Hussar
Legend
"Scientific minds"? Now there's an anachronism.
D&D General Which D&D Words and Things are Post 1608?
Faolyn
(she/her)
Meh. There have been people exploring reality and trying to understand it long before the scientific method was developed--and that's another thing that could have been developed already in a D&D setting.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
I don't disagree; but the thread is looking for things post-1608 Earth time that appear in D&D, and gravity as a thing is one such.
Doesn't matter - in order to reverse something you have to know it exists to be reversed, and be able to identify and-or conceptualize it.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Absolutely true. something doesn't need to have been discovered in order to exist.
And the same applies to infravision. Some real world animals have infravision. And animals in D&D are assumed to function like their real world counterparts. Ergo infravision exists in D&D, irrespective of if fictional creatures have that ability or not.
Also true. Magic provides tools to probe the workings of the universe that are simply not available to real world scientists. It's not unreasonable to suppose that your average wizard has scientific understanding that is well beyond the real world.
Nikosandros
Golden Procrastinator
Yes and it can be argued that something not dissimilar to the scientific method was developed in the Hellenistic period. In any event, there was plenty of theoretical speculation and productions of scientific models such as in the work of Archimedes.
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
The 7th Century Indian Astronomer Brahmagupta in 628 proposed that “it is the nature of the earth to attract and to keep things, just as it is the nature of water to flow… The earth is the only low thing, nothing may go lower, and seeds always return to it, in whatever direction you may throw them away, and never rise upwards from the earth” he called this Attractive force Gurutvakarsan.
Later a Persian astronomers proposed that other heavenly bodies also exerted their own attractive force.
so the idea of Gravity is certainly older than the term, and any number of intelligent thinkers proposed ideas throughout history
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Re: Gravity - Part of the reason for this thread is that folks didn't like "species" because it sounded too modern, and to note lots of other words that were even more modern. Does all of science otherwise not specified in D&D work the same as IRL? (What does "Featherfall" do if falling in a vacuum based on its name, for example?)
Anyway, here is a post on superseded theories in science that is tangentially relevant.
www.enworld.org
Anyway, here is a post on superseded theories in science that is tangentially relevant.
D&D General - Technology in D&D, the IRL Timeline, and Pausing It.
Most D&D settings are lousy with the remnants of ancient civilizations that includes dungeons to delve, treasures to plunder, and magic items to discover. That would suggest that maybe some sort of cataclysm of apocalyptic scope interrupted the progression of technology as we understand it...
www.enworld.org
Mod Note:
It isn't like that dismissive and condescending tone is going to make things better in this discussion, though. So, maybe consider how your advice applies to yourself, too.
Gravity as a word is one such. But, it isn't like "things fall toward the Earth" is post-1608.
The Newtonian formulation of gravity did not pop fully-formed out of Newton's head alone - his formulation came after reading the thoughts of natural philosophers of the 1500s, and indeed, some as far back as the 6th century, who were arguing that Aristotle was wrong.
Though the experiment of dropping things off the Tower of Pisa somewhere around 1590 is apocryphal, the principles of it were established by Italian experimenters decades before.
So, everyone gets to decide for themselves when folks had a concept of "gravity". Aristotle knew things fell. Galilleo new that all objects fall at the same rate of speed, regardless of composition, if drag is not a factor. Newton gave us a classical mathematical formulation. Einstein gave us a relativistic formulation. And nobody has yet given us a solid quantum formulation.
That's weird. Most people can put a car into reverse without knowing the workings of a car transmission....
You seem to be applying scientific concepts to magic which do not necessarily hold. Magic (depending on your magical tradition) does not require understanding, so much as it requires desired effect. Indeed, broadly, it seems to me that the more detailed the understanding of how a thing operates, the less magical that operation will seem...
Also, the PHB is a metagame document, so its contents do not necessarily reflect character knowledge - so the names of the spells are for the player, not necessarily the character. Your spellcaster may not be designing a spell to "reverse gravity". They may be designing a spell to "stop falling so fast" (feather fall) or "fall upwards" (reverse gravity).
Synthil
Explorer
You don't need to understand the process of oxidiation to start a fire. Or to put one out.
As for modern language, I always assume it's just translation for players anyway. The characters aren't speaking English (or German, in our case), the players do. Because even old words don't make sense in a fantasy setting. Take the German and Russian words for emperor: Kaiser and tsar. Directly derived from Caesar. But there was no ruling dude named Caesar in most settings so the words don't make sense.
So I have no problem with contemporary or otherwise anachronistic language and concepts. They're there to inform players not characters.
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