What is Reality ? What is Magic ?
What is Reality ? What is Magic ?
by : Aria Ratmandanu
"The magic of reality is not a trick, but quite simply "wonderful". Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real."
We’ll come to dinosaurs and stars in a moment. But in any case, how do we know things exist, even in the present? Well, our five senses – sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste – do a pretty good job of convincing us that many things are real: rocks and camels, newly mown grass and freshly ground coffee, sandpaper and velvet, waterfalls and doorbells, sugar and salt. But are we only going to call something ‘real’ if we can detect it directly with one of our five senses ?
What about a distant galaxy, too far away to be seen with the naked eye? What about a bacterium, too small to be seen without a powerful microscope? Must we say that these do not exist because we can’t see them? No. Obviously we can enhance our senses through the use of special instruments: telescopes for the galaxy, microscopes for “for bacteria. Because we understand telescopes and microscopes, and how they work, we can use them to extend the reach of our senses – in this case, the sense of sight – and what they enable us to see convinces us that galaxies and bacteria exist.
How about radio waves? Do they exist? Our eyes can’t detect them, nor can our ears, but again special instruments – television sets, for example – convert them into signals that we can see and hear. So, although we can’t see or hear radio waves, we know they are a part of reality. As with telescopes and microscopes, we understand how radios and televisions work. So they help our senses to build a picture of what exists: the real world – reality. Radio telescopes (and X-ray telescopes) show us stars and galaxies through what seem like different eyes: another way to expand our view of reality.
Back to those dinosaurs. How do we know that they once roamed the Earth? We have never seen them or heard them or had to run away from them. Alas, we don’t have a time machine to show them to us directly. But here we have a different kind of aid “to our senses: we have fossils, and we can see them with the naked eye. Fossils don’t run and jump but, because we understand how fossils are formed, they can tell us something of what happened millions of years ago. We understand how water, with minerals dissolved in it, seeps into corpses buried in layers of mud and rock. We understand how the minerals crystallize out of the water and replace the materials of the corpse, atom by atom, leaving some trace of the original animal’s form imprinted on the stone. So, although we can’t see dinosaurs directly with our senses, we can work out that they must have existed, using indirect evidence that still ultimately reaches us through our senses: we see and touch the stony traces of ancient life.
In a different sense, a telescope can work like a kind of time machine. What “we see when we look at anything is actually light, and light takes time to travel. Even when you look at a friend’s face you are seeing them in the past, because the light from their face takes a tiny fraction of a second to travel to your eye. Sound travels much more slowly, which is why you see a firework burst in the sky noticeably earlier than you hear the bang. When you watch a man chopping down a tree in the distance, there is an odd delay in the sound of his axe hitting the tree.
Light travels so fast that we normally assume anything we see happens at the instant we see it. But stars are another matter. Even the sun is eight light-minutes away. If the sun blew up, this catastrophic event wouldn’t become a part of our reality until eight minutes later. And that would be the end of us! As for the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, if you look at it in 2012, what you are seeing is happening in 2008. Galaxies are huge collections of stars. We are in one galaxy called the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way’s next-door neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, your telescope is a time machine taking you back two and a half million years. There’s a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs.”
Are there really aliens in outer space ? We’ve never seen or heard them. Are they a part of reality? Nobody knows; but we do know what kind of things could one day tell us if they are. If ever we got near to an alien, our sense organs could tell us about it. Perhaps somebody will one day invent a telescope powerful enough to detect life on other planets from here. Or perhaps our radio telescopes will pick up messages that could only have come from an alien intelligence. For reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.
Atoms have always existed, but it was only rather recently that we became sure of their existence, and it is likely that our descendants will know about many more things that, for now, we do not. That is the wonder and the joy of science: it goes on and on uncovering new things. This doesn’t mean we should believe just anything that anybody might dream up: there are a million things we can imagine but which are highly unlikely to be real fairies and hobgoblins, leprechauns and hippogriffs. We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
Abracadabra..
Stage magic, by contrast, really does happen, and it can be great fun. Or at least, something really happens, though it isn’t what the audience thinks it is. A man on a stage (it usually is a man, for some reason) deceives us into thinking that something astonishing has happened (it may even seem supernatural) when what really happened was something quite different. Silk handkerchiefs cannot turn into rabbits, any more than frogs can turn into princes. What we have seen on the stage is only a trick. Our eyes have deceived us, or rather, the conjuror has gone to great pains to deceive our eyes, perhaps by cleverly using words to distract us from what he is really doing with his hands.
Some conjurors are honest and go out of their way to make sure their audiences know that they have simply performed a trick. I am thinking of people like James ‘The Amazing’ Randi, or Penn and Teller, or Derren Brown. Even though these admirable performers don’t usually tell the audience exactly how they did the trick, they could be thrown out of the Magic Circle (the conjurors’ club) if they did that they do make sure the audience knows that there was no supernatural magic involved. Others don’t actively spell out that it was just a trick, but they don’t make exaggerated claims about what they have done either they just leave the audience with the rather enjoyable sensation that something mysterious has happened, without actively lying about it. But unfortunately there are some conjurors who are deliberately dishonest, and who pretend they really do have ‘paranormal’ powers: perhaps they claim that they really can bend metal or stop clocks by the power of thought alone. Some of these dishonest fakes (‘charlatans’ is a good word for them) earn large fees from mining or oil companies by claiming that they can tell, using ‘psychic powers’, where would be a good place to drill.
Of course, no one really believes that it would be possible to turn a frog into a prince (or was it a prince into a frog ? I can never remember) or a pumpkin into a coach, but have you ever stopped to consider why such things would be impossible ? There are various ways of explaining it. My favourite way is this. Frogs and coaches are complicated things, with lots of parts that need to be put together in a special way, in a special pattern that can’t just happen by accident (or by a wave of a wand). That’s what ‘complicated’ means. It is very difficult to make a complicated thing like a frog or a coach. To make a coach you need to bring all the parts together in just the right way. You need the skills of a carpenter and other craftsmen. Coaches don’t just happen by chance or by snapping your fingers and saying ‘Abracadabra’. A coach has structure, complexity, working parts: wheels and axles, windows and doors, springs and padded seats.
To turn one complex organism into another complex organism in a single step as in a fairytale would indeed be beyond the realms of realistic possibility. And yet complex organisms do exist. So how did they arise? How, in reality, did complicated things like frogs and lions, baboons and banyan trees, princes and pumpkins, you and me come into existence ?
The answer is that complex organisms like humans, crocodiles and Brussels sprouts did not come about suddenly, in one fell swoop, but gradually, step by tiny step, so that what was there after each step was only a little bit different from what was already there before. No wand was needed. What we have here is the process called selective breeding. It makes use of the fact that organisms vary among themselves and those variations tend to be inherited that is, passed on from parent to child via the genes. This is Darwin’s great idea, and it is called Evolution by Natural Selection. It is one of the most important ideas ever to occur to a human mind. It explains everything we know about life on Earth.
The second meaning of magic is the one I mean in my title: poetic magic. We are moved to tears by a beautiful piece of music and we describe the performance as ‘magical’. We gaze up at the stars on a dark night with no moon and no city lights and, breathless with joy, we say the sight is ‘pure magic’. We might use the same word to describe a gorgeous sunset, or an alpine landscape, or a rainbow against a dark sky. In this sense, ‘magical’ simply means deeply moving, exhilarating: something that gives us goose bumps, something that makes us feel more fully alive. What I hope to show you in this article is that reality, the facts of the real world as understood through the methods of science is magical in this third sense, the poetic sense, the good to be alive sense.
Science takes exactly the opposite approach. Science thrives on its inability so far to explain everything, and uses that as the spur to go on asking questions, creating possible models and testing them, so that we make our way, inch by inch, closer to the truth. If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.
In the rest of this article, I want to show you that the real world, as understood scientifically, has magic of its own, the kind I call poetic magic: an inspiring beauty which is all the more magical because it is real and because we can understand how it works. Next to the true beauty and magic of the real world, spells and stage tricks seem cheap and tawdry by comparison. The magic of reality is not a trick, but quite simply "wonderful". Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.
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