Maxims of the Dresdenverse (Part 2)
Science Fails
The comforting rules of science and technology, the certainty that a better computer or a bigger gun will settle the problem—sorry, they don’t work ’round here. Wizards and some other monsters cause nearby technology to malfunction simply by their presence.
HARRY: Billy, please change “some other monsters” to “some other supernatural entities”? We’re not all that bad.
Well, mostly.
Okay.
Just freaking change it, Billy.
Monsters aren’t reliably affected by the laws of physics. (They seem to treat them as “vague guidelines” more than laws.) They can fly, walk through walls, tear apart steel doors, and bounce bullets or ignore them entirely. All the carefully acquired handguns, sniper rifles, flamethrowers, computer security, and mobile phones in the world may ultimately be useless if pitted against the wrong sort of adversary.
Not only does technology not work around the wizardly-inclined, nobody can really explain why post-WWII technology doesn’t work. There aren’t any convenient rules. No wizard has yet attempted to catalogue his effects on technology.
HARRY: Butters is pretty close. He has some theories.
BOB: Last time Butters and I spoke, he was on about something about your electromagnetic field (I call it an aura) interfering with electron spin and/or phase jumps in transistors and other solid state electronics. (I think that’s what he said. Technology is just another flavor of faith to me.)
Furthermore, no monster is going to publish a list of ways that it can be hurt.
HARRY: Like this game. Heh.
By the by, there’s some circumstantial evidence that indicates Stoker was manipulated into writing Dracula by the White Court. So while no monster is gonna come up with a “Top Ten Ways to Whack Me” list, another monster might do so.
However, others can. The most recent example of such a tome, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, detailed most of the significant ways in which a Black Court vampire can be damaged or killed. The Black Court still hasn’t recovered.
This dovetails remarkably well with the note above about people choosing not to see what’s going on around them. Scientists who might be able to analyze data on monsters don’t want to know in the first place; then their instruments go nuts, so they dismiss the cases of spontaneous combustion or bouncing bullets as statistical anomalies. With regard to the supernatural, science can’t tell you what just happened, can’t explain why it happened, and can’t stop it from happening again.
Sure, Mr. or Ms. Sciencey-Science, your lab is spotless, filled with the tools and gear of analysis, and you have spent years filling your head with logic, knowledge, methods—but the specimen before you refuses to make sense according to everything you’ve been taught. Meanwhile, it’s very dark outside, something large is moving around in the gloom, and your electric light has started flickering. The monster is getting closer, and you can’t do thing one about it—or even understand what’s going on.
However, this doesn’t mean that technology can’t be useful, if properly applied (and kept away from wizards who can make it go pfft!). Different creatures have different vulnerabilities—a flamethrower or a water balloon filled with holy water might be just the thing to even the odds against a Black Court vampire. Even if a bullet in the brainpan fails to take a monster down, extreme applications of kinetic force (such as a car at ramming speed or a crashlanding satellite) tend to have some sort of effect. Other tools of technology can be used to pass information, archive data, set up perimeters, collect evidence, or may be functional in particular ways against particular types of monster.
Assuming that a wizard doesn’t accidentally fuse them, of course.
In two weeks, we wrap up this section of Harry’s World with the final Maxims of the Dresdenverse
This makes me so happy.
Cool stuff indeed.
Bullet in the brainpan? Is that a common quote for that situation? I keep thinking of the quote from Serenity/Firefly “Bullet in the brainpan, Squish!” I think Billy’d be the type to like that series as well. x3
I’m already liking the style in which the book appears to be written – it seems to me that it’s going to be a mighty entertaining read as well as an informative rpg – a win/win scenario! I especially like the take on Dracula – I wonder what other books have been influenced by the denizens of the Dresdenverse? Should Harry watch out for Balrogs?!
One question: why is “technology” so commonly equated with “electricity”? I mean, yeah, electricity is the most common source of power for most equipment these days, but Harry has used chemical glow-lights on several occasions with nary a quiver from either him or the light. Does that mean that biotechnology is going to become the “great equalizer” if supernaturals go to war against the entire human race?
Bonus challenge: would a full-fledged wizard be able to use a Babbage Engine?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine
Not for quick games of solitaire, obviously, but for the kind of number-crunching and data-mining that would reduce even Bob to tears of boredom. For example, the ParaNet statistics that Harry and Elaine collect could reveal some interesting patterns about the kinds of supernatural activities in various locations over particular cycles.
@Perrin Rynning
Why do it on a difference engine? Why not have a convenient human do it for you? Butters, Billy or some of the paranetters themselves could probably produce printouts for Harry.
I think the real question is could an artificer incorporate a difference engine into a magical focus/device … perhaps Bob on mental steriods
Technology isn’t equated with electricity in the Dresdenverse: Harry’s magic fouls up guns.
Which is the main “wtfsaythatagain” (in a good way) in my mind about the deal with technology, because guns, with a few exceptions, are pretty much about hitting a grenade with a hammer. Heck, I bet wizards could come up with some alchemy-boosted black powder ammo without much trouble.
This is the problem with people trying to apply physics to understanding why technology malfunctions in the presence of wizards. Physics is great, and definitely has a place in the Dresden Files in terms of conceptualizing effects, but it’s a mindless principle — it “just functions”. But magic brings an element of will — subconscious at times — into the picture.
Why do guns malfunction? Because it is *believed* that guns are an aspect of technology.
I’ve been working on my own theories as to why Magic messes up Technology, and it has to do with “Our Place in the Universe.”
See, wizards (and Magic) are not really comfortable with the modern world. The mutable Laws of Magic just can’t rub elbows with the static Laws of Physics, like the rate of combustion of gunpowder, mechanical differential of gears and levers and all that jazz without the less-trained-in-willpower Muggle Science failing.
HOWEVER, we have never heard, until Small Favors, of Michael Carpenter’s house suffering from magic’s anti-technology effects. The reason for this is, Michael and his family are Christian, moreover Catholic. “Capital-F” Faith in a higher power, who is/was/always will be, has claimed that “there’s nothing new under the sun,” which includes modern technology. Furthermore, Michael’s Faith could include that regardless of how obscure or esoteric the technology, they all function according to God’s Plan, all the creatures of Creation, physics, gravity, and on up. (Biogenesis and evolution too, maybe.) Magic too. Nobody can claim that Michael or Charity are lacking in Faith or Willpower. You CAN claim that Molly is lacking in both. Therefore, her Magic will do wonky things with technology. Michael’s Faith gets along just swimmingly with modern tech, even if he’s personally ignorant of how exactly it works, as long as the warranty lasts. XD
It’s possible that Dresden’s Magic has some adverse effect on Michael’s Faith-based “invincible-ness,” but that’s pure speculation.
PS: I’d like to see a book set in Asia, Africa, or Rome, where Magic and Technology are part of everyday life, and study what kinds of effects Magic has on Faith and vice versa.
My inner geek is beginning to crow impatient with the wait. However, I want you guys to finish this thing right so take your time.
Aw man. I can’t wait to get my grubby nerd hands on this. I wish I could help too.
This’ll be so awesome.
I’m curious why scientists are always shown to be unable to take on the idea of magic. If you actually demonstrated real magic to a scientist to the point where they couldn’t explain it any other way, they’d be all over trying to understand it.
The whole point of science is that where reality and theory don’t match, replace the theory, and if that means accepting the reality of magic then so be it. Science is all about figuring out the rules. Though they’d probably call it something mathematically fancy
Bringing faith and belief into the matter leads us to the awesome bottom line: technology doesn’t work because magic does.
Should one go over his head, one could even start wondering if our current level of technology and science isn’t universally nerfed by the presence of magic in the world, and what could be accomplished should the laws of physics be freed from “magic interference”. Then again, sleep deprived people shouldn’t be thinking about that. ^^
Well as I understand it, magic seems to interact with the currently unseen but felt Higgs-Boson particle and that causes technology to malfunction. Since technology is another aspect of will, then a wizard should be able to will his magic to not harm technology, but that would take much control. So much control that the time spent would normally be used to increase power in the case of battle wizards like Harry. Tech would probably function better for Molly than Harry because she can do the more delicate things, where he needs foci to refine his power. Maybe Molly can become the wizardly equivalent of an IT person with enough control.
Here’s a fun thought, the magical effects of Faith could very well be the reason technology either works or doesn’t in multiple ways. A pure scientist type has Faith in Science, which either accepts evolution, creation or something else as the source of life, but really isn’t so great with the concept of Faith so it’s a shaky Faith. Wizards, and the more magically inclined generally are not so trusting of technology, which would equate to a lack of even lowercase “f” faith in a stable, static set of science rules. Instead they might be said to have Faith in the mutable rules of magic. Now do this sort of analysis for every being involved with consideration for the effect of precedence and the post WWII technology starts making sense as a Faith induced “rule” of magic.
The scary idea is having a set of True Believers creating and maintaining tech for the wizards. Their Faith and efforts might very well protect the technology from the effects of magic’s anti-technology field. Better yet would be a Faith based magic user, maybe as a Focused Practitioner, or a barrier specialist, as they could very well find ways to protect or use technology.
Wow, there’s a lot of deep philosophical ideas in these comments. My idea seems a little dumbed down by comparison. I’d always just sort of pictures the anti-technology part of wizards being more of a field of energy that surrounds them. It exerts a small amount of force on everything around them, so the more parts something has, and the more delicate they are, the more chance that said small force would cause those parts to break. This, to me, explains why the more modern technology is more likely to fail, because as a general rule, the more recent technology is both smaller, and more complex.
I’m just wondering if there is an implication of a World of Darkness-esque Technocracy that create magi-tech (basically everything after WW2).
Because if the guys do stoop that low as to rip off White Wolf, I am going to be very upset and going to write a nasty letter.
Personally, I like the biotech angle. It’s very Vorlon-esque.
@Peteman, that’d be a real trick, since it’s impossible in the Dresdenverse by every indication we’ve had — and more to the point, stated — in the post above.
Then again, the Raith had enough money to afford a decent enough lighting system that worked during a mean hocus pocus showdown. I think the other supernatural denizens probably can come up with ways to use technology to their advantage, despite – or even because – big wizard boys not having that resource. Red Court does that, eBay is used, Craigslist is used… so, in a way, technology is just like magic: used with enough creativity, can be nasty.
@Korrozive, are you thinking about the trapped-pixies-in-bottles lighting system?
Personally i think that the “aura” of denizens of magic just bend the laws of physics. like maybe Harry has problems with his car because his aura makes the smallest most delicate piece in the engine slip so that the car breaks or maybe electronics fail because the aura make everything more conductive then it should be burning them out. Heck with magic being so tied to emotions this aura could bend the laws more and more with more emotional power. The reason older technology can last is because it is not as fine and the slip is less likely because bigger stronger and heavier pieces where used in construction.
Also in “Death Masks” Harry shows he can control his effect on technology by holding the effects in by a constant will spell. It was draining for him but he states that delicate things like that are not his specialty. The reason that hexing a piece of technology is probably so easy for any wizard is because magic is said to be mostly in the mind in “Small Favor” and i think “Dead Beat” so the confidence in the response to the action of trying to hex technology if you Believe you will is the same as it just being a fact. Like Believing you can create fire is the same as it being True.
Oh well just my opinions.
So, about the whole “post-WWII” technology class (excluding guns, which are a lot simpler than a VW Beetle…); most of them apply Quantum Physics. There’s already enough bad mysticism written up on that that I won’t elaborate too far, but it makes a certain amount of sense that it would be more susceptable.
The interesting thing about Quantum (and to a lesser extent Einsteinian) physics is that it sort-of dumps the whole Newtonian idea of an objective reality clicking along in perfect synchronisity. The answer to “What’s happening” depends on who’s looking, and what they’re doing – it makes a certain amount of sense that wizards could be some special class of observers that affect all this unusually…
I could further hypothesize that it would be The Sight specifically that led to this effect, and technology that a wizard never noticed (even retroactively!) probably shouldn’t be affected… but perhaps I’m being too scientific here.
My read was always that is it not that complicated, wizards just leak out extra magical power, so all energy effects near them get a minor boost of noise. Old tech tends to be tough, but newer things are sensitive. Modern electronics use very little amounts of electricity so if you give them a random spike, they burn out. Your car overheats as fuel burns hotter now and then, your precise mechanism jams and your bullets fires off too fast, gunking your gun. This makes harry’s suppression spell the magical equivalent of holding his breath, or at least trying to breath without moving your chest.
This means you can figure out how to break anything by figuring out what it would do if you ran it with too much power.
Nah, the one used in the cavern that held the duel against that Malvora dude in White Night, which Harry had to purposefully disable (contrarily to it just dieing on its own) when things got more interesting… though it has been a while since I read it and my memory may not be serving me to well, all I remember is nailed impression it got me of “Sheesh, money is a power to be reckoned with just like so many others, it seems”. Again, sorry if I’m just being full of gibberish.
The problem is that even Science, the more physics you go the worse, has a basic Heisenberg Uncertainty into it. The whole point of experimentation is that Scientists DON’T know everything there is to know, even within specialties, so they come up with ways to test it, repeatedly and reliably.
For something like your Science’s True Believers to work, you’d potentially have to have something on the level of C.S. Friedman’s third book in the Coldfire Trilogy: Picture a planet in which the only thing that mattered was your will, your thoughts, and the world granted your every thought, scaling for difficulty. Normally, nervous fear, spite, plain disbelief, and other such emotions, will cause your Science to fizzle. Now picture you have an entire society under a political system with equal parts mob psychology and religious zealotry, and there’s an Event. Gather everyone together, all of them mentally focused on a particular result. It works because the populous as the whole believes it SHOULD work, by the grace of God, and their collective will creates that scientific result.
Frankly, it’d be easier to exile either Magic or Science to another continent. Which is part of what happened in the book.
one of the things my boyfriend pointed out when I was thinking about how to make a comp dresden could use cause i was bored was that most of the chips in a computer have pointless designs lazered into them. What if you rearranged the chips to dispell magic energies, which hypothetically would work as long as things were still connected right and would prob cost a tad bit more on electricity bill, and lazer in protective runes and such onto the chips instead of the silly designs. Then you could keep it from frying the hard drive and such, then you put wards and such around the casing. could work for cell phones and such too.
@Samara
As far as that goes, I’ve always understood any kind of magic item as just a piece of magic circuitry. Energy comes is, gets processed by whatever ways the particular method of enchantment uses, gets out as the proposed result. From this point of view, why would wizards ever need “conventional” technology? I fancy the ways that technology can be used _against_ them. In a way, magic users are hindered by lack of will to change their methods and (gasp!) ingenuity to do so, not lack of means to do so. IMHO.
If you take into consideration that jim’s world is a variation on our own and it is getting to the point that almost any higher form of education requires use of conventional technology and most occupations are beganing to require at least an AA eventually younger wizards will need to figure out ways to use comps to get things done. cause I may be wrong cause I am only on the six book but from what I can tell it is hinted that harry is the only one, along with elaine now (bf told me that part) that uses their magic for an occupation.
@fred
But Harry uses guns successfully on most all occasions. And Murphy, Marcone and Thomas shoot next to Harry and have no troubles. However, a supernatural can, and would put the kabash on any technology relatively easily. Think of how little trouble Shagnasty had disrupting the White Court sensors. And you know the White Court would use the best, most wizardproof tech out there. So, it is electricity that takes the hardest hit from wizards, and their strong aura, or electromagnetic field, makes good sense.
@Samara
How would anyone know how to arrange chips to disrupt magic energy/ What makes one think that magic energy is even the same from one time to the next? Maybe one arrangement would work for one magic aura, but not for another?
@Steven Egan
Now that is an excelllent thought. if someone was in fact concentrating on, and protecting the tech it might work even with a wizard nearby. But someone would have to concentrate on the tech at all times.
The way that a wizard affexts technology we have been taught is by an exaggerated Murphys’ Law. So lets say if there is any moisture in the air, or any particle that can fall into a vent, or anything at all like that- it will. Harry tells us that.
@BarGamer
Nope. Michael said that he is constantly fixing things in his house, and doing preventative measures besides. You also have to remember Mollys powers were not present until her puberty. Thas when a wizards magical powers arive. So in the first few books, she would have been too young to be a problem. But as her powers have manifested he has had the usual amount of trouble. The only reason he keeps up so well is that he is a carpenter, not that he is a catholic.
@BarGamer
There is absolutely no reason to assume that in Dresdenverse the amount of difficulty or percent chance of something happening enters into spells at all. Its quite different. Besides, we know for a fact that magic is influenced by physics. For example when harry creates fire, he has to get the heat energy from his surroundings. he uses that principle to freeze lake Michigan. So magic on every level interacts with scientific principles. They are not mutually exclusive. it is only that electricity is affected by a wizards presense. Not that scienc is affected by the existence of magic!
Also, why is everyone not thinking of the obvious? All a wizard would need to do is to GET A SECRETARY! Then he could say “Miss Jaones, can you get on the internet and look up this address, and send off these emails saying I will not attend that function, please. ” OK? Done.
The theory works in macs bar.. it is the way it is arranged that disrupts magical energies.. same concept, smaller scale
@
Maria
But you do make a very good point: Many of us posters, like Harry, are just used to doing stuff on our own. Being a tech-nerd of marginal skills, I know that the prospect of going through life without being able to use computers gives me an unpleasant shiver. Therefore, if my magic were to kick in and erase all my hard-drives (“My resume! My mp3 collection! My fan-fic! NOOOOO!!!”), my reflex response would be to come up with a new kind of computer that my magic wouldn’t screw up.
Aw, that’s taking the easy way out.
Eventually, of course, my long-suffering girlfriend would point out that there was still an outside chance that the data would be recoverable, but only if someone else did it.
At which point, I would stop goofing around with Lego pieces (which would represent the limit of my budget)…
http://acarol.woz.org/
… and start working on getting my magic under control.
Getting back to magic vs. technology, I think that it will be very interesting to watch the interactions over time. Does the actual age of the technology matter, or is it a function of the individual wizard’s world-view? For example, will Molly be forced to drive a classic VW as well (or a genuine WW II-era Jeep), or will her own technological cut-off point let her drive something of slightly more recent design?
Say, a black 1967 Chevy Impala?