isn't as important I don't think.

Now, when it comes to the 'infinite energy plane' powering magical effects, basically Drachasor's point holds - once you go that far, more or less everything becomes equally plausible. I mean, there are similar, even less severe release valves in physics that you could use to permit 'any effect', but they're all fairly unrealistic in the sense of 'we would not expect aliens to be able to have this technology'. If there were some infinite source of energy that could be tapped, the evidence would be present in observations of the expansion rate of the universe and things like that.

I agree, which is why I'm suggesting that we shouldn't touch on the mechanism, since again if we do then we could invent magic, which seems improbable.

There is a principle in physics 'if it isn't forbidden, its mandatory'. This is basically an observation that the universe is really big and the energy scales out there are far higher than anything we can produce on earth, so if there is some physical process by which something can happen, then statistically it does happen, and it happens all the time. This is e.g. why you can always rule out doomsday scenarios that involve 'if X happened, it would destroy the universe!' and the like - because if it can happen, it does happen. So if there is some infinite (or cosmically large) source of energy that couples to the dynamics of matter in the universe, that source of energy will 'show up' in the expansion curve of the universe. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily have to be cosmically large - you could get away with something that has about 3x as much matter/energy as the 'bright' universe and fit it into the known fraction of dark matter, though galaxy rotation curves suggest that it would need to be much more diffuse than visible matter, so in practice there wouldn't be much there to tap at any given point on the planet's surface.

Anyhow, this is all why I'd suggest if you want a physics-like magic system, start from a single modification and move outwards, rather than start from an endpoint and move inwards. If you can show to the players that everything that can be done in the system derives from a single principle it will seem more plausible than if you use the kinds of 'analogy' explanations you've been using. Even better if the players themselves have to derive it.

Well certainly that is true, I was agreeing with this I believe by the end of the last post, which is mostly why I was trying to avoid further mechanism arguments, since they seem difficult.

For example, I played in a World of Darkness campaign where the DM basically said 'okay, you're a physicist, and you're playing a mortal, so I'm just going to give you things with weird properties to play with'. There were 'etheric essences' in various things that could be distilled down, stored, compressed, etc. These different essences would bind to specific elemental metals, and could then be activated with a specific kind of energy input that at first was just specific to our environment but which I later learned to carry with me.

So adding something like the Ether to the world could resolve the problem then?

So I had for my powers a metal that could heat up, a metal that could cool down, a metal that could change the inertial mass of things around it, etc. The last one we used to make momentum-deconserving airships. Did it violate known physics? Yes. But in its own system, it was self-consistent, so you could do engineering with it and actually come up with stuff much more complex than the base elements.

I would say that system, despite violating energy and momentum conservation, was more 'realistic' than the things that have been discussed in this thread, because it had a very strong self-consistency and causality.

Well that's an interesting, although I'm not sure if that's exactly what I'm looking for.

You could propose a magic system that basically says - there is an entity outside the universe that gets to 'decide' which way each quantum-mechanical 'measurement' goes at the beginning of time, and so any time someone 'uses' magic, its just that that entity predicted the situation and decided to select a highly improbable outcome to occur for its own motivations. But in such a system there is no actual causality between the 'magic user' and the effect - its not really a system anymore. Its not something that is 'believable' as an alien technology.

Well then I'd be looking for that sort of thing magic as technology I would guess.

FYI AMFV, I studied QM in college. You don't really know what you are talking about, but going into that in detail seems like it would largely be a waste of time.

I'm still not seeing how you aren't just taking a ray gun and calling it a magic wand. Then you declare this to be "magic." I mean, basically light-bulbs seem to be "magic" by this standard. I'm not really seeing the magic in tossing a grenade and calling it a fireball or giving someone antibiotics and calling it "cure disease."

Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.

Furthermore if you're not seeing the magic of that, then that's fine, but it's still a workable system, no? If I create it with magic energy, it's magic. Any arguments regarding what kind of genre it is, is probably going to create more problems than its going to solve, furthermore it's probably going to be impracticable.

[Drachasor]

Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.

I'm a physics major. So yes, I studied it quite a bit.

Furthermore if you're not seeing the magic of that, then that's fine, but it's still a workable system, no? If I create it with magic energy, it's magic. Any arguments regarding what kind of genre it is, is probably going to create more problems than its going to solve, furthermore it's probably going to be impracticable.

Yes, I suppose if you want to relabel "electricity" as "magic" then you can pretend it is magic.

[AMFV]

I'm a physics major. So yes, I studied it quite a bit.

Fair enough, but there is modelling of it, correct? That's a thing that people do, as I understand it.

Yes, I suppose if you want to relabel "electricity" as "magic" then you an pretend it is magic.

Well magic isn't really well defined in most settings, varies, and has about a billion definitions when it is defined. Arthur C. Clarke is probably the most accurate in that he defines it as any technology that cannot be sufficiently explained, which is completely a workable definition for a game.

[NichG]

Well certainly that is true, I was agreeing with this I believe by the end of the last post, which is mostly why I was trying to avoid further mechanism arguments, since they seem difficult.

I've omitted my counter-arguments to the rest of your post then, since it'd be a big side-track. Lets just agree to forget about 'physically plausible' as a goal, and focus more on a magic system that behaves 'like a science' - e.g. internally consistent, engineerable - while maintaining the 'personal power' aspect of magic.

So adding something like the Ether to the world could resolve the problem then?

I don't know what you mean by 'resolve the problem' here. But generally, adding something like one or two simple interactions to the base physics is enough to create a number of interesting applications that derive from those interactions.

It does require a very 'nitty-gritty first' style of building a game. Because of the constraint that everything follow logically, the mechanics basically have to come last, so its hard to balance. The other thing is that players in such a system will build up a library of tricks, and if you want to run multiple campaigns you'll have to deal with the metagame issue of players coming in with tricks from previous characters that still work, because they're something you could do. But that's to be expected to some degree. Modern rifles are OP compared to flintlocks in real life, after all. My advice there would be, advance the setting by 100 years between successive campaigns so you can say that the tricks the PCs discovered during the first campaign became commonplace in the next 100 years...

Anyhow, I think the 'connect two points' magic system is a good example of what to expect from this kind of approach. Another good example might be the Allomancy system in the Mistborn series of novels, which is pretty solid as far as deriving complex workings from a small set of fundamental rules.

(Feruchemy, from the same books, I feel violates the 'no spurious sentience' limitation - the ability to 'store health' for example doesn't really mesh with how complex an issue a person's health actually is. One could argue that Pewter Allomancy has that issue too, actually.)

Like as your field of study or in a class? Because that's important, in a class means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, if that's your major then probably I don't know what I'm talking about. But taking a few classes about it is probably not enough to have a thorough understanding it of it.

I have a PhD in Physics and as far as I can tell, Drachasor hasn't said anything incorrect about QM so far in this conversation.

[Drachasor]

Fair enough, but there is modelling of it, correct? That's a thing that people do, as I understand it.

Yes, but when you start dealing with multiple particles it gets very complicated very quickly. It's also inherently probabilistic (unlike say ballistics). And just because you can model something equivalent to a system doesn't mean you know the exact state the system is in. Fundamentally you cannot determine the exact state of a quantum system, because any attempt to precisely measure it will alter it. Take an electron. Want to figure out where it is? Shoot a photon at it and wait for a response. Problem is, when the photon hits the electron, it gives it energy, so its momentum is changed. Use a more energetic photon and you'll know better where the electron is, but its momentum is less clear. Use a less energetic photon and you'll have a fuzzier idea of the location, but the momentum can be known more precisely. Roughly speaking. There's no fancy trick around this, and momentum/position is just one of many pairs that have this relationship.

Point is, don't confuse modeling a system with knowing everything about the system. Models have limits. Manipulating an actual system has limits too.

That's not to say manipulating small stuff is impossible. Certainly arranging atoms is achievable in certain conditions (life does it for one). But imperfection is going to be an inherent part of the system and precise manipulation of many systems is likely going to be impossible. Direct manipulations of "probability" doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you are taking about atomic trajectories. This is especially true in a noisy system like you'd find in real life.

Well magic isn't really well defined in most settings, varies, and has about a billion definitions when it is defined. Arthur C. Clarke is probably the most accurate in that he defines it as any technology that cannot be sufficiently explained, which is completely a workable definition for a game.

There's a difference between it being unexplained to the populace, and being unexplained from a game design perspective. You seem to be playing fast and loose with the latter. It's hard to tell exactly where you are going since you seem to be moving from one extreme to another, back, and taking stops at various points in the middle.

Anyhow, it isn't a very good approach to say "X happens in highly specific circumstances, therefore X in general is possible" and use that as the basis of a magic system. It's not going to get something that feels realistic, imho. It's going to get something that feels random and arbitrary.

I think you need to do a few things to make meaningful progress.
1. Define the difference between magic and technology in the setting precisely.
2. If magic breaks any standard laws of physics, be precise about it and carefully work out the consequences.
3. If this magic is going to incorporate anything beyond what we currently know exists, then state exactly what it is and how its relationship to known reality.

That's at least a starting point.

[AMFV]

Yes, but when you start dealing with multiple particles it gets very complicated very quickly. It's also inherently probabilistic (unlike say ballistics). And just because you can model something equivalent to a system doesn't mean you know the exact state the system is in. Fundamentally you cannot determine the exact state of a quantum system, because any attempt to precisely measure it will alter it. Take an electron. Want to figure out where it is? Shoot a photon at it and wait for a response. Problem is, when the photon hits the electron, it gives it energy, so its momentum is changed. Use a more energetic photon and you'll know better where the electron is, but its momentum is less clear. Use a less energetic photon and you'll have a fuzzier idea of the location, but the momentum can be known more precisely. Roughly speaking. There's no fancy trick around this, and momentum/position is just one of many pairs that have this relationship.

Certainly true. The modeling relationship is quite complex.

Point is, don't confuse modeling a system with knowing everything about the system. Models have limits. Manipulating an actual system has limits too.

Certainly true, and I think we'd need to establish how the manipulation would work for this type of thing.

That's not to say manipulating small stuff is impossible. Certainly arranging atoms is achievable in certain conditions (life does it for one). But imperfection is going to be an inherent part of the system and precise manipulation of many systems is likely going to be impossible. Direct manipulations of "probability" doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you are taking about atomic trajectories. This is especially true in a noisy system like you'd find in real life.

Which is why I was suggesting some kind of God-Machine type thing, there'd have to be some kind of complex system to model that sort of thing or affect it, certainly beyond anything we've ever done, since there are things that have some sorts of modeling though, that means that if life can do it, then magic should be able to do something similar in that way.

There's a difference between it being unexplained to the populace, and being unexplained from a game design perspective. You seem to be playing fast and loose with the latter. It's hard to tell exactly where you are going since you seem to be moving from one extreme to another, back, and taking stops at various points in the middle.

To be fair, I am kind of jumping back and forth, I'm mostly trying to figure out the scenario.

Anyhow, it isn't a very good approach to say "X happens in highly specific circumstances, therefore X in general is possible" and use that as the basis of a magic system. It's not going to get something that feels realistic, imho. It's going to get something that feels random and arbitrary.

Well "X Happens in highly specific circumstances so X in general is possible" is a true assertion. The problem with something that feels realistic is that you're going to have some acceptable breaks from reality, and those are going to arbitrary in any system that would involve magic, since we're inventing laws that aren't consistent with the laws of reality.

I think you need to do a few things to make meaningful progress.
1. Define the difference between magic and technology in the setting precisely.
2. If magic breaks any standard laws of physics, be precise about it and carefully work out the consequences.
3. If this magic is going to incorporate anything beyond what we currently know exists, then state exactly what it is and how its relationship to known reality.

That's at least a starting point.

1.) I think that I'm going to say that no discernible difference needs to exist in the system between magic and high technology. If that makes the end result "science fiction" or "science fantasy" or any number of other genres that it might push it into.

2.) Well it would depend on the way that magic is affecting things which rules we're going to have to play fast and loose with. Since we're going to be exerting influence over distance then we'd need some sort of magical force. I think adding a magical force to the system could help. You could have a magical energy that can be manipulated by magic, which could have specific exemptions, although I'm not sure what the assumptions of that system will be as of yet.

3.)Well, I think I briefly touched on that in the previous answer. We could definitely add a magical force, which could involve some kind of cognizant magical particles. Which naturally is impossible, but it certainly could exist.

[Lorsa]

What was wrong with my idea of using mages as some form of energy-distributer-conduit? As long as [whatever] is conserved then it's possible to do?

If you're just looking to have a system where magic can do anything that could be seen or observed as being done by any other mechanism in the universe, then magic can do a lot.

Skyscrapers can be built, and if you don't care about the mechanism in which they are then magic might as well summon one from nothing.

Since there are particles that can travel at light speed, so should magic be able to make something travel that fast (which is more or less equivalent to teleportation).

Muscles are controlled by electrical impulses through the nervous system, so magic should be able to control muscles in others (which means you can move around with people against their will).

Etc.

If you don't care about which conservation laws and in turn which menchanisms cause various effects then you could do almost anything.

Hey! There's a universe that exists! So magic should be able to create another universe!

[AMFV]

What was wrong with my idea of using mages as some form of energy-distributer-conduit? As long as [whatever] is conserved then it's possible to do?

I liked your idea, actually. Almost everything I've been proposing since then has been some variation on it. I'm not sure if I responded directly to that since I was caught up in other stuff.

If you're just looking to have a system where magic can do anything that could be seen or observed as being done by any other mechanism in the universe, then magic can do a lot.

Well we are probably going to have to put into place some kind of arbitrary limitation on what can be done, or how much can be done. But I'm saying that sweating the details on the mechanism is only going to create headaches since that section is naturally invented.

Skyscrapers can be built, and if you don't care about the mechanism in which they were then magic might as well summon one from nothing.

Well summoning one from nothing is producing a result that doesn't occur in the natural world, since skyscrapers don't spontaneously exist.

Since there are particles that can travel in light speed, so should magic be able to make something travel that fast (which is more or less equivalent to teleportation).

Muscles are controlled by electrical impulses through the nervous system, so magic should be able to control muscles in others (which means you can move around with people against their will).

Etc.

If you don't care about which conservation laws and in turn which menchanisms cause various effects then you could do almost anything.

Hey! There's a universe that exists! So magic should be able to create another universe!

Maybe magic can...

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, what if instead of trying to make magic conform to the physics of our real world, breaking it induced some kind of strain, so the more you do the more strain it takes.

How do the physicists in the thread feel about that, what sort of things would be doable with less strain, to your thinking, and what sort of things would be doable with more strain, ergo more egregious breaks. I know that this isn't a standard line of thinking, but it's an idea. So basically the more far-fetched something is, the more likely it is to be impossible for any given mage.

[NichG]

I'm not sure I can actually answer the question... I think its pretty hard (impossible?) to define without reference to 'how' you're straining physics.

Consider something like a coin toss. For a fair coin, we can say a given result has a 50% chance of occurring, so it seems like altering the toss shouldn't be too improbable a change to reality. But once the coin is in the air, if I e.g. measured the rotation and velocity of the coin with a high-speed camera, I could predict the outcome with a far higher certainty than 50%. I can't really easily tell you what the maximum possible certainty one could achieve down to e.g. thermodynamic or quantum mechanical bounds would be, but its going to be pretty high.

So influencing that coin toss by, e.g., literally seeing the future and then spilling a drink on the guy's shoe and hoping it goes differently would scale in improbability differently than influencing the coin toss by microscopically manipulating the particles in the air, or by being able to change the gravitational constant in the area slightly. I'm not actually sure how to say which is really creating the 'worse' strain.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to use the following mechanism for magic:

- Practitioners of magic can see 'the future as it will be prior to looking'. More skilled practitioners can see further ahead, though of course two practitioners looking at the same event interfere with each-other. Your average mage can see about 5-10 seconds ahead. When looking, they are always looking at a specific moment - they don't get the entire 10 seconds in an instant.

- Practitioners of magic can 're-look' at a rate of about once per second, so long as they are only looking for easily-distinguishable outcomes (like the result of a coin-flip). The more difficult it is to understand the outcome, the fewer 're-looks' they get.

- A practitioner of magic learns to compartmentalize what they have seen, so that they can choose to 'lock in' a result and not let it be influenced by their future knowledge. The consequence is that they are unaware of whether or not their manipulation succeeded until they actually experience the outcome in their present. They always remember all but the 'last' time they chose to look at the future.

- Practitioners can 'strain' themselves to compress their perceptual time, allowing them to re-look more often in a shorter span. So they can watch 1 second of the future in half a second of real-time, and so on. This is highly taxing.

This system has the advantage that the improbabilities/probabilities are all macroscopic. You don't have to do a 30 minute calculation of the partition function of copper atoms to figure out how hard it is to alter a coin flip in flight. Instead, chaos theory actually comes to the rescue here - as long as you look at the outcome early enough, you can bump an elbow, shift the table, etc, to alter the coin toss to a new random result, and then just stop when it's the result you want.

So in this system, a 10-second mage could modify the probability of the coin flip from a 1/2 chance of the wrong result down to a 1/1024 chance of the wrong result (since they can look 10 times and 2^10 is 1024). Or they could take something with a 1/1024 chance and raise it up to about a 50/50 shot.

In this system, mages would be very good snipers and gun-users, okay at physical combat (since the future-sight could easily distract them from an important 'now'), and would be very good early warning systems for things that are about to happen.

This system basically lets mages violate the second law of thermodynamics but should preserve all 'material' conservation/etc laws. This does technically mean that a group of mages could theoretically 'reuse' energy to an arbitrary degree, but the actual rate of accumulation would be pretty slow (microscopic amounts - I think it'd be something like ~ 10^(-20) J/s at room temperature, but I'd have to do the calculation out in detail)

[AMFV]

I'm not sure I can actually answer the question... I think its pretty hard (impossible?) to define without reference to 'how' you're straining physics.

True, and I'll admit that my definition isn't probably the best. I was actually kind of hoping that you guys could help with defining exactly that might work, since again I'm not the most knowledgeable on the subject.

My original idea was something to do with how unbelievable the result was, kind of a magical system powered by belief and understanding basically.

Consider something like a coin toss. For a fair coin, we can say a given result has a 50% chance of occurring, so it seems like altering the toss shouldn't be too improbable a change to reality. But once the coin is in the air, if I e.g. measured the rotation and velocity of the coin with a high-speed camera, I could predict the outcome with a far higher certainty than 50%. I can't really easily tell you what the maximum possible certainty one could achieve down to e.g. thermodynamic or quantum mechanical bounds would be, but its going to be pretty high.

So influencing that coin toss by, e.g., literally seeing the future and then spilling a drink on the guy's shoe and hoping it goes differently would scale in improbability differently than influencing the coin toss by microscopically manipulating the particles in the air, or by being able to change the gravitational constant in the area slightly. I'm not actually sure how to say which is really creating the 'worse' strain.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to use the following mechanism for magic:

- Practitioners of magic can see 'the future as it will be prior to looking'. More skilled practitioners can see further ahead, though of course two practitioners looking at the same event interfere with each-other. Your average mage can see about 5-10 seconds ahead. When looking, they are always looking at a specific moment - they don't get the entire 10 seconds in an instant.

- Practitioners of magic can 're-look' at a rate of about once per second, so long as they are only looking for easily-distinguishable outcomes (like the result of a coin-flip). The more difficult it is to understand the outcome, the fewer 're-looks' they get.

- A practitioner of magic learns to compartmentalize what they have seen, so that they can choose to 'lock in' a result and not let it be influenced by their future knowledge. The consequence is that they are unaware of whether or not their manipulation succeeded until they actually experience the outcome in their present. They always remember all but the 'last' time they chose to look at the future.

- Practitioners can 'strain' themselves to compress their perceptual time, allowing them to re-look more often in a shorter span. So they can watch 1 second of the future in half a second of real-time, and so on. This is highly taxing.

This system has the advantage that the improbabilities/probabilities are all macroscopic. You don't have to do a 30 minute calculation of the partition function of copper atoms to figure out how hard it is to alter a coin flip in flight. Instead, chaos theory actually comes to the rescue here - as long as you look at the outcome early enough, you can bump an elbow, shift the table, etc, to alter the coin toss to a new random result, and then just stop when it's the result you want.

So in this system, a 10-second mage could modify the probability of the coin flip from a 1/2 chance of the wrong result down to a 1/1024 chance of the wrong result (since they can look 10 times and 2^10 is 1024). Or they could take something with a 1/1024 chance and raise it up to about a 50/50 shot.

In this system, mages would be very good snipers and gun-users, okay at physical combat (since the future-sight could easily distract them from an important 'now'), and would be very good early warning systems for things that are about to happen.

This system basically lets mages violate the second law of thermodynamics but should preserve all 'material' conservation/etc laws. This does technically mean that a group of mages could theoretically 'reuse' energy to an arbitrary degree, but the actual rate of accumulation would be pretty slow (microscopic amounts - I think it'd be something like ~ 10^(-20) J/s at room temperature, but I'd have to do the calculation out in detail)

Well since the second of law of thermodynamics is general, then maybe we could even fix that by having there be an increase in entropy around the Practitioner or as a result of the practitioner, which would present a really interesting dilemma in using the magical powers to enhance themselves or to shift things might have unpredictable results. Would that be a workable fix as far as Entropy goes, or are we still in hot water with that. Basically they're reducing the Entropy with regards to one thing and distributing that increased Entropy elsewhere as a kind of dissipation, which I think might be a workable solution but I'm just talking out of my ass here, so if it's not let me know.

Also what other parameters regarding the strain of things might you want to implement and the like? Because while I really like that system I'm mostly trying to find out if we can get more workable systems, although I really do like that idea.

[Lorsa]

I liked your idea, actually. Almost everything I've been proposing since then has been some variation on it. I'm not sure if I responded directly to that since I was caught up in other stuff.

Oh, good.

Well we are probably going to have to put into place some kind of arbitrary limitation on what can be done, or how much can be done. But I'm saying that sweating the details on the mechanism is only going to create headaches since that section is naturally invented.

The limitation would probably be how much energy the mage can transfer, the assumption with just about any system is that there are varying degrees of power.

Well summoning one from nothing is producing a result that doesn't occur in the natural world, since skyscrapers don't spontaneously exist.

Yes I know. What I meant to say was that explosions don't spontanously exist either. There are mechanisms behind them and if you don't care about those mechanisms at all, then why bother as far as skyscrapers are concerned?

Maybe magic can...

Maybe a mage in another universe created this one? It would certainly explain a lot of things...

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, what if instead of trying to make magic conform to the physics of our real world, breaking it induced some kind of strain, so the more you do the more strain it takes.

How do the physicists in the thread feel about that, what sort of things would be doable with less strain, to your thinking, and what sort of things would be doable with more strain, ergo more egregious breaks. I know that this isn't a standard line of thinking, but it's an idea. So basically the more far-fetched something is, the more likely it is to be impossible for any given mage.

The WoD Mage systems have something called "Paradox", where if the magic tries to alter the world too much some strain occures and it can cause bad things to happen to the mage (including the summoning of demons that want to kill him/her).

Under my proposed system, where you just channel energy from one place to another but the sum always stays the same, the mage could choose where to place the reverse effect (the oppossed momentum, or reduction of heat or loss of mass or whatever) or simply let it be decided randomly by the universe itself. Creating effects without deciding a "drain" so to speak would be much easier and more energy could be channeled this way. However, the effects could be detrimental as there is no control at all where the drain goes (probably somewhere in the vicinity though).

So you could have 3 levels of "easeness" by which powers were channeled:

1. Hardest: Choose the drain as some external object, either something you can see or if you want to allow something you have a magical connection to (easily abuseable though).

2. Slightly easier/more power: Choose the drain as yourself. It has the potential to channel more energy as you are more intimately connected to you, but can potentially be very lethal to you depending on what you are trying to do.

3. Easiest/most power: Don't choose the drain and let the universe work it out. Can end up decidedly bad (perhaps some form of table can be constructed to see just how bad).

[NichG]

True, and I'll admit that my definition isn't probably the best. I was actually kind of hoping that you guys could help with defining exactly that might work, since again I'm not the most knowledgeable on the subject.

My original idea was something to do with how unbelievable the result was, kind of a magical system powered by belief and understanding basically.

'Mage' kinda does this. Its not that the magic system is powered by belief, but rather Mage suggests 'there is no such thing as physics or physical law, only the belief of mundanes that force everyone to play by the same, boring rules'. Thus, if you as a Mage show a mundane something that they cannot deal with, their (dis)belief smacks you in the face and does awful things to you. The more overt your magic, the more harm befalls you.

Edit: Ninja'd

Well since the second of law of thermodynamics is general, then maybe we could even fix that by having there be an increase in entropy around the Practitioner or as a result of the practitioner, which would present a really interesting dilemma in using the magical powers to enhance themselves or to shift things might have unpredictable results. Would that be a workable fix as far as Entropy goes, or are we still in hot water with that. Basically they're reducing the Entropy with regards to one thing and distributing that increased Entropy elsewhere as a kind of dissipation, which I think might be a workable solution but I'm just talking out of my ass here, so if it's not let me know.

The good news is that the amounts are vanishingly small. Even if, e.g., that civilization made a computer that had the precognitive power of these mages and had it make 're-views' of reality at 100GhZ, we're talking a billionth of a joule per second. Which is much less energy than the computer itself would use.

So its quite possible that the entropy cost of what the mage is doing is being paid by the increased brain activity needed to process both the present and future at the same time. In fact, that increased brain activity will probably pay for it a billion-fold.

What I can't guarantee is that there isn't some clever way to leverage this. I think the amount of recycled energy you get out scales with the temperature of the thing you're manipulating, so there might be some issues with e.g. a mage manipulating a high energy event in a particle accelerator. Still, even in that case, its not likely to produce 'useful' amounts of energy recycling compared with the investment in resources needed to build and run the particle accelerator.

Also what other parameters regarding the strain of things might you want to implement and the like? Because while I really like that system I'm mostly trying to find out if we can get more workable systems, although I really do like that idea.

Well, my main issue with the 'strain' is that its really hard to give an answer independent of mechanism. Really it keeps coming back to mechanism. If I have a given mechanism to look at, then I can tell you roughly how easy or hard it would be to do something with that mechanism. But the answer will depend almost entirely on the particular mechanism chosen.

The portal/connection-based system I previously mentioned, for example, could easily crack the foundations of buildings (portal in a boulder from the opposite side of the world and force the building foundation to act as the source of the change in angular momentum), etc. But it couldn't (easily) control a coin flip or heal a wound or convince someone to accept a business deal. The precognitive magic system could easily mess with a coin flip or even get someone to accept a business deal (see 10 variations on things you could say, and always get to keep the best version), but it also couldn't heal a wound and it couldn't boil water or harm a building.

[AMFV]

The limitation would probably be how much energy the mage can transfer, the assumption with just about any system is that there are varying degrees of power.

Definitely. I was more interested in where those cut offs are at all.

Yes I know. What I meant to say was that explosions don't spontanously exist either. There are mechanisms behind them and if you don't care about those mechanisms at all, then why bother as far as skyscrapers are concerned?

The point I was making is that creating a certain suspension of disbelief is easier where we have to create something wholesale, it might be possible to create a magic that violates physics or natural laws in an explained way.

I'm mostly interested in a system that's consistent and then can be applied without breaking the natural laws too much.

Maybe a mage in another universe created this one? It would certainly explain a lot of things...

True, although discussing that might get too much into real world religion.

The WoD Mage systems have something called "Paradox", where if the magic tries to alter the world too much some strain occures and it can cause bad things to happen to the mage (including the summoning of demons that want to kill him/her).

I'm familiar with it, I think W40k has a similar thing, although theirs is even crappier and less pleasant.

Under my proposed system, where you just channel energy from one place to another but the sum always stays the same, the mage could choose where to place the reverse effect (the oppossed momentum, or reduction of heat or loss of mass or whatever) or simply let it be decided randomly by the universe itself. Creating effects without deciding a "drain" so to speak would be much easier and more energy could be channeled this way. However, the effects could be detrimental as there is no control at all where the drain goes (probably somewhere in the vicinity though).

So you could have 3 levels of "easeness" by which powers were channeled:

1. Hardest: Choose the drain as some external object, either something you can see or if you want to allow something you have a magical connection to (easily abuseable though).

2. Slightly easier/more power: Choose the drain as yourself. It has the potential to channel more energy as you are more intimately connected to you, but can potentially be very lethal to you depending on what you are trying to do.

3. Easiest/most power: Don't choose the drain and let the universe work it out. Can end up decidedly bad (perhaps some form of table can be constructed to see just how bad).

Certainly, although the energy drain would eventually get to be quite a bit, and could have a lot of unseen effects, through mostly the aforementioned chaos theory.

'Mage' kinda does this. Its not that the magic system is powered by belief, but rather Mage suggests 'there is no such thing as physics or physical law, only the belief of mundanes that force everyone to play by the same, boring rules'. Thus, if you as a Mage show a mundane something that they cannot deal with, their (dis)belief smacks you in the face and does awful things to you. The more overt your magic, the more harm befalls you.

Edit: Ninja'd

I'm actually familiar with it, although it doesn't try to play by any reality at all really, although it's pretty fun and of its own respect, the whole strain idea and belief was kind of cribbed from them. Although in our case it'd be how much what you did was against the natural order and not it's apparent level of magic.

The good news is that the amounts are vanishingly small. Even if, e.g., that civilization made a computer that had the precognitive power of these mages and had it make 're-views' of reality at 100GhZ, we're talking a billionth of a joule per second. Which is much less energy than the computer itself would use.

So its quite possible that the entropy cost of what the mage is doing is being paid by the increased brain activity needed to process both the present and future at the same time. In fact, that increased brain activity will probably pay for it a billion-fold.

That is actually kind of a little bit disappointing, I was hoping for something that was more detrimental to the Mage (Wizard, Practitioner whatever). But in a related note... Since we are using dramatically more brain power that could have some nasty effects. Mages could start to go gradually more and more insane. Suffering from various ailments as they channel magic from the brain being over strained. Actually that's pretty interesting, meaning that it is both more and less difficult to work with magic.

What I can't guarantee is that there isn't some clever way to leverage this. I think the amount of recycled energy you get out scales with the temperature of the thing you're manipulating, so there might be some issues with e.g. a mage manipulating a high energy event in a particle accelerator. Still, even in that case, its not likely to produce 'useful' amounts of energy recycling compared with the investment in resources needed to build and run the particle accelerator.

Fair enough, although the extra energy going through the brain could still have a very nasty effect on said mage.

Well, my main issue with the 'strain' is that its really hard to give an answer independent of mechanism. Really it keeps coming back to mechanism. If I have a given mechanism to look at, then I can tell you roughly how easy or hard it would be to do something with that mechanism. But the answer will depend almost entirely on the particular mechanism chosen.

Fair enough, we could definitely look at the mechanism, since we're not going for direct realism as much anymore just a system that takes reality into account. I was actually looking for some ideas as to what mechanisms might present different strain, or what that associated strain might be.

So far we have your two proposed mechanisms, the probability altering one with precognition, and the linking one, which you address shortly thereafter. We also have Lorsa's recommended energy channeling which alters some physical laws as well, and would therefore create a difference in strain, although I'm not savvy enough to actually compute it.

The portal/connection-based system I previously mentioned, for example, could easily crack the foundations of buildings (portal in a boulder from the opposite side of the world and force the building foundation to act as the source of the change in angular momentum), etc. But it couldn't (easily) control a coin flip or heal a wound or convince someone to accept a business deal. The precognitive magic system could easily mess with a coin flip or even get someone to accept a business deal (see 10 variations on things you could say, and always get to keep the best version), but it also couldn't heal a wound and it couldn't boil water or harm a building.

So healing is almost impossible under our systems in really any of the proposed systems, that's actually kind of sensible, and it would fit with having a general prohibition against using magic on living things directly, or to directly influence living things, meaning the 10 things you could say is okay, but altering somebody's brain chemistry might not be. That's also a fairly standard law in magic.

My next question would be, could we integrate those systems in some way, or do you think they should stand alone. We could call it the three pillars of magic, The Energy Channeling thing, The Precognitive, and the Connection (Although there'd be interesting interplay between them) do you feel that'd be a good method for a fairly realistic or giving a semblance of realism form of magic?

[NichG]

I think having multiple of these systems in play at once is going to be kind of dissonant. This is getting outside of what is demonstrable in physics and goes more to an intuition about how physics works, but basically the tendency of physical law is to get simpler and simpler the more fundamental you get.

What I mean by that is, it looks as though all of physics might derive from a number of underlying 'properties' of the universe that you could count on one hand. The more you know, the more you can unify things that seemed to be different into a single underlying thing combined with a spontaneous symmetry-breaking event. For example, at first it looks like there are four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, gravity, nuclear strong, nuclear weak; but we can actually show how those forces all mathematically 'fall out' of a single underlying symmetry that underwent a process of freezing out as the universe cooled.

So if you have several different systems of 'these are added to the world', it makes sense from the point of view of trying to make them 'sciencey' that you should try to unify their origins. In other words, the existence of multiple systems should come not from the fact that there are in fact 3 or 4 new forces in the cosmos, but instead they should be 3 or 4 facets of some underlying 'thing', which have just been interpreted by people to actually be different because they don't understand the underlying principle (yet).

Incidentally, thinking about the precog-mage, it may be a little worse than my initial estimates on entropy, because the mage is in principle gaining information about other events than just the coin flip - and can in principle take more complex actions in response than to just 'change the random number seed of the universe'. I don't think it should be too much more, but there may be ways that it can be leveraged which would cause it to be quite a bit more. Probably the best way to estimate it is to look at the information bandwidth of the sum total of the human senses and just use that as the bitrate instead of the 1 bit per second based on distinct 'observations'.

So maybe thats something like a factor of ten million (human eyes evidently process about 10 megabits/sec and they have the highest bitrate of the various senses). It'd still be such a small amount of energy that you wouldn't really notice it - something on the order of the energy involved in a single synapse firing (give or take a few orders of magnitude).

[QNLA]

So I'll preface this by saying that I've studied theoretical physics as a major for my undergrad and am currently a PhD student. Prior to getting into things I'd like to straighten out a comment that AMFV said about Theories and Laws. For science its best to think of the two as near intechangable, the main thing that seems different to me is that laws seem to imply more mathematics, less discription. An example is General theory of relativity is more correct then Newton's law of universal gravitation.

The next question that we have to pin down is what do you mean by "realistic" and "magic" which is slightly ambiguous at the moment. Probably safe to assume that "realistic" means that the system doesn't violate any currently generally accepted theory of science, though we are allowed to change the initial composition of the universe (change the shape of spacetime, change the chemical composition of the air we breath, ect.)

Magic is weird but I'm assuming the best way to describe what you want is:

an action someone can do along the lines of magic in fantasy stories which uses no devices/equiptment which are both detectable with their technology/magic and non-natural appearing.

which leaves a lot of leeway.

If you do make your meanings more specific, maybe edit the OP to include your exact definitions as people are likely to skip posts (especially this one as it is long).


For Quantum Mechanics modeling, yes you can model it, but you are modeling the probability of the system being in each possible state/orientation. So its still probabilistic.

The Sentient computer idea seems very much like advanced technology to me, though to be completely realistic you have to ask about how the computer reads in data about the universe as well as modifies it to bias the future towards the one wanted by the spell. And you'd have to be able to communicate with the spellcaster in the first place.

I like the idea of the reading the future and choosing if they want that one or not, but to be realistic I don't like it as you can't violate causility in physics (no sending things through time). You could maybe get around that by having a universe which has lots of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in the spacetime (in layman's terms they are wormholes which link different times together). But then you run into issues with self-consistancy principles or the fact that general relativity (GR) is deterministic so you can't change what you do. I can't tell you how such a universe would be different to ours but it would be, the changing the future is probably more philosophy of physics then actual physics but if GR is combined with quantum mechanics then there may be a way around.

Another idea is there is something called the inflaton field which is what caused the initial expansion of the universe (right after the big bang). Which you may be able to obtain energy from, or could modify to cause accelerations which could destroy things. But I only really see this idea working for some sort of envoca type and you couldn't do much which was constructive with this.

[Lorsa]

Definitely. I was more interested in where those cut offs are at all.

That's going to take a while to work out.

The point I was making is that creating a certain suspension of disbelief is easier where we have to create something wholesale, it might be possible to create a magic that violates physics or natural laws in an explained way.

I'm mostly interested in a system that's consistent and then can be applied without breaking the natural laws too much.

It's that vagueness in the "too much" that most physicists will have a problem with. How much is too much to you? I'm a physics major too (nanophysics), and for most parts that leads to having to ignore basically everything I know about the world to play in any sci-fi game, so it gets hard to judge what appropriate suspension of disbelief is for non-physicists.

I mean, in Eclipse Phase, my character once ended up on an object (through a Pandora gate) that was traveling in near light-speed and managed to have an instant quantum-entangled communication with someone back in our solar system. Ignoring the fact that QEC doesn't actually work, my mind immedietely wondered what happened to time dilation and how that would affect the communication. The GM of course didn't care about this, or even knew what it was so I just ignored it.

I have no problem suspending my disbelief in most roleplaying games, but it does get tricky understanding what is acceptable to someone else.

True, although discussing that might get too much into real world religion.

Yeah, let's not do that.

Certainly, although the energy drain would eventually get to be quite a bit, and could have a lot of unseen effects, through mostly the aforementioned chaos theory.

And all those unseen effects is what makes it interesting! Also, there will probably be some social laws in place that says a mage isn't allowed to use a random energy drain for their effects. So you'd have an organisation that is trying to police mages that abuses this, perhaps including registration as practitioner etc. Just an idea, I always think it's fun with authorative organisations that can mess the characters up.

Fair enough, we could definitely look at the mechanism, since we're not going for direct realism as much anymore just a system that takes reality into account. I was actually looking for some ideas as to what mechanisms might present different strain, or what that associated strain might be.

So far we have your two proposed mechanisms, the probability altering one with precognition, and the linking one, which you address shortly thereafter. We also have Lorsa's recommended energy channeling which alters some physical laws as well, and would therefore create a difference in strain, although I'm not savvy enough to actually compute it.

So healing is almost impossible under our systems in really any of the proposed systems, that's actually kind of sensible, and it would fit with having a general prohibition against using magic on living things directly, or to directly influence living things, meaning the 10 things you could say is okay, but altering somebody's brain chemistry might not be. That's also a fairly standard law in magic.

My next question would be, could we integrate those systems in some way, or do you think they should stand alone. We could call it the three pillars of magic, The Energy Channeling thing, The Precognitive, and the Connection (Although there'd be interesting interplay between them) do you feel that'd be a good method for a fairly realistic or giving a semblance of realism form of magic?

I'm quite sure they can be integrated. Also, there's a possibility of getting healing if you allow mages to manipulate matter on a nanoscale. Tissue is basically carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with some added other elements like phosphor, sulfur, cloride etc, and if you have say a batch of those elements, it could be possible to apply it to a wound and use magic to rearrange them into nice ordered structures. Or steal them from other tissue that is closeby (which would cause the person to be diminished in some other way, or the mage himself). The actual organisation require fairly small amounts of momentum and energy, as you're organising them into molecules that are energetically favorable, so the "drain" under my system would be minimal. It depends on if you want the mage to be able to do it simply be "magic" without micromanaging the actual movements themselves. It's possible if you want it.

[NichG]

I like the idea of the reading the future and choosing if they want that one or not, but to be realistic I don't like it as you can't violate causility in physics (no sending things through time). You could maybe get around that by having a universe which has lots of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in the spacetime (in layman's terms they are wormholes which link different times together). But then you run into issues with self-consistancy principles or the fact that general relativity (GR) is deterministic so you can't change what you do. I can't tell you how such a universe would be different to ours but it would be, the changing the future is probably more philosophy of physics then actual physics but if GR is combined with quantum mechanics then there may be a way around.

Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

It does seem like it would allow for FTL communication and basically the ability to send messages arbitrarily far back into the past though. That is a pretty big problem. I guess you could hack it and say that the precog mage only sees the consequences of things within their light-cone, but that could get weird - it basically implies that the precog mage is somehow computing the future rather than reading it out, and that computation isn't really believable.

So okay, I think that answers the question as to what you need to change for that system. You basically need a non-relativistic universe to run the precog mage without it introducing some big problems.

[Drachasor]

Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

It does seem like it would allow for FTL communication and basically the ability to send messages arbitrarily far back into the past though. That is a pretty big problem. I guess you could hack it and say that the precog mage only sees the consequences of things within their light-cone, but that could get weird - it basically implies that the precog mage is somehow computing the future rather than reading it out, and that computation isn't really believable.

So okay, I think that answers the question as to what you need to change for that system. You basically need a non-relativistic universe to run the precog mage without it introducing some big problems.

Even within their lightcone has problems, since things outside his lightcone can affect the outcome.

The other option for predicting the future is cheating of course. If you go with some sort of hidden "god machine" then it can force the predictions it makes to come true. In fact, "predictions" would really just be mislabeled plans. Though, you could toss on some short term and localized prediction as well, I suppose.

[NichG]

Well, 'within his lightcone' meaning 'information which he could have received up to that point in time'. But its weird because the constancy of certain things from outside of the light-cone is important, so there would almost have to be some sort of 'gentle boundary conditions' assumptions or the future would always look pitch black.

So yeah, I think its no good unless you use a non-relativistic universe.

[QNLA]

Changing the future wouldn't be a problem here - you could use a many-worlds interpretation of QM and say that the precog mage is basically just collapsing the wavefunction away from universes that do not satisfy their desired constraint.

You'd basically have to perform complete destructive interference with the outcomes that you don't want, we can't control the collapse of the wavefunction according to our current knowledge of quantum mechanics. Also if you look into the future with the precog mage then you'd be measuring the future, I'd imagine this would cause some sort of entanglement between you and the outcome future, so all the other prefered outcomes would no longer be possible under the many-worlds theory.

However you could use something which has been named "time loop logic" which is outlined here on wikipedia. This would just set up a situtation where if your magic works then your desired outcome is the only logical outcome. The magic would work something like this:

1) recieve message from the future.
2) wait until your spell is suppose to happen.
3) Check if your spell happened as you wanted.
4A) If yes, send back same message.
4B) If no, send back different message.

without some sort of loop then the only consistant future is where your spell worked. If the spell failed then either the algorithm never ran or something went wrong in the mind of the person trying to perform the spell. I'd imagine it would be hard to figure out this and keep your mind performing the algorithm properly which could be why it fails sometimes and why not everyone would be able to do it even if everyone physically has the signal generators/recievers.

The only differences between this and real life is that you'd need the universe to be scattered with CTCs and humans able to send some signal through them. The CTC space-time fabric could change a lot about how the universe works, though in some reigmes I'd imagine the differences would be negligable and you'd probably have to be able to detect quantum mechanics before seeing anything particually different to how the universe works if this wasn't the case. I'm now tempted to see if there are any solutions to einstein's equations like this and if so simulate it to see what it looks like.