How can you scientifically explain Mana?

How can you scientifically explain Mana?

Other urls found in this thread:

brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
britannica.com/topic/mana-Polynesian-and-Melanesian-religion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Potential magical energy

you don't. it's magic, bitch; I don't need to explain shit.

A background energy like radiation that people with special training can shape

Yes you do, bitch.

You can't scientifically explain magic. That's why it's magic. It's explicitly something that's not covered by the laws of what is real. If you could scientifically explain it it wouldn't be magic.

>Scientifically explain mana
>Scientifically explain a fictional power source that is used to produce explicitly supernatural effects
>Laughing_wizards.jpg

Science is just a way of obtaining knowledge.

There's no reason it can't apply to magic or anything else.

mana is a from of energy that certain people can utilize to perform wondrous feats

prove it, bitch.

dimensional refraction and subtle manipulations of relative mass fields and electromagnetism.

Oh, and quantum physics bullshit.

Aether

I don't have to.

Mana is the actualized subjective energy that allows a user to enforce their perception of reality on the collective reality around them.

Such is the level of focus that the forms it takes is limited and short lived as the collective understanding of reality eventually overwhelms the temporary subjective energy produced and returns everything back to a sort of balanced, neutral state.

This implies that there is a perception of reality greater than that of all sentient beings currently known to exist but otherwise can't be immediately proven.

It's a fundamental force of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism that can be utilized by certain methods to alter space and matter

>Mana
Isn't it based on some Pacific islanders beliefs? What's their explanation for it?

Science is a very specific way of obtaining knowledge that is based on the assumption that the objects/events being studied are consistent, measurable, and reproducible. Magic need not be any of those.

More or less with the other's in the thread, mana is entirely there to be fuel for bullshit that doesn't care about science. That said, if I had to force it:

Mana is a collected mass of old quantum waveforms from earlier events that haven't yet collapsed. There's reasonable evidence to suggest that reality can operate retroactive causality, and our own ability to observe and thus collapse uncertain events is not very thorough. Up until events are collapsed, the superpositions that make up the materials in the area add up to a 'average' of possible behaviours which gives us the sort of outcomes we expect from a simple mechanistic standpoint.

When you expend mana on a spell, you force a directed collapse of these uncollapsed waveforms, causing macro-scale effects. Brownian motions happen to align into a telekinetic throw or whatever.

When you collapse waveforms in your environment, they are now 'known'. So you can't use them for more spells in the immediate future. You need to wait a while for the uncertainty in the environment to accumulate back to useful levels.

the same way you scientifically explain the soul

Magic circuits

I like to frame magic as a secondary metric of the universe that is not subject to the laws of physics as we understand them. Magic is any energy source that can act in clear defiance of entropy or against the laws of thermodynamics. A conscious mind that is no longer being represented by physical matter and electrical signals may be represented by magical energy.

>Body has synapses in it that allows non-contact based manipulation of surroundings in a proximity (let's say the vectors of molecules for a specific, because that can lead into tons of stuff)
>Not everyone has them, and even then, not everyone can activate these synapses in a fashion that yields results
>Its a very physically demanding thing to do, thus mages eat an pro-athletes worth of calories daily.

Honestly the last part was a fun little bit I liked in Mass Effect.

so FF ring of fates?

Magic-calories

How can you scientifically explain Psionics?

...

When smug anime girls die their smug anime souls pass into the aether and break down into smug anime particles which is commonly known as mana.

Ambient potential energy that reacts to willpower?

Mana is magic fuel, magic is inherently inconsistent, it's not really something that can be scientifically measured or explained.

YOU NEED TO FUCK BITCHES TO RECHARGE YOUR MANA, SHIROU

Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei does this very well.

You know the many worlds theory thing? Well, magic is basically what happens when a small fraction of a small fraction of a small bit of an alternate universe crosses over into our reality in a (semi?)controlled fashion. Mana is a modified part of the borders between universes.

You don't. A concept like mana is inherently unverifiable, as a mystic energy that exists within the universe. Once it is scientifically proven, it becomes science and would be accorded proper terminology and due research.

Prior to that its hokem.

Weaboo shit

Magical Potential Energy.
You ask engineers this shit, not scientists.

Mana is the event of the electrical synapse that take place in your brain escaping. A rational healthy mind prevents this phenomenon. However, despite escaping the brain they are still a part of your neural network and thus can still be manipulated by your thoughts. As such they allow an individual to manipulate reality by infesting it with their escaped sanity.

A mage is any individual who is aware of this application of insanity. The less sane a mage is the more powerful they are, though finding the right balance between irrationality and control is the mark of a true master.

Check'd, bitch.

She's an ayy lmao not a wizard

Energy in the environment (heat, life, whatever) which mages can channel to create magical effects.

>Science is a very specific way of obtaining knowledge that is based on the assumption that the objects/events being studied are consistent, measurable, and reproducible. Magic need not be any of those.

So magic is just macro-scale quantum mechanics?
Nice.

>user still believes in a soul

That's cute.

It exists in some people and you cant really try to find any magic particles or energies trough equipment. It completely shits on modern physics. Solid plasma, creating much from nothing and the ability to make projectiles not hit you simply by telling them, not removing any innertia or energy behind it.

Its complete bullshit is what it is.

Mana is the physical psychomatter of a noosphere surrounding a planet.

Look at magic in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series or Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind. Both "explain" their magic systems logically/scientifically.

Mana is mental concentration. Some have more than others. You can increase it through training until it become instinct after certain threshold. Imagine learning to grasp with your hand. You have to coordinate individual fingers, how much force to apply, gauge the distance. Do it a million times, it becomes natural, do it a million more, it becomes detrimental

Ask the polynesians

>Both "explain" their magic systems logically/scientifically
This is the easy part to do. The hard part is to realize magic is older than science and not supposed to be explained scientifically.

Mana is the capacity to interact with an invisible energy field, a fifth fundamental force of the universe that can impact non-linear time. There are multiple methods of interacting with this energy field, and the proper understanding of it can potentially alter reality as a the lay-person understands it.

Numerous species understand how to interact with and shape this energy field in a natural method. The proper mindset can pull the energy field into our dimensions enough to give it enough of "our reality" that it can be used for a number of things. These come across as telekinetics, field manipulators (which include typical flying bricks that aren't made of super dense materials and combustion for thrust) and energy manipulators (a pyrokinetic is really just using the field to produce a space where combustion is more likely).

People are capable of manipulating this extra-dimensional energy field by attuning their minds to certain lines of thought. In general terms, this is how humans can learn to become psychic. Even fortune tellers potentially tap into this non-linear energy field, glimpsing potential futures in instants. "Magic" users are simply following specific mental patterns and concepts to facilitate acting on the field in specific, organized, crafted ways. Learning a new spell is learning how to achieve a result from a specific mental program that has been tweaked in certain ways.

Since mana is trans-temporal, it can achieve a level of reality alteration, wiping an individual from the timeline, providing fortune to a user or so on.

Wizards as scientist is such a shitty trope made by them to make themselves feel more special than they actually are.

The same way you explain preexistence scientifically.
You don't

Just read some ethnology books that cover tribal Polynesian culture.

Energy.
Much like thermal energy in a person's body, or chemical energy in form of food and body-fat, mana is a form of energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, but simply changes form.
Whilst it permeates most planes of existence, like a form of background radiation, it exists in more dense pockets in the void-spaces between planes. It is theorised to be the source of sentient consciousness in the universe.
After millennia of exposure to this energy, some creatures, ranging from individuals to entire species, have developed the ability to manipulate this energy; this manifests itself as the a spell. A spell can draw upon the mana within the caster themselves (much like expending chemical energy in physical activity) or carefully directing magical energy from outside themselves - divine spells draw upon magic energy from a divine source, of which the caster becomes a willing conduit.

Fireball behaves roughly the same ever time you cast it

Explain further

It's basically a Pascal, but the force term is in Thaums instead of Newtons.

There's a slight deperdition of energy everytime there's neural activity in your body. Learning magic is actually learning to keep that flow inside you and channel it to affect matter using unconventional physics

Which means that 1 mana denotes enough magical force to create a pidgeon or 3 billiard balls per m^2

Midichlorians

ARGH!

>dude its magic I aint gotta explain shit
>but I also have to do this specific thing to cast magic

If the magic in your world/story has different outcomes resulting from the exact same actions, then your world is shit and you're using magic as a terrible storytelling crutch.

Except this is only true for specific instances. In Harry Potter not all spells worked the same for all people, meaning that even with the scientific methodology it was unpredictable and failed to adhere to a logical and consistent effect.

In Roger Zelazny's Changeling and Madwand books, Magic was an inherently personal act of power that each mage enacted on the universe under his own power. The exception were Madwands, whose magic could duplicate and enact everyone else styles, until they achieved such a great understanding that their magic had NO style and type: madwands could enact magic through pure willpower and no other mages could connect to or understand their powers, or even see their power in use.

In The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist, low magic could be duplicated and was relatively predictable. High magic was intensely personal, and was an act of individual will that could be altered and changed by the will of the mage using it, and did not need to follow any pattern or methodology.

Scientific method to understand magic only consistently applies in game systems, and that only because the rules are needed to contain the actions of the players. Very very few systems allow for non-regulated magic, and they invariably include either rolls for random effects or GM fiat weirdness.

Magic is always a plot device outside of regulated games, user. even in stories and fairy tales, it always has been.

The fact that you don't like that doesn't make it shit, it makes it magic as opposed to psychic sciences.

Magic flows through our world from the previous world to the next, and wizards are like hydroelectric dams.

That's my explanation.

Here's a simple thing for you to consider.

If magic is created through the actions of an individual, and their will and desire is what powers that magic and enforces it upon reality, how can two people EVER achieve the same exact result unless they have the exact same perception, thought process, and desires and willpower?

Such a thing is definitively impossible; your 'magic is a science' idealism is not only ridiculous, it can never work outside of game mechanics..

Mana as ambient natural magical energy present in the environment and all living things that has determined flow patterns (ley lines), strength, and measurable qualities that shape/are shaped by environment. Essentially a way to refer to natural magical energy.

Was she right Veeky Forums?

See, the main problem here is that you (and most authors that try to say "science doesn't apply to magic") really don't understand the scientific method and how scientists go about things.

Just because something is personal, or produces different results based on the same inputs does not mean that you can't apply the scientific method to it. The only thing it means that you have to go one level higher and look at what you might have missed.

Also, Harry Potter has a very shitty magic system and it basically ruins the books, so that's not a good example.

If magic is specific to the individual, that just means you have to study the individual, isolate trends, make predictions and test them, see what variables in personality produce what changes in magic.

The problem here is that you don't think like a scientist would. A scientist wouldn't just give up and go "well, this just is impossible to analyze," he'd go "Why can't I analyze it using current methods and what must I change to get better results"

Quantum mechanics are totally consistent, measurable and reproducible tho.

>Magic is always a plot device outside of regulated games
Magic is only a plot device when the protagonist can't use magic and magic only exists to fuck the protagonist over. If your protagonist can use magic and is expected to solve problems using magic, then you (as the author) most establish rules for your magic or your story will be shit full of asspulls and deus ex machinas and will provide no satisfaction to the reader.

I recommend reading Sanderson's post on hard and soft magic. Regardless of what you think of him as an author and despite the pretentious title of the essay, he does make some good points and he is pretty much right in this one:

brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/

ITT: nerds want magic to be like science, so they can pretend they would be wizards god in made up fantasy world

ITT: autists latch onto the word "magic" and can't accept alternate views on the idea

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

bump

Same way you can scientifically explain health points.
A system that simplify the rules of the universe in order to make it a game that can be played without using a supercomputer.

Also:
britannica.com/topic/mana-Polynesian-and-Melanesian-religion
(sadly less complete than the french edition that explores ethnolinguistics more)

NANOMACHINES, SON

...

An invisible, intangible arcane fuel that permeates reality not unlike dark matter, converted and consumed to power arcane processes.

Y'all need to go read Ra by qntm.

A very long time ago in a galaxy far far away some fucking Space-Merlin guy invented an incredible machine that bends time and space and does fucking anything. Then he built an interface that would allow him to issue concise commands to activate the stupidly complex processes that make it work.

Then he built a second interface that would look for people with his genetic markers and interpret keywords and gestures in such a way as to further simply the commands for the machine.

Then that space-merlin kicked the shit out of everybody else and had a ton of kids with all the bitches he was fucking and soon his hundreds of descendants were able to qualify for the machine's wizard radar and they use what commands they still remember to do magic.

Mana is what science currently labels as 'dark matter' or 'dark energy'. It is everywhere, all around us, and we cannot perceive it. However, mathematically we know its there.

Mana isn't all one thing, there are different kinds of mana and how they can be used and manipulated are specific to them. But much like how electromagnetism can be used to perform incredible feats with the right technology, mana can be utilized as a tool as well.

Its hard to control and largely poorly understood, since we can never observe mana directly, just its effect on the environment around us or the heat and light produced by its use. But over the years, certain people with mana sensitivity (an uncommon but useful mutation that has trouble succeeding because society often kills those that display it out of fear) have made great progress in identifying specific mana applications and recording them for future generations.

the mtg-ish view of mana as a fuel source is ghey and disrespectful to an ancient concept

If I wanted a setting where people studied magic scientifically then I'd call mana the spiritual/supernatural equivalent of mass - the greater the mana of a body the more magical force it can exert, and in turn the harder it is to act on it with magic.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

God, that was so dumb. "It's not magic, you're just using life energy to alter reality." How does that make it not magic? You're just describing how it works. It's like saying "you're not really transmitting speech over a radio, you're just converting mechanical waves into electromagnetic ones and back into mechanical once again".

Heat-like energy from a dimension closely tied to the physical dimension, sort of like a 4th dimension to physical space.

this is why some magical creatures can teleport, as they use it like a tunnel (this fucks with the magical flux though and can cause problems, only assholes teleport)

I had similar thoughts.

Merely an energy source within all living things that can be harnessed if using the proper training and equipment.

In its simplest form, it is a means of guiding or controlling the process of matter-energy conversions.

Since magic is derived from all living things and the natural world, the most powerful form of magic is considered to be life itself: intricate, complex, and potentially limitless.

Nanotechnology programmed to imitate the effects of "magic".

human activity is neither consistent, measurable nor reproducible, but you can still apply the scientific method to it, it's just very very hard

>all these people thinking that magic is necessarily supernatural or that understanding how something works means it can't be magic
In most old tales and mythology, magic was a part of the world. It was entirely natural, it was just beyond most people because they hadn't studied/trained hard enough. And, in several traditions, understanding is what actually unlocks magical capacity--it was specifically the knowledge of how it works that made magic possible.

Two things:
1 - Ontologically basic mental things (Things that require thoughts or emotions need to happen without brains being involved. There needs to be angry fire.) This is what feels magical even when you understand it.
2 - The existence of those implies some basic stuff doesn't work the way it does in our universe, but it could still look a lot like ours.

In addition to the types of matter that exist in our universe, there's mana, composed of thaums. There are different types of thaums corresponding to emotions (the glad/sad/mad/afrad thaums), personality traits, and the components of intelligent thought. Mana interacts weakly with physical matter (it's invisible and intangible), but physical matter can move mana. The electrical force in particular repels it. Mana has no attractive force to itself, so it tends to be loosely distributed, but concentrated mana does interact and has a stronger effect on physical matter.

The brain is an organ that creates a cage of electricity around a bunch of mana. The mana does the thinking. This would show up in a cat scan, it's not how our world's brains work at all. But it has to be this way or reductionism breaks (you shouldn't have two natural phenomenon that work the same for different reasons, it's improbable) (also this world's electrical cage brain is way easier to evolve than our world's brains anyway).

The ability to do things with mana (outside your own brain's functions) takes skill and practice, because it's fickle and weakly interacting.

>There needs to be angry fire
I really hate how modern fantasy depicts fire as nothing but anger and destruction, despite it classically being the element of passion and creativity.

Fair point. I'd prefer if it's not always angry, but it's pretty sad if the stuff an evil wizard throws at you isn't angry.

Explain it reverse lucifer.

Would be more logical if one could only tap it through a evolutionary mutation, an extra fleshy bit inside that allows a person to tap the energy.

It's not rape if it's Shirou.

You don't need to explain it in full as if it's some well-explored science, but you do have to have some sort of loose abstract, a silhouette of actual understanding, so that you can properly conceptualize how it interacts with things at a basic level. You also need to be able to describe it narratively in a way that props up the contrivances of its rule associations.
With systems that lack that, you get people blithely saying "magic can do literally anything with no compromises," which is bad for settings, gameplay, and general narrative.

However you frame it, at the very least you have to be able to firmly illustrate that while mysterious there's a process to it and that it's a latent element of the setting. Even if fairy godmothers and benevolent genies exist, with "phenomenal cosmic power", they don't just 'fix' everything with a snap of their fingers: they're bound to compel the stories to proceed rather than thrust things directly to conclusions now made boring. Same with gods and demigods in myth.

Nope. With the right stimuli orgasm can be forced even out of the unwilling..
Eyes turning heart-shaped is 100% reliable proof though.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana

Holes in the material that access the plane of Form.
Magic also literally can't do anything that couldn't be done with mundane means.
Magic just expedites the processes, letting you bypass the physical processes necessary.
So if you want to cast Fireball, you first have to create an explosion and use that explosion to locate the Idea of Explosions on the plane of Forms. Then whenever you cast Fireball you're opening a portal with mana to the plane of Forms at the location of the Idea of Explosions.

Manacomine is produced by magus gland and stored in manacomine sack in chest.