Discussion In a World of magic would science develop well?

Magic is magic. Hard to explain.

 

one of science definition is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
now assume magic is natural thing on magic world then yes they can develop science, because they think magic is part of nature similar with lightning, storm, fire, flood and stuff~ the technology may different compare to our world tho~

science is method, mindset, principal and stuff like that~ it can build technology but don't confuse it with technology~ if magic civilization use science method to build their tech then they already have science it just lil bit different compare pure physical based science like our own because our nature law may different~ some may same tho such mathematics, biology it just the application may really different
can it develop well?
that kinda hard question cuz it depend on historical event, what if world war never happen do you think we already on nuclear science or not?

 

Probably a combination of magic and tech. Although, if some things were found better done without magic, they might make that part magic free.

 

I'd say it would eventually. Even on earth it took a super long time for us to figure science out.

 

@Bad Storm if the world ends, are you planning on having a great big party at your house?

 

yes, I've always wanted to throw a party that will turn into utter chaos after a few minutes

 

Gotta lock away your valuables and bedroom doors~

 

I have not read the full thread yet, but it depends on how magic and science are balanced in the world.
To powerful/easy magic would hinder scientific development. but if it is rare of difficult enough it would not.

If it does not follow some form of consistent internal logic, that could cause issues with people developing logical approaces to studying other fields.

Development follows needs and desires, if magic can fill a need then most would not bother developing a non-magic answer for that need. Plus the people with the resources to fund research need to see the value in the development, which they might not even if magic is restricted to the elite.

Though if there is an area that helps magic (like refining metals if the purity of the materials used affects the end result) then you could see it contribute to the desire to developments.

Considering the biggest driver of new tech is war, or more specifically the arms race of offensive weapons vs defensive protection and armor, The entire would would develop based on how useful magic is in war. Large scale formation destroying spells would tend to encourage smaller more spread out and mobile formations if it did not lead to an abandonment of standard infantry entirely.

 

If magic actually worked, why wouldn't it be part of science? Think of it this way, Isaac Newton didn't make any major distinction between science and alchemy, so why wouldn't other scientists do the same thing? Aren't a lot of magical researchers in fantasy worlds pretty the same thing as scientists to begin with?

 

Having read through this thread, most of my questions haven't even been asked. Let's assume a world with magic that runs off of a set of learnable rules, as a standard baseline. The difficulty of utilising magic can vary depending on the world, but everyone has at least the potential to develop magic, unless they have something wrong with them, which is considered them being magically crippled. This can be directly compared to people being able to walk and run unless they're physically crippled.

In worlds where magic is easy to utilise and gain access to, my question is on the limitations for animals utilising magic. Sure, this would affect the animal's development in various ways (a mouse that spits fire for self defence may not want to live in a forest regularly plagued by drought, lest they get cooked by them attempting to defend themselves, for example), but it would also affect the development of the local sentients (aka, humans). Animals were a lot bigger threat to humanity before the development of guns, something that we easily forget nowadays. If we gain the ability to utilise magic, but also have to deal with animals that can utilise it to, it's going to change a lot about how our society develops, and even if it develops. Penning in animals becomes harder when they can transform the ground to make a small hill to walk over the fence with. As is herding them when they can respond as if attacked by sending dangerous shards of ice or blasts of flame. And these are the problems after domesticating the animals in question, actually domesticating them would become a significantly greater problem. At this point, in this world, I want to know if society would actually develop sufficiently to actually attempt to start delving into the rules of reality, be they magical or purely physical, or would always be to scared to make a permanent settlement and a defensible position from which society could develop.

In a world where magic's challenging to utilise and gain access to, the difference may only start to appear after society has developed science, and only needs to add the mystical arts that are subsequentially discovered into their technology. In this world, unless animals other than humans are discovered with an innate ability to utilise magic, the difference between the development of science in our world and their world would be near parallel, with only some minor changes after the discovery of how to utilise magic and incorporate it into technology. In fact, magic may be so limited that it can't be utilised without technological assistance, meaning that magic would have minimal practical difference to electricity in our world, with only some minor utilisation differences being present.

Now, there's a BROAD width of possibilities between the two, each with numerous different "flavours" of how much the presence of magic hinders or aids in the development of technology and society, and why, so I'm not going to go over every option. But I do want to say that I have presented options where systematic magic likely prevents the development of science, as well as one where it doesn't affect the development of science. So I can quite clearly say that it can vary depending on the rules and the world's development.

 

Because people almost always pick the low hanging fruit until they run out.

If magic is easier to develop and does not rely on the laws of physics then physics will be left to the wayside. But if it depends on the laws of physics then it could encourage that development.

Newton is a bad example, as he thought Alchemy was real so treated it as such despite the lack of results.

 

If magic worked, then wouldn't it be science?

That's my point: people tried to approach magic empirically even though it didn't produce results. Now imagine that these results now exist - wouldn't it become that much more popular?

 

No. At least no in the discovering the laws of physics way. Not unless it works with those laws, and has the exact same outcome for every user who makes the same actions.

Heck depending on how it works forms of art like painting and sculpture could easily be better analogies to how people interact with it, a lot of Fantasy stories they are better equivalents.

The question you are ignoring as it shows why your claim is idiotic is "Why?"

They did that because alchemists thought they could use alchemy it to make gold, or gain eternal youth.
There was a very real motivation behind what they were doing, despite the futility of it.

That is why I said it is a bad example, because you it relies on a motivation fueling the research in one direction, that simply put does not exist in the other direction.

If someone has a way to do something, then they will not invest time or resources in another way unless they see some potential value in that field to balance out the investment. Alchemists were after fortune the same way to many people drop all their money on lotteries, scratch tickets or casinos. without an equivalent perceived goal for science, real or imagined, the analogy does not work.

 

Honestly, the wording of this should have been "physics" over "science", though I will be arguing with the wording the OP used. While Science can be applicable, it's more of an approach to solving problems, and it's usually only applicable when magic doesn't have a set system (belief models & willpower models) or has a system that can't be easily developed in a systematic manner in an external manner (elemental awakening & bloodline magic models. Also the cultivation model when it actually follows the rules being about self improvement, or when "bloodline" and "body type" is incorporated into it at a foundational level). Outside of those, I can see science being utilised. That isn't to say that the Laws of Physics, even if they're applicable, would be discovered, just that the process of systematic and empirically objective research being utilised to discover and improve upon what they know.

Below is the explanation for the models I mentioned, including greater reasons as to why an objective model wouldn't work when they're the only thing the world has to build off of:

Belief and Willpower Models for how magic works actively defies systematic modelling. That isn't to say that systematic modelling can't be done with them, but that, in many situations, they models are inapplicable or highly subjective. To explain, the belief model is one where the more people believe that magic works in way "X", the more magic works in way "X". This is planet wide, so generating the belief that magic works in methods "X, Y and Z" would be commonplace, and, in some stories, can generate literal "gods" to give out magical power to people. Willpower works pretty much the same way, but on an individual level. The more you believe something, the easier that thing is to do with magic. This can be taken in to two extremes, with someone believing that they are a GOD enough to gain the power to become a god, while someone else can believe that magic's just a bunch of hooey enough that they aren't affected by it. You can easily see why systematic, objective, research like science requires would fail with these, they both work on subjectivity over objectivity.

Elemental Awakening is the when a person has an innate element, an affinity to said element, and utilises magic through that. In some stories a person's Elemental Affinity can be chosen, modified, change naturally, or is permanently set to it's initial criteria. However, the important thing here for "science" is that the magic is varied, and displays effects based on internal criteria. Even if you can produce some empirically objective means of measuring amounts of magic, and how it operates external to the user's body, that doesn't change the fact that each individual has a different means of utilising it internally. Think of trying to advance science when every advancement requires one to understand the psychology of each student you're teaching, and you see why I'm saying that this won't work with the required level of objectivity.

Bloodline is easy to explain, if you read & agreed with my explanation for Elemental Awakening. This is because it's basically the same thing, only a person inherits their "element" or personal ability from their parent. Think how Quirks pass on in Boku No Hero Academia, and you understand how Bloodline Magic usually works. And it doesn't lend itself to aiding in the utilisation of Science due to the same reason why Elemental Awakening doesn't, too much subjectivity due to too much of what's happening being related to the caster's body and mind, instead of externally where they can be reliably be researched in an objective manner.

The Cultivation Model, meanwhile, is the most diverse. It sometimes incorporates aspects of both the Bloodline and Elemental Models, as well as adds in a whole raft of issues due to being primarily focused on self-improvement and producing individuals immortality. Combine that with the fact that a person who may have some minor thing unknown about their body, or that many of these worlds have people eating item's A, B, C, D & E to give them permanent benefits for even centuries later, and suddenly you have a nightmare trying to ensure that you have test subjects that you can say are empirically objective to research with. A successful triple-blind research result that could have happened due to test subject 1 and/or placebo control subject 2 finding a hidden "natural medicine" and taking it without ever reporting it's consumption would cause nightmares for objectivity, and neither can you actually ask them not to take the "natural medicine", particularly when it's believed to give tangible benefits. All that while ignoring the difficulties that start up due to some people being born with things like reversed organs and the like would add to trying to research objectively in a world with a cultivation system.

 

Except that unless magic is completely unique for every person, it can still be researched and developed in a systematic manner. And unless empiricism somehow doesn't work any more, this process is basically science. You're making the assumption that science and magic are completely different things, and that's true in the real world but only because magic isn't real. If it were, then why wouldn't we study it like any other natural phenomenon?

 

The natrul world of philosophy would take an extremely different direction due to magic so I don't expect you will see science develop and people would not have a need for the scientific method, since they can reach a higher point of objective truth

 

I disagree, our world has an artificial distinction between "science" and "magic" and separates them into 2 separate camps for historical reasons and the fact that "magic" in our world can't be demonstrated. If an alternate world has "magic" manifested, then it isn't the superstitious magic that we know in our world but a Law of nature that is part of the "Science" of the other world. In fact, with visible "magic", people would be more interested in knowing how it works and hence study the "Laws" involved in the manifestation. In short, they will start studying "Science" through magic.

If there was magic in another world, science would be even more developed since magic will actually catalyze scientific thinking. Our "magic =/= science" is an artificial separation that stems from us not having magic in the first place.

 

As long as there's maginternet, it's cool with me.

 

The problem with these debates is that the definition of science can be extend to be so over encompassing that any form of pattern recognition can be defined as science thus insofar as magic is not pure chaos it will be to some extent "science", but that's a tautology at this point and not worth discussing or even stating and neither does it really say much about how magic will be approached in any given setting.

 

Technically Science has an original definition, and if you go by it pretty much every valid (so no Phrenology or Homeopathy) field of study is included.
So it is not Science is extended that is the problem, but most people using the term imprecisely. Which in my experience happens way to often in life.

But ya, the question should likely be would Technology develop in a world with magic, and/or would Science as a study of the natural world and it rules develop in a world with magic.

To which the answer is "it depends to heavily on the world and how its magic works"