“Preposterous twaddlecock Time travel is impossible!”
“But Professor, you time traveled yourself. Remember? When we went back to Roswell?”
“That proves nothing! And furthermore, you'd think I could remember a thing like that! Plus, who are you anyway?”
Geologically, ice is a mineral, aka a rock. If lava is just rock heated past its melting point, water is lava.
The state (as defined by Engles, Marx, Lenin, etc.) is the problem. Like this is exactly what it does by definition.
If the government forms an alliance with the market it becomes a slave to the market.
There are more homes than homeless, more food than starving kids. Life saving medicines can be extremely cheap to produce but are sold for fortunes. Everywhere you look, the bourgeoisie are literally holding people’s lives for ransom… and the government does nothing.
In fact the government does less than nothing. It is the government that facilitates the hoarding of these resources. It is the government that enforces patent laws that allow life saving medicines to be kept from those in need. It is the government that enables and legalizes this racketeering by the rich.
When you live in a society where politicians talk equally (or more) about how they’ll help the market as they talk about how they’ll help their citizens—which is what their job is supposed to be—are you really surprised?
Are you really surprised that a government which chooses to let its people go unhoused just to keep the real estate market up is a government in which wealth holds the power? Are you surprised that a government that shuts down worker strikes and forces compromise on the side of the exploited rather than solely on the side of exploitative corporations is a government that can be manipulated by the owner of multiple massive companies?
There is nothing surprising here. The system is working exactly as it is intended to. The problem is not a few members of the bourgeoisie colluding to manipulate the state because that’s how the state always works. The problem is the state.
If you would like to learn more about “the state” I suggest you read State and Revolution. That’s what made me switch from “oh we just need to tax the rich” to “the rich should not exist.” It also is just kind of impressive how Lenin describes many things that are very relevant today despite the fact he wrote this short book over a century ago.
Not to be that guy, but science is basically anything that gets studied/tested/researched. If you have the ability to cast spells and someone notices similarities and tries to categorize spells, that’s science. Studying how spells are made would be science. Studying the limitation of spells would be science. Testing news spells would be science. Etc.
So the big question is really how well understood is the science of magic in your world?
Does anyone actually know how it works or is it more like quantum mechanics with lots of theories but each still has limitations?
If magic is widespread and the beings using it are curious, chances are they’ve experimented with it and possibly taken notes about their experiments.
If magic offers great advantages then knowledge of it might be closely guarded by practitioners and not easily learned.
If magic can only be practiced by a certain species/family/etc. then general knowledge of how magic works could be much less accessible to the general population making it much more mysterious.
If not, then it’s likely there are schools that teach it to those who can use it and even those who can’t use it would likely still be taught about it. I mean, if you’re an engineer and you want to shape titanium and some spell can do that more easily than a mill or lathe, you’re going to want to know.
If you can heal with magic, non magic doctors would still want to be in the know about what can or can’t be cured with either medicine or magic.
If you mean science as in advanced physics or having digital devices, things will get more complicated if you want to make a logically consistent world. Like very complicated to the point it might take the joy out of world building. For example…
If there’s a spell that creates light/heat, where does the energy come from? You either violate thermodynamics or that energy comes from somewhere. OR the energy disappears after a while which might be a cool thing to think about.
If there’s a spell that freezes things, it violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way unless more heat (entropy) is generated somewhere else. If this generation somewhere else is somewhere really far away, you can create an infinite power source pretty easily.
Arguably teleportation may or may not violate relativity which, fun fact, might be the reason gold is gold colored and not silver colored so if you break relativity you might break some weird shit from the color of chemicals to the laws that hold your proteins together.
If magic has any visual effects, like an aura, it means magic interacts with the electromagnetic fields in a way that generates or manipulates photons. This could fuck up lots of digital stuff but also might be dangerous because color corresponds to frequency. If you can change the frequency could certain spells emit gamma radiation? Do invisible spells produce infrared or UV? If some spells interact with photons but some don’t then why?
Furthermore, air is a substance. If you cast a spell that explodes objects how does the spell know when it hits the object and not an air molecule? If the spell isn’t instant why does it have a specific speed? If it’s effected by matter then would casting a spell under water go slower? Does water explode if you cast an explosion while in it or does the spell hit the nearest solid before causing an effect?
If magic doesn’t interact with matter between the caster and the object, what medium transfers the information? What particles carry the magic force(s)? If magic particles don’t interact with physical matter how does a being made of that matter cast a spell? How does the being specify a target?
If spells have incantations, what makes those work? Can any sound create magic? Could a parrot accidentally cast a spell? If it’s in a specific language, why? What beings created that language? If magic just randomly happens to be a set of sounds that humans can make that seems rather coincidental yes?
If only certain creatures/races/families can use magic, why? How does the genetics of a being effect if it can or can’t interact with a fundamental field of this universe (magic)?
If it is genetic or physical in any way, with enough scientific study it should be possible to replicate it or remove it.
If it is metaphysical like it comes from the ‘soul’ then religion and science will overlap. Furthermore beings would likely use this to be prejudiced against any living thing that can’t do magic.
If all living things can do magic what about viruses? What about single celled bacteria? What specifically defines “living” in the context of magic and by what mechanism do those criteria enable the use of magic?
Anyway, the point is that if you try to get to technical and logical, it’s going to become a pain. The best bet, in my opinion, is to try avoiding the abundance of magic. If magic existed in our universe it would already have multiple scientific disciplines devoted to it. You’d be able to major in magic but more importantly, most of the general population would know fundamental things about magic and its limitations which means you’d likely need to explain your magic system more.
If you don’t want to get technical it might be best to not let your characters get technical. Keeping the knowledge of magic secretive/mysterious would help with this.
Or you can get completely lost in the world building and start writing out how many different magical fields there’d need to be and how they interact with elementary particles and how the thermodynamics of spells is rectified by events in those fields giving the illusion that thermodynamics was violated while still preserving the typical physics required for chemistry to remain unchanged and then think to yourself wait, wasn’t I going to write a story? Why am I researching theoretical math?
I’m an engineering student and my current research projects are eating up my time, so I unfortunately lack time to make/find content to post here. Over winter break I’ll try to create more content.
Don’t forget his birthday and his mother’s maiden name too
I’m fairly certain it’s potpourri which is not a drink. When you heat it up on a stove it’s meant to fill your house with its scent. “pot pourri” directly translates to “rotten pot” which I think is accurate because I’ve never been fond of the smell
This is actually a screenshot of me making my way up the hill to Stormveil Castle in Elden ring lol
Well actually it’s the other way around. The reason imaginary numbers were invented was to solve a problem we’d been crying over for centuries.
Then, as in most cases, solving one problem opens the door to millions of other problems like why in the fuck does the universe use these imaginary numbers we made up to solve cube roots?
Why is i a core part of the unit circle with like e^i*pi^ ? “Oh that’s because i is just perpendicular to the real number line” ?! Say that sentence again, how the fuck did we go from throwing sharp sticks to utterly deranged sentences like that? More importantly why do utterly deranged sentences like that accurately describe our universe and what is the next ludicrous math concept we’re going to discover is integral to the function of the universe?
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Tap for spoiler
It’s written as journal entries by a woman who may or may not have been insane before she got locked in an asylum or possibly just a room in her house by her husband. There’s a woman in the wallpaper who creepily crawls along the wall but actually it’s her shadow because she’s the creepy woman crawling around the room and rubbing up against the wall. Of course you don’t really know this until she starts really sounding crazy and starts ripping up the wallpaper trying to free the woman in the walls. In the end her husband returns home and either he faints or she fucking murders him with the blade she uses to sharpen her pencil. The book ends with her thinking she’s been freed, not by escaping through the now unlocked door but by entering the yellow wallpaper. There’s also a creepy film adaptation we watched that was… unsettling.
It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.
Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.
If you assume that a “bullet” is a unit of momentum (the mass and velocity of a bullet) and “square child” is actually just referring to the mass of a child who happens to be square shaped and not the mass of a child squared, then “bullets per square child” is describing valid units for a velocity