Quoted from DanC In  my crazy world, science was discarded for magic.  So, no physics, science, medicine etc.  Magic is the root of existence.

Magic was never in contention with science so would not count as a historical change. Try harder.

Science grew out of magic.

The likes of Einstein (odten called the first scientist) were Alchemists, attempting to create the Philosophers Stone. Their research on transmuting matter lead to what we know call Chemistry.

They don't teach you it in school, but Einstein's two major preoccupations were creating the Philosophers Stone to achieve immortality and his belief he'd been chosen by God to properly translate the Bible.

It is conceivable that the transformation from magic/occultism to science never happened and everyone remained an Alchemist/magician.

Quoted from Talldave If the same situation is looked at, and the script ends up in the year 2200 and jellyfish rule the world it’s like well that doesn’t make a lot of sense contextually. I guess it’s just up to the readers to be more alert at connecting the dots, especially because someone is going to pick a historical event that isn’t common knowledge and everyone is going to get confused and hate the script.

I for one, welcome our new Jellyfish overlords!

As to Dan's comment, I'm with Dustin on this one. Although this is an alternate timeline you can't just change into fantasy. The reason real magic, Harry Potter style, doesn't exist isn't because of an event in history, magic just doesn't (sadly) exist.

Unless of course, you say that clever Illusionists and the belief in magic become more popular than science? That would be a very interesting alternate universe indeed. Imagine if David Blaine was president lol!

On a personal note, I've gone from having most of this weekend gloriously free for writing to having hardly any free time at all and I'm gutted. I've got a feeling that, as per usual, I'll end up pushing a vomit draft through at the last moment. No excuses, if it's rubbish it's rubbish, I just can't believe how life sneaks up on you and steals personal free time.

Yeah, you have to keep it within the realms of the possible.. However there are millions of occultists, ceremonial magicians, wiccans and voodoo practitioners round the world who believe in the fundamental reality of magic/magick.

You can have it so all technological advances are seen as magic, or designed to exaggerate "magical" abilities, I suppose.

Sorry to hear that, Mark.

As for me, I just completed my first draft, already working on my second. I've still got a week to churn out more drafts. So far, it's edge-of-your-seat. Just wait until I tweak and polish it into the final product.

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films Science grew out of magic. The likes of Einstein (odten called the first scientist) were Alchemists, attempting to create the Philosophers Stone. Their research on transmuting matter lead to what we know call Chemistry. They don't teach you it in school, but Einstein's two major preoccupations were creating the Philosophers Stone to achieve immortality and his belief he'd been chosen by God to properly translate the Bible. It is conceivable that the transformation from magic/occultism to science never happened and everyone remained an Alchemist/magician.

Science grew out of wanting to know more about the world and the way it works. Not anything to do with magic. Scientists today have found the 'Philosopher's Stone' - at least in terms of being able to synthesise gold. It's not magic.

Belief in a magical being watching over us in the sky aside, we have never had a crux point inhistory where we could have followed the path of magic, simply for the fact that magic isn't real and it would have gotten us nowhere. However, it would make a great satirical comedy if pulled off correctly.

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films Science grew out of magic. The likes of Einstein (odten called the first scientist) were Alchemists, attempting to create the Philosophers Stone. Their research on transmuting matter lead to what we know call Chemistry. They don't teach you it in school, but Einstein's two major preoccupations were creating the Philosophers Stone to achieve immortality and his belief he'd been chosen by God to properly translate the Bible. It is conceivable that the transformation from magic/occultism to science never happened and everyone remained an Alchemist/magician.

I hope you were kidding. The word scientist was coined in 1834... 45 years before Albert Einstein was born. Prior to that, people in that profession were known as natural philosophers.

And magic grew out of science. The earliest inklings of learned behavior were essentially scientific: do X to Y and Z happens. Abstract thought brought hypotheses and experimentation: do X to other things and see if something like Z happens.  This isn't even limited to humans.

Superstition emerged from the overbroad and/or naive application of science where there wasn't enough information to make sound judgements. Wood floats, so we make canoes out of wood. So far, so good. Five guys set out in canoes over The Waterfall, and the only one who came back alive was the one wearing a red hat. From now on, everyone piloting a canoe wear a red hat! Superstition. Magic and pseudo-science can be seen as really formal systems of superstition.

Obviously, ancient cultures didn't have the experience to fully disentangle their science from their superstitions, but they weren't idiots.

Magic grew out of science?

Only a hundred thousand years out, mate. !

I put Einstein by the way... I meant Newton.

You never know what's going to be discussed in one of these threads.

I read somewhere if something is hard to believe or plain wrong you need to insert a dialog about that right in a script and prove overwise.
You don't even have to prove, just be eloquent about it and make believe it's a possibility.

So, in other words - If you want to show magic might have preceded science and you know many may disagree with you just have two characters talk about it.
They use this trick in sitcoms a lot.

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films Magic grew out of science? Only a hundred thousand years out, mate. !

I never claimed that the magic systems work, only that science predated them.

There are some cases where a relatively rational form of superstition makes sense. Based on the notion that doing the exact same thing in the same circumstances should lead to the same outcome, there are situations where it's simpler to replicate everything than figure out precisely which factors are important. For example, Intel found that replicating just the parts of a chip fabrication plant that "should" matter led to a significant drop in productivity at the new plant. New plants built to be as precise copies as possible as good-performing plants did just fine. These plants cost over a billion dollars each, so it's much cheaper just to keep on using the same wall colors and conference room layouts and groundskeeping schedules and so on than it is to figure out which details matter and which don't.

Professional athletes fall into this trap a lot. Some will respond to a hot streak by studiously repeating whatever they did to prepare for that particular game.

Coming back to magick, from what I can tell modern Wiccans sincerely believe that the mind can affect the world around it. The trappings of magick (candles, athame knives, essential oils, casting circles, cauldrons, etc.) are there to get the practitioner into a state of mind conducive to affecting the world. A more secular view would call it self-hypnosis.

Remember back when hypnosis was discovered, the natural philosophers of the day agreed that Mesmerism worked, they just thought that Dr. Mesmer's explanation of it working through animal spirits was a load of bull.

Just saw this and it struck me as funny;

Quoted Text After the casting, the athame is the tool traditionally used to invoke the elemental guardians of the four directions (also termed "calling the quarters"), typically by drawing invoking pentagrams at each quarter. This important traditional practice is one of the reasons often given for the false requirement that the athame must be double-edged; because attempting to trace a pentagram in the air with a single-edged blade will require some awkward twisting of the hand and wrist, in order to keep the single cutting edge in the direction of motion. Practitioners unfortunately get caught up on this logistic and may be unaware that the elementals are more concerned with the threat the magical blade represents than how one twists their wrist.

So a superstition (athame must be double-edged) emerged from within a superstition.

It's turtles all the way down.

Quoted from FrankM I never claimed that the magic systems work, only that science predated them. There are some cases where a relatively rational form of superstition makes sense. Based on the notion that doing the exact same thing in the same circumstances should lead to the same outcome, there are situations where it's simpler to replicate everything than figure out precisely which factors are important. For example, Intel found that replicating just the parts of a chip fabrication plant that "should" matter led to a significant drop in productivity at the new plant. New plants built to be as precise copies as possible as good-performing plants did just fine. These plants cost over a billion dollars each, so it's much cheaper just to keep on using the same wall colors and conference room layouts and groundskeeping schedules and so on than it is to figure out which details matter and which don't. Professional athletes fall into this trap a lot. Some will respond to a hot streak by studiously repeating whatever they did to prepare for that particular game. Coming back to magick, from what I can tell modern Wiccans sincerely believe that the mind can affect the world around it. The trappings of magick (candles, athame knives, essential oils, casting circles, cauldrons, etc.) are there to get the practitioner into a state of mind conducive to affecting the world. A more secular view would call it self-hypnosis. Remember back when hypnosis was discovered, the natural philosophers of the day agreed that Mesmerism worked, they just thought that Dr. Mesmer's explanation of it working through animal spirits was a load of bull.

I have made no value judgement on what works, or what doesn't, mate.


I'm just saying that Magic as a concept has existed from the beginning of human existence. Our primitive societies were based around Shaman, Withdoctors, Druids etc not scientists...science came a hundred thousand years after magic as a concept...even if you extend it way beyond it's modern usage and include natural philosophy as science then it's still only when we get to the Ancient Greeks that "science" comes around. People had been happily casting spells for thousands of years before that.

Magic came first, then religion, then science.

There are still extant spells to Ishtar from Ancient Mesopotamia in existence...and that's just stuff that's survived.

What we now call science, "the scientific method", has existed, if we are being generous, since around the 17th Century (you give the date 1834 as it's first mention which shows how late in the game we're talking):


"The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses".[4] Experiments are a procedure designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method".


It is a very, very, very modern thing and was preceded by thousands upon thousands of years by religion, and magic.


Here's a little article on how Alchemy evolved into Chemistry:

https://www.khanacademy.org/pa.....alchemy-to-chemistry

If you want to have a world based on Magic, you just have to have a slight change in the Age of Enlightenment and have it that Alchemy never evolved into Chemistry and then into Science (in the modern sense of the word), but instead the "scientific method" remained a part of the overriding doctrine of Alchemy.

It's arguable how far that allows you to modify what humans are actually capable of, though.

And it also raises an interesting question about how far a writer's personal beliefs can be taken into account when evaluating challenge conditions: Can a modern day Chaos Magician write a story whereby magic can materially effect events, if that is what he believes actually happens? Or do we all have to judge a script agnostically?

Strangely, you seem to know this anyway...

Your post about superstition is exactly how a rationalist would describe Magic coming about...someone wanted rain and when they picked up a stone it started raining...they then came to believe that certain stones could make it rain and when rain was needed, they went looking for them.

That simple kind of thinking is why magic was humankind's first overriding ideology...predating the others by a considerable distance.