JREF Swift Blog

Science As Magic

Party tricks

Over the holidays I had my entire immediate family over to the house for Thanksgiving. This throng includes about 60 or so people, with 15 or so children under the age of ten. While the parents and adult cousins were informing each other about how their lives had basically stayed the same since the last time they met, the children became restless. Thankfully, my uncle is a magician.

Showing someone that the world is more amazing than they once thought and then instilling in them the tools to comprehend it is where magic, science, and skepticism intersect.

My uncle Jeff has been practicing magic for three decades, has worked for most of his life performing at state fairs around the country, has met James Randi, and happens to carry a magic kit along with him for just such a dilemma. He sat the children down in a small room and proceeded to do his act. Even though he is still masterful at his illusions, I had seen this performance many times and decided to turn my attention to the children watching the show. When I did this, I noticed a distinct look of wonder on the children's faces. Through magic, my uncle had now established that the laws of reality seemingly bend to his will, and the children were in rapt anticipation for the next miracle. This is magic at its best; an intimate distortion of what you think is possible.

I believe that magic has much to offer the skeptical movement. No doubt, many world-class magicians have integrated themselves into the skeptic/scientific community. But it's not just that magic is fun to watch or that magicians are intimately aware of how some pseudoscientists con people out of time and money (like James Randi and the faith healers), it is the byproducts of being tricked, the cognitive insights, the curiosity that it produces that skeptics can fully embrace. Much like Richard Dawkins has proposed in his first children's book, The Magic of Reality, re-branding science as a way to explain the magic that we see in nature might help us to take advantage of the curiosity that magic so adeptly creates.

Why do we like magic?

I believe that we like magic for a number of reasons, but first and foremost I think that we like to be mistaken about how the world works (in a harmless context). We go through our lives cognitively establishing a set of rules, borders, and boundaries through which our experience is interpreted. This is obviously beneficial to us; without such a structuring or schemata, processing the tremendous flow of stimuli from the outside world would paralyze us. Our brains simply do not and can not deal with all of the world's information. In order to cope, rules about the world are cognitively asserted so that conclusions and decisions can be made without actually experiencing the outcomes ourselves. In a sense, we are normalizing ourselves to the repetition of life, filtering out taxing elaborations of phenomena like gravity or the bio-mechanics of leg movement.

Like many things that confuse us, illusion invites exited speculation, forcing us to recheck our standards of reality.

When someone comes along with a trick that invalidates these rules, we are fascinated. I speculate that unless you know or have an idea how the trick is done, it might be impossible not to be fascinated. Viewing something that so clearly sidesteps our tested boundaries of experience in effect tells your brain, "Hold on a second, something weird just happened and I cannot figure it out." For many of us, the next sentence would be "Let's figure it out."

Magic makes impossibility fun and amusing. It creates a zone where you can expect to be mistaken about how things work, and just as easily return to normal once you leave that zone. We wouldn't want all our lives to mystify and confuse us, but being stupefied for an hour or so seems to be just fine. We want the world to be occasionally permissive of miracles. Using a definition of magic offered by Teller of Penn and Teller:

[Magic is] The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.

Magic, for a few fleeting moments, lets you think that the causal chains that you have no problem believing when you see them on stage are true. Why wouldn't you want to believe that people can catch bullets in their teeth or be harmlessly cut in half? But what if we approached science, or as skeptics helped people to approach science, as a way to show the real causal links, the ones that are many times more fascinating than outright fiction?

If we can take advantage of the skillful way in which magic can at the same time show us that we were wrong about reality and explain the trick, perhaps skeptics can find a way to at the same time show people where their thinking or reasoning goes wrong and provide the more interesting, science-based answer.

From amazement to curiosity

The children viewing the magic show were too young to take the tricks that my uncle did as anything other than amazing or perhaps weird and mysterious. Regardless, I find that once the viewer gets older, another step is taken when viewing magic from amazement to curiosity. No longer is it just marveling at a circumvention of what you think possible, it then becomes a drive to find out how such a trick could be done; just look at the segment of the book industry which sells manuals on how to do various illusions (6,800 seperate books from a rudimentary Amazon search). Unless we are ready to accept the fact that we were mistaken about the impossibility of levitation or making the Statue of Liberty disappear, we take a step back into rationality to see where our experience went wrong.

If you have ever watched a magic show, I would bet at some point you have either thought or said to yourself, "How did he/she do that?" Imagine the kind of interest we could drum up if we presented science in the same way.

In this view, the move from amazement to curiosity is an analog to the scientific enterprise. When we observe something incredible that shakes loose our notions of truth, wonder is quickly followed by rigorous and systematic curiosity.

In terms of knowledge, we are the children in this universe, nature is the magic show, and science is our best attempt to figure out the trick.

The kind of wonder that magic can produce is something that should be capitalized upon if we are to instill in the public and our children the desires that will allow them to interpret the deluge of information the current generation now has to handle. The same magic tricks that drive us crazy when we cannot figure them out are the same tricks that could become a method of teaching science. Science teachers have done this for years in the form of classroom demonstrations, but we need to move this outside of the schools and into the general public. The kind of magic that gets people on the street to either drop their jaw to the floor or giggle with the laughter of incredulity is the same kind of magic that the world naturally produces. For example, to see a mimic octopus simultaneously change color, texture, and behavior to match the appearances and actions of other sea life is nothing short of magical.

Imagine the kind of marine biologists we could raise if such magic was presented as something that has a reason for happening, that this magic was based on biology and genetics and evolution.

Furthermore, think of the kind of physicists we could raise if we told our kids (or anyone for that matter) that the phenomena in the video below is completely explainable and they could be the ones to figure it out.

In other words, as skeptics we can teach others to see the magic of reality, and better yet we can teach them the trick.

Of course, making this kind of analogy is not to say that we should be telling anyone that nature is magical to the effect of fairy tales and myths. It would be hard to overcome the already established definition of magic that easily includes ghosts and ESP. Because of this, a critical component of the view of science as the magic of nature is also a healthy chunk of skepticism. Without it, the true explanations of science are interspersed with the traditionally magic ones like spirits or divine intervention.

I think playing up the magic of nature can be a real boon for science: creating mystery, shaking beliefs about reality, and then explaining the trick. If we can move away from the definitions of magic that imply impossibility to the ones that imply wonder and intelligibility, then magic can be a guide to knowing.

Science and Magic

I have worked with young science students and have tried this "magic of reality" approach before. For example, when two students wanted to know how scabs formed, I first had to explain to them that blood flows throughout their bodies. I took one student by the hand and gently pressed a thumb into her palm. "See how your skin gets lighter in the area that I pressed?" I said. They had no idea how or why this would happen; it might as well have been magic. I told them that I am actually moving blood out of the region in which I pressed, and that you can see it flow as it moves back into the lighter area. The point is that I used this simple trick as a vehicle to explain science. Creating an unexplainable experience for someone I think drives curiosity. Once I let the students in on the trick, they were begging to know everything that I could tell them about blood. It doesn't take much. Once they knew that such incredible things are explainable, it wasn't too long until I was fielding questions about everything from bacteria to radiation to frostbite.

Nature contains so many things which do not square with our worldview, so many things that we cannot relate to or understand that any inquiry that develops real explanations for these mysteries must be valued.

As skeptics, we have to stress that the world is explainable. There are no doubt things that seem to defy explanation, but given science's track record and the absence of any observed supernatural or paranormal phenomena, it is a safe bet that the natural world has natural explanations.

--Nature is magical enough

If every wondrous thing that we see in nature is at least open to explanation, the magic of nature invites the curiosity of science. If we want to let the rest of the world in on the tricks, we should do well to present the universe as a magical place. But not as the kind of place where frogs turn into princes, the kind of place where wonder is a gateway to knowledge.



Kyle Hill is the newly appointed JREF research fellow specializing in communication research and human information processing. He writes daily at the Science-Based Life blog and you can follow him on Twitter here .