I put “magic” in quotes because I am using the term as shortcut for several ideas. For purposes of this thread, assume that magic means any phenomenon that violates the conservation of mass & energy, the laws of thermodynamics, the principle of causality, or the fact that light moves at a finite speed and no material object can be accelerated to that speed. To a layman like me, those all seem among the most fundamental laws for how the universe works on a macroscopic scale; if I have erred in my phrasing or left any very basic laws out, please correct me.
All righty. According to chaotic inflation theory, there may well be universes other than our own that have different physical constants. If we grant that this theory is correct, could “magic” as defined above exist in any of them?
There is no “universe” posited by any scientific cosmological theory which violates any of those premises. If there are “universes” which do violate such premises, they are outside the bounds of what we can, at our current level of knowledge, posit scientifically. All of the things you list are at a more fundamental level than the values of the physical constants.
No, wait, that’s not quite entirely right. Our understanding of the Universe does dictate that there be a maximum speed unattainable to any massive object, but it does not necessarily dictate that electromagnetic radiation, or indeed any phenomenon, actually travel at that speed. One could, in principle, have a world without any massless particles at all, and in fact, the world in which we find ourselves does contain massive photon-like particles. You’d still have the high-energy limit for massive particles, though, which amounts to the same thing.
I think you’ve left out a key requirement: to be called “magic” in the ordinary sense of the term, it would have to be something that responds to human will, that a person can make something “magical” happen. If there is any plausible mechanism by which there could somehow be a linkage between people’s thoughts and physical events occuring, then there could be magic.
Now in a truly infinite number of universes, a vanishingly small subgroup of them would be the ones where every time someone does whatever prequisite is deemed necessary for magic, then by sheer coincidence a random quantum fluctuation causes what they wanted to happen. But since that’s just a biased sample of randomly occuring events, I wouldn’t really call that magic.
I don’t think that any of the current physical constants can be “tweaked” to make the concepts you refer to go away, unless you can set them to 0 or infinity. Causality and thermodynamics have no parameters, and the speed of light/information is some particular value which is related to the conservation of mass/energy but unless its “value” is zero or infinity I don’t see how that influences anything in a “magical” way.
ETA: I also agree roughly with Lumpy that “magic” might be too loaded a term, and may just be something that is even more fundamentally impossible than just hacking around causality.
Chronos, should I have listed inertia or any other property in my OP? Because I have the feeling I left something very basic out, but I can’t think of what.
I wasn’t trying to define magic. I was using the word as shorthand for the essential laws I named, because there’s not room to write all “conservation of mass & energy, ultimate speed limit for material objects, causuality, and the laws of thermodynamics” in the thread title.
I would rather not try to define magic in this thread. Again, its use in the thread question was just shorthand.
Great Debates is down the hall and to the left.
Anyway, assuming you mean an [del]omnimax[/del] omnipotent, omniscient, transcendental, and immanent deity, if such exists in any universe, She exists in all of them. But I’d rather leave that for another thread, if you don’t mind.
Again, it was just shorthand. Lack of space in the thread title.
Sure, but it’s very hard to know what you mean. Violating the conservation of energy is at least conceptually easy but how you’d make it possible through tuning physical constants is unclear to me and violating causality is something that my mind just doesn’t want to understand.
The reason I opened the thread was because I was wondering about the primality of the constants I mentioned. At work a couple of people were talking about the many worlds hypothesis, which they understood pretty much on a Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths level, and one claimed that there’d be universes in which things like those I mentioned did not hold. I thought not, but I didn’t interject myself into the conversation because I didn’t have a good reason why not, and also because I find my life is better when I don’t talk to certain people at work ;). I hoped somebody hereabouts might supply reasoning to support my intutions that, no matter what universe one posits to exists according to inflation theory, certain fantasy-fiction outcomes are just not going to occur.
First off, that was rather dickish. Second, you’re flat wrong. Science is a tool. The fact that you claimed science can’t analyze magic implies that you consider science to be a body of knowledge about the universe. This is bloody incorrect. Science is a tool of runderstanding reactions. At the bottom of it, it boils down to nothing more than observations, about which we generalize rules. But it’s the observations and the process which is science, not the guesses.
Science may not be a good enough tool to understand the forces of another universe: they might be too complex for us to fully understand. But if the universe itself is similar enough to be understood by a human or human-like mind, it can neccessarily be understood to some degree using a scientific process. Science, as such, can exist in any universe with any kind of consistent oputput for a given input: reaction to certain actions under certain conditions. And most magic in fact demanded that exact assumption about the universe.
Chronos… don’t be silly. There are indeed universes posited as the OP suggests, even by scientists. They won’t look like what we live in, sure. But there’s nothing at all about the many worlds theory, or any similar metaverse theory I’ve ever heard of, which remotely prevents such universes. In fact, very such theory implies they probaby do exist. We would not understand them, not being able to carry out experiments on their reality. But they exist in the same degree that we exist.
How would you tell? Nothing in this universe demontrates cause and effect any clearer than the very thing you laugh at here. We have no way whatsoever to prove that our phtysical causes have physical effects, except that we see constantly opne following the other, in a way which logically connects them. But we can’t prove it and in fact, some physicists would indeed hold that cause and effect technically does not exist, in that time itself is illusory, or that all existence itself is merely probabalistic and not deterministic.
Or let us describe it this way. Can you honestly not see how the Mamorians of the Yuruthic plane would similarly laugh at one of their fellows for saying, “What if, instead of responding to the Second Thought Force, creatures in another universe have reality shaped from the physical force exerted?”
Because it’s the same thing. Our physical laws need have no reality outside this universe. If anything outside it does exist (which I find extremely probable, and for which you should discard the spatial thinking implied by the word “outside”), it could easily have very similar or dissimilar physical laws. If we assume, as many physicists do, that singularities can actually seed universes, our dimension could easily be the child of an infinite line of them, and parent to infinite more.
If you’re asking “does an infinite number of universes include universes where the laws of physics as we know them get broken”, then my intuitive guess is no. The two main hypotheses I know of that involve infinite universes are the idea that our universe is spatially infinite and therefore anything and everything happens somewhere in it; and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. And both of those presume that the laws of physics as we know them are in operation. Now both allow for the idea that fantastically unlikely things could happen due to random thermal or quantum fluctuations. All the molecules of air in a room could happen to have exactly the right trajectories to bunch up into a corner for example. Quantum physics even allows for (again, fantastically unlikely) violations of the conservation of energy. How far you could take this, I don’t know. The speed of light doesn’t seem like something that can be bypassed by statistical anomalies.
A bit tautological though. Anything that conforms to to the physics of a universe, even if those physics are not understood, is by definition, not magic, but science.
In any case - there are serious physicists who state that there is no particular reason to even believe that the constants are necessarily constant everywhere within our universe. So if the question is whether or not the constants could be different in other portions of a multiverse, sure, that’s part of the basic multiverse concept, especially of M-theory.
No, that’s not true. Or rather, it’s a very thin reading of the theories. The former is, in as much as we know, proven to not be true at the present time. The latter says absolutely nothing about what the laws of physics are in other possibilities, except that they are liklely similar.
There’s nothing inherent in our physics which make them anything special. In fact, there’s no particular reason in science to consider them anything but the product of random chance.
My almost certainly flawed understanding is that the early universe almost certainly violated many of the things we consider laws now. The 4 types of force or energy were combined or simply didn’t exist, the early universe expanded (again, from my flawed, Science Channel understanding) at many times the speed of light in an almost geometric progression, cause and effect weren’t very well defined, there weren’t any atoms, etc etc. I don’t know if any of that qualifies as ‘magic’, but it was certainly weird.
Also, at the quantum level, my (again most likely flawed) understanding is that things equally act pretty freaking weird…and some of it seem pretty much like ‘magic’ to me, from my macro-viewpoint. The way things work at the quantum level defies our empiric view of how the universe operates.
As for as a universe where people use magic instead of science, I don’t think that’s likely, though I can see a universe where the laws of reality are different than our own. Certainly there could be universes (or even places in this universe) where something like a dragon (a creature that breaths fire and flies) is possible, or something like a unicorn (an vaguely equine shaped creature with a horn) exist. I suppose it’s possible that there could be beings who are able to directly manipulate energy (maybe even the mysterious dark matter/dark energy) in some way that to us would seem magical…all sorts of weird or strange adaptions are theoretically possible, I suppose.
I think part of the problem with the OP is that we may discover in 200 or 300 years that everything we “know” now about conservation of energy and matter, or thermodynamics or other scientific “truths” is totally wrong, or at least incomplete.
Galileo, Newton and others thought they had a pretty good understanding of the way the universe works, but discoveries since their time have forced us to come up with some new explanations.
We do things every day which would cause humans of just a few hundred years ago to fall down and worship us as gods, such as touching a switch and causing a dark room to be filled with light, or traveling in a vehicle with no animals to pull it.
Who’s to say that what the OP is calling “magic” is not just a manifestation of a higher order of science than we now understand?
Problem with that is that stereotypical magic tends to have a complexity that is out of all proportion with the complexity of the gestures, words, symbols, and reagents used to cast it. If a spell was actually describing what was done, a polymorph spell or whatever would take eons to cast.
For the typical D&D mage stuff, you would need a higher order being, a god if you will, to interpret and grant the request, and that being would need to have actual godlike powers derived from a total understanding and ability to manipulate the fundamental stuff of the universe.