Temporalmage wrote:Waving your hands around and mumbeling a few words while expending a few PPE gives you the net result of blowing a hole in solid rock. Yes this can be repllicated by those with the spell, it can be taught to others, and somtimes may seem to follow some sort of scientific principles. But what keeps magic special, and allows it to break conventional physics and science is belief and faith. If you don't believe in magic, AND that you can cast magic, then you'll never be able to do it. Period. Yet if you don't believe in gravity, you'll still fall down. Therefor applying physics and science to somthing that breaks the laws of physics and science is like using tea leaves to figure out the tensile strength of steel. Not gonna work.
and yet this arguement does not hold water. light is a force, and i do not need to belevie in it to see it. but i do need to beleive that the little button on a flashlight could be a switch to turn it on before i try it out.
all the hand waving, the mumbo-jumbo, is just a 'switch', a means of making it eisier for a person to perform the act of turning potential psychic energy into another form of energy/matter. the mechanics do not require it, nor do they technically require beleif. it's just that until one beleives something is possible, they will never be able to figure it out, and for a process like 'magic', which is largely mental effort, if waving your hands and saying random sounds makes you more confindent, it'll help your mental state.
as always, clarkes law applies. if i was to bring the aformentioned flashlight to a caveman, and showed him what to push, he'd no doubt consider it a magic thing. and when the battery runs out, he'd likely think the magic had left it.
there have been real cases of this kind of thing. where more modernized cultures encounter less modernized ones, and the less modernized ones interprite things like camera's, lighters, and so on as magic or supernatural. all because they do not understand the process being used, because it is outside of their understanding of the world. "he just rubbed his finger along the side of the rock and a flame shot out!"
in palladium, it's the same. magic is a set of physical laws and processes that turn PPE into other forms of energy/matter/work. the mechanisms of that conversion are not fully documented or understood by most (they are either cloaked in too many generations of superstition, or have not been studied sufficently). some cultures in the megaverse have figured out the mechanisms to a degree. i point you to the UWW and how some of their members have technological based 'magic' devices, that are not TW as found on earth.
i direct you to the SNRLS system of the republic of japan, able to sense 'magic' energy using pure technology. the CS's RSCG has already been mentioned. the NGR continues to do the same, a project that produced the U-rounds.
It was stated that you can't create or destroy energy, only displace it. As that was stated where it applied to magic I disagree. Magic can rip the very fabric of space and time. Destroying or creating energy, kinetic or otherwise, is lowball for magic in comparison to that.
ripping space and time again is merely using energy to manipulate energy/matter. you take PPE and convert it into the severly bent space needed ot link places within spacetime or nearby spacetimes.
and as mentioned, 'magic' spells convert PPE into some other form of energy/matter/work.
so there is no energy being created or destroyed. just energy being converted (in various levels of efficency) to other forms.