Quote:
Originally Posted by DJHARKAVY
... Or perhaps it should be written to state that 'that which we cannot explain is magic.'
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I think that works quite well. If a modern human saw another modern human muttering a few words and waving a stick and something appeared out of nowhere as a result, we'd probably be inclined to check the stick for evidence of a power-source etc ... but if we found the stick to be simply wood then we'd be scratching our heads. Now certainly scientists would continue to look for explanations, they're like that, but I suspect most of the rest of the population would be content to call it magic - at least until it was reduced to something as common place as the mobile phone. (Is magic only magic if it is limited to just a few people? Is anything ubiquitous, however amazing, always given some less fanciful name, like eyesight, smell and hearing. Could it be that Harry Potter's magic is only called magic because there are muggles and squibs?)
Now wind forward some thousands of years and go the planet Solaria (see Isaac Asimov's
The Naked Sun) and we see humans with "transducer lobes" in their head that collects energy from their surroundings - so giving them the power they need to do what otherwise might appear to be magic. They don't call it magic, they have an explanation for their ability.