Magic in Science, Science in Magic

Abstract

Imagine you have travelled many hundreds or thousands of years into the past. There, you meet your ancestor, Bernie. You and Bernie start getting to know each other, so you decide to show Bernie something on your phone, because let’s be real, you would hardly travel anywhere in the farther reaches of time or space without your precious phone. Now Bernie inquires about this phone. You tell Bernie that this device has a number of functions. It can let you talk to someone miles away, record videos or pictures, predict the weather, or basically plan your whole life out. Bernie would then proceed to either worship you, call you a prophet or a witch, or send you to some equivalent of a place like an asylum, depending on who you’re imagining Bernie to be.

Or maybe Bernie decides to travel through the same portal you did to step into the present. Bernie sees metal carriages carrying people on land, or metal birds soaring overhead, carrying hundreds of people through the sky. Bernie finds out that doctors can peer inside the body without cutting it open, then replace failing hearts with new ones. To you, this is just science. To Bernie, this would most definitely not be science. It would be sorcery. And now you’re taking Bernie to the hospital because Bernie’s mind might just have short-circuited.