A pseudo-scientific explanation of magic

[Dakkareth]

On a similar note, it seems like you could explain a great deal of "magic" in a D&D like world through the unconscious manipulation of Zero Point Energy.

(I've been using that idea as background for my world)

In ancient times, before mankind of even this world even existed, the Firstborn were the rulers of a great part of the universe. The Firstborn - you would know them as 'draconiae'. Yes, dragons, but nothing like your mother told you in her fairy tales. As the first species to attain intelligence and self-consciousness, they also reached perfection before all others. Their bodies were so filled with the power of life, that their blood alone could heal deadly wounds and their lifespan exceeded that of worlds. Their understanding was so great, that they would know the future of a being merely by looking at it. Great works of art enabled them to travel unimaginable distances in the blink of an eye or transform dead rocks into living worlds. These machines drew upon the power of the chaos that is in all things, the infinite permutations of existence dancing through being and non-being in the spaces between the elements of which all consists - sieving energy from nothingness.

But all that was not enough for the Firstborn. The greatest of them devised a process by which their race would be able to shape the chaos not with machines but with their very thoughts. Sacrificing themselves the Twelve Archons poured the energies of their immortal lifes into a net made of frozen light, woven between all the worlds their race had ever visited. And as their spirits made of the loose web a tightly woven fabric, the energies of the chaos were tamed and channeled. By simply reaching out with their minds to the fabric of their fathers' spirits, travelling on threads of frozen light, they could call the energy to them and command it in full. Even to the Secondborn, whose mastery was close to that of the Firstborn, the new powers of the Draconiae seemed to impossible, that they referred to them by their word for 'unexplicable' - Arcana.

Whenever you see a wizard conjuring power from nothing, remember this: It was not him, who made this possible. Laterborn species managed to pierce some of the Firstborns' secrets, to tap into some part of the great web and use its powers for their own ends. Often great minds of those races created their own spirit-channels to better access the power of the First and though they were far from being as powerful as the original, they made the energies available to others. The Sources available to mankind are many, but by way of countless intermediary channely they all draw from the First.
---

In short, the Firstborn created a kind of consciousness that transcended the need for a body, existing as a field of energy, as structures in space-time itself. This new creation had the same abilities as their machines with which they tapped Zero-Point-Energy and made it available to their entire race. Later others 'hacked' into this system and created their own versions, but unable to reproduce the original process they only could draw on the predecessor Source. Still, access was possible. Through millions of intermediaries, the great geniuses of mankinds past have managed to create their own 'tap' - a task that has become much easier now, that everyone can build on the work of those races that came before. And so human sorcerers can access these energies.

 

[Dakkareth]

I killed the topic with my vast sorcerous powers!

 

[The_Universe]

I think maybe we all ran out of cool, semi-original ideas on the topic. Don't blame yourself.

 

[Yair]

Sorry for the hijack...
[/hijack]

As noted - the idea that all minds are one mind is going to be a really hard sell, in terms of free will and the like.

*shrug* it is a standard trope in various mystic and theological circles, and a common theme of new-age and oriental faiths. I guess we'll have to disagree here.

No, QM says that your measurements affects the thing you measure. Unless the observer can measure the whole Universe at once, there's limits to the reach.

Ehmm... no.
[science speak]
In non-relativisitic quantum mechanics, consider a system at state Psi=Psi0*(Psi1*Rho1+Psi2*Rho2) (zero temperature for simplicity), where Psi1 and Psi2 (and Rho1 and Rho2) are orthogonal states that spread a 2-dimensional Hilbert space within the overall Hilbert space. Now consider a diagonal measurement operator O acting within the first Hilbert space, so that O*Psi1*=o1*Psi1 and O*Psi2=o2*Psi2, and another measurment M so that M*Rho1=m1*Rho1 and M*Rho2=m2*Rho2.
By the measurement axiom of NRQM, if person A measures Psi by O the the state becomes Psi0*Psi1*Rho1 at probability o1, and Psi0*Psi2*Rho2 at probability o2. If person B now measures with O, he will always get a concurrent result, indicating that A's measurment affected the things he measured. To see that this is not limited in space, consider B measuring M instead. He will always get Psi0*Psi2*Rho2, despite Rho being a totally different system that can be at any distance. A didn't measure it, and yet he affected it.
Measurement is NRQM is not local, and affects all the universe immediately. Notice that this does not violate causality, as a measurment at point A cannot be used to transfer information to point B despite affecting it immediately.
As a word of caution, while this phenomenon can be generalized for a generic state density, in practice systems near thermal equilibrium past a (low) temperature threshold will not be entangled, leading to the localization of the measurement's effects.
As relativistic QM is an extension of NRQM, it does not significantly change these results, except to make everything so complex nothing is calculable.
[/science-speak]

More importantly, the observation has an effect, but that effect is not predictable. Observation resolves questions, but does not allow the observer to choose what the answer is.

Of course. But we are talking here about PSEUDO-scientific explanations of magic. There is no scientific explanation of magic - according to hard science, magic is impossible (duh!).

The only sole scientific explanation of magic that I am aware of is the assumption that the PCs live in a highly and exponentially increasingly improbable world. According to QM there is a chance (a miniscule, rediculous chance) that when I say Abra-Kadabra and point with my finger, a fireball will emerge at a designated spot.
It's a very small chance, but if you take the Many Worlds [many minds] interpertation very seriously you could claim that your tale is of one of these worlds at the very tail of reality, where the bizzare often does happen. Or that it simply describes an alternate, improbable, reality. That's basically what I was suggesting too, in QM terms, just with a different interpertation.
[/hijack]

Dakkareth: Your tale reminded me of another idea someone may found of interest. It is suggested by Tipler, a physicist turned metaphysicist.
The idea is that someone indeed managed to transform itself and its machines into true spirit, and nigh reached omnipotence, but this was not in the past but rather at the future. They reach out to the past to shape it so that this feat will be accomplished, navigating history and physics to make this possibility a reality.
In technical terms, the boundary conditions on the universe's future are such that they culminate in an omniscience and omnipotence of intelligent life in the limit of infinite time (so, technically, the omniscient/potent entity is transcendant to existence; google the Omega Point). The boundary conditions set limits on the evolution of the universe, not restricting choice but directing it to its ultimate goal. Omniscience is measured by the amount of information contained by intelligent beings in the universe (true omniscience means they know all that can be known about the universe), omnipotence measures their ability to change it (true omnipotence means that can wield transformations on an energy scale of the whole universe).
If all this smells of Christian ideas, this is not an accident, but I don't think I can say more on that within the forum's rules.
So anyways, your Firstborn can actually not be born yet. What's time for such powerful beings?

 

[Dakkareth]

... which in turn reminds me of the many theories of how the illithids came into being - including one of my own on the origin of Ilsensine.

Shades of Dan Simmons and Stephen Baxter there as well. In the case above I was aiming for something less absolute, though. Because there are greater beings around than the Firstborn of that age ...

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Exactly, that's the real trick, isn't it? And as you point out, some of the staples of D&D style magic are still just as mysterious, if not even moreso, under this pseudo-scientific rationale. I'm not actually at all sure that D&D style magic is compatible with it. Although it might me -- if you can manipulate matter at a quantum particle level, healing (for example) shouldn't be impossible -- just hypercomplex. Only a supercomputer could hope to plot it out.

Or maybe all mages in this setting are autists. I dunno.

Or maybe most of the complexities are off-loaded onto the system somehow, so that the mage doesn't need to calculate all that himself? i.e. he does one or two relatively simple things, and the system simply follows its normal rules.

Of course, those "simple" things would be something along the lines of "create amino acids and speed up time" or something of that nature. But arguably (or at least, potentially) simpler mathematically than micro-managing the process of healing.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Our mind, singular? That presents a problem of more than just grammar. I don't think anyone wants to try to sell the idea that for all the sentients int eh world, there's only one mind that needs to be affected.

Then, you've got either magic that doesn't really have objective reality, because there are people you see now for whom that magic simply won't happen while it does happen for you, or you have to affect all the myriad minds in the universe at once, which just sounds implausible.

Depends on how interconnected the minds of the universe are, doesn't it? What's the boundary between "mind" and "soul"? Are all souls (as some religions claim) aspects or parts of the same thing? If they are, then you have less finagling to do, provided that thing is somewhat malleable. You tweak it, and the whole world responds.

Weird thought: Maybe every being is connected to an uber-consciousness of the universe on some level, and that's what magic manipulates. You could change SR to be the result of a being that is not entirely of the same world, and therefore has less connection to said consciousness (or has one to a different one). Therefore, you have a harder time "convincing" him that he just got hit by a fireball, or maybe you can't at all. Of course, it should work both ways then. If a demon has SR against everyone in universe A because he comes from universe B, then everyone native to universe A would also have SR against him.

I think it's sort of a cute idea, but would require massive reworking of a lot of creatures (and copious SR checks in many games).

 

[Desdichado]

Or maybe most of the complexities are off-loaded onto the system somehow, so that the mage doesn't need to calculate all that himself? i.e. he does one or two relatively simple things, and the system simply follows its normal rules.

There's also the idea that spells only need to be figured out once, by the real geniuses, and then their work is passed on to other magicians. Who may be necessarily brilliant, but are also standing on the shoulders of giants, repeating their formula because they don't have the talent to create their own.

 

[shadow]

What? I'm completely lost! All of this goes completely over my head! I guess that's because I'm a linguist and a liberal arts student. In my games magic is just magic.

 

[bolen]

Note if Magic existed. It would obey rules just like other sciences.

By the way, vacuum energy is one of the favorite subjects of all crackpots around the world.

This said however, I am not a very big fan of mixing real scientific words with fiction. Sometimes I get very annoyed with star trek because it uses words which have a precise scientific meaning and strings them together for non sense.

Niven's The Magic Goes Away has a fairly good "scientific magic" system where mana is a resource which one uses.