Magic and Alchemy

James linked an interesting article on magic and the modern world, one that deserves some commentary. 

To be modern, almost by definition, is to live without putting much stock in a supernatural “beyond” to the world. And yet, nearly every time a new technology is introduced, its promoters reach back to the ancient idea of magic to capture its significance...  Even more surprising is how often we still talk about a specific magical tradition: the practice of alchemy. For centuries, alchemists sought to transmute all metals into gold, to escape the conditions of mortality, and perhaps even to create new forms of life that would answer to our command—all summed up in the quest for the substance known as “the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Now, if to be modern is to largely disbelieve in magic, surely to be modern is to know that the alchemists’ quest failed. If we think of alchemy at all, we think of it in contrast with a proper science like chemistry. The alchemists were wrong about the natural world—the chemists, after much trial and error, were right.*

* Significantly, though, the early “natural philosophers" spent at least as much of their time on what we would call alchemy as what we would now call chemistry. Indeed, many celebrated figures now remembered for their scientific contributions—like the physician Paracelsus and the mathematician Isaac Newton—spent far more of their time on alchemy (and in Newton’s case, astrology) than on anything resembling modern science, and made no clear distinctions between them. You might almost say that we now use alchemy for the approaches to the natural world that didn’t work out—while science is the name we give, in retrospect, to the approaches that did work out.

I think what a modern philosopher might know about alchemy is not that it failed, but that it proved to be a lot more involved than Newton could imagine without a knowledge of subatomic particles. Lead has three more protons than gold, and an electron shell that is substantially different in character. To transmute one into the other is a technical feat that is still beyond us, but we understand better why it is, and it isn't obvious that it can never be done. It might not ever be worth the substantial trouble involved; or possibly we will develop a technology that will make it trivial to dis- and reassemble subatomic particles however we want, something like a replicator in Star Trek. That would be alchemy in the literal sense, not now "magic" but "science fiction." It might someday become fact. It might even be effortless, at least from the perspective of the technology's end user, as it is when Picard orders a tea and finds that the glass as well as the tea simply appears.

Thus, the connection he is finding between ideas of magic and emerging technologies is not as strange as he suggests. It's a fairly sensible way to proceed.

Alchemy failed as science, but it succeeded as a dream. Magic doesn’t “work,” in the sense that science works, but it does work as a dream. And technology is, after all, applied science. Applied to what? To a dream that was there long before science, the dream of magic.

Think of magic, for the moment, as the quest for instant, effortless power—the ability to get things done without taking time and without requiring labor or toil. In the absence of magic (or technology), getting anything done requires some amount of time, sometimes a great deal of time. But what if you could get results without waiting?

So, again, it doesn't work yet: but this is a reasonable description of how it might work. If I want hot water, instead of having to build a fire and smelt iron to make a pot (or build one out of clay, then fired in a kiln), and then fetch water from the stream, and then.... no, I just turn on the hot water faucet. Or I put water in a microwave, where a magnetron generates an electromagnetic bombardment that gives me boiling water in a minute while I wait.  The reason to imagine it this way is because this is how it works. Parts of it don't work yet, but other parts work now that our ancestors would have regarded as plain magic (and that, to be sure, many moderns don't understand either -- a joke in Oceans 13 was that a security system could only be defeated with a magnetron, "And you know what a magnetron is, don't you?" The joke was that the filmmakers could be reasonably sure that few in the audience would know that one was heavily involved in their microwaved popcorn).

That isn't what the article is about, but it impacts the frame of what it is about. Talking about how we have entered a new era in the last hundred years is likewise simply wrong: a similar thing was happening in the long middle ages with the invention and refinement of water-based technologies like grain mills. The author makes a point about how until recently everything has proceeded at the speed of digestion, as we used organic labor to create effects; but water mills could run day and night. Wind power also: witness how it drove ships across the wide world while men slept below decks, save for the night watch. It's only the speed that has increased. 

What the article is actually about is how to make good people and good relationships, and why hardship and time are important for that. That deserves a separate post, but I think this helps reframe us for that discussion.