Re: Splitting the genres

:: For magic to exist, we'd have to completely overhaul everything we
:: know about physics, and biology, and chemistry, and who knows what
:: else. The same is not true for, say, an FTL drive (quod vide
:: Alcubierre).

: "westprog" <westprog@xxxxxxxxxxx>
: That's a commonsense view of things, but it's actually wrong. For an
: FTL drive to work, the laws of nature would have to be altered in an
: absolutely fundamental way. Far more so than for magic to work.

Huh? Can you explain why you think so? In neither case would it be
*necessary* to overhaul everything; but in the case of magic, you add a
new physical process (or several) to the way things work, while in the
case of FTL you *might* not even have to do that (if quantum gravity
works out benignly enough).

Further, absent Clarke's third law, the additions you'd have to make
to get magic to work would be *very* different than those we know about
now, whereas to get FTL to work, even if you had to add something like
a prefered frame, it wouldn't change the fundamental nature of the
laws of nature; not fundamentally worse than the change from Newtonian to
Einsteinian physics.


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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