[HPforGrownups] Technology/Magic (was Re: The Muggle World (long))

[Peg Kerr]

No: HPFGUIDX 6295



atelecky at mit.edu wrote:

> Hermione advised Harry in GoF that he might "get" the Summoning Charm
> if he understood the "theory" behind it. Snape had his students coming
> up with their own recipes for antidotes, so there must be some sort of
> rules and formulas to follow in potion making; you don't simply read
> the recipe and blindly follow it because you can't explain why it
> works. It seems that magic is no more mysterious or illogical to
> wizards than physics or chemistry is to us. And it actually makes some
> sense that it would be: after all, from the little I've studied so far
> of Newton's Laws and the laws of Thermodynamics etc., and unless I'm
> grossly mistaken, they aren't and can't really be "proven"; they
> simply are statements of things that people have observed to be
> consistently true in the world around them. They are something like
> axioms in math--they're given to be true, and given that they are
> true, you can prove that various theories follow from them.

I've mentioned this essay umpteen times before, but once again it's germaine
to this discussion so I'm mentioning it again, for the benefit of new people
to the list:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0001/reviews/jacobs.html

This discusses magic as an alternative technology to the technology we know
(and the author of the essay points out that not too long ago, magic and
technology were considered to be more closely linked than they are today).

Peg