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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7880498" data-attributes="member: 12377">The formulae involved in engineering a proper steam engine (pressure, tolerances, heat, timing, etc.) also resemble magic.I'm reminded of Freemasonry. Supposedly, in the Middle Ages, the knowledge of how to build a cathedral that wouldn't collapse was incredibly valuable, but also difficult to learn. When someone showed up claiming to have this knowledge, you needed a quick way to judge whether they were legit. So the Freemasons started an exclusive club with a bunch of "secret handshakes," fancy regalia, and esoteric terminology, so that they could recognize one another. All of this merely looked mystical to the uninitiated. (Overt mystical trappings were added centuries later by bored nobility who didn't know anything about building cathedrals; ironically, this came about due to advances in science and math which made engineering knowledge much more widespread, rendering the original function of Freemasonry obsolete.)I'm also reminded that Isaac Newton spent a lot of time studying alchemy, and so did Boyle (of Boyle's Law, which is pretty relevant to steam engines). Francis Bacon is said to have dabbled in the occult. And don't even get me started on Paracelsus. (Dude's real full name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He invented some of the best-known D&D creatures. You should go look him up.)Anyway, even these are all Renaissance examples, my point is that most pre-Enlightenment people didn't really distinguish between magic and science, like, at all. You could say that "science" is really just the scientific method, a way of figuring things out; "magic" is one of the things they would try to figure out using science. Or, conversely, you had people like Paracelsus applying magical methods to natural problems, successfully. Obviously by today's standards you would not want Paracelsus as your primary-care physician but some of his techniques were such an improvement over what had come before that he is considered a contributor to the founding of modern medicine.So, yeah, you could consider boiling water to be "not magic," but that's kind of a modern perspective. For most of human history, there was simply "how the world works," and stuff we knew, and stuff we didn't. I guarantee some culture somewhere has a myth, involving gods or spirits, to explain why water boils.</blockquote>

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