Comments on: Magic and Persuasion https://www.isegoria.net/2015/10/magic-and-persuasion/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Thu, 28 May 2026 23:08:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: William Newman https://www.isegoria.net/2015/10/magic-and-persuasion/comment-page-1/#comment-2404049 William Newman Sun, 04 Oct 2015 16:03:25 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=38988#comment-2404049 Things like how surprisingly weirdly helium can behave when you cool it near absolute zero, or how surprisingly usefully silicon can behave when you purify it to substantially less than 1 ppb impurities, or how surprisingly excitingly uranium behaves when you purify away the relatively dull isotope 238 and leave only 235, are not magical secrets in some sense, but they seem to me to be well into Clarke’s ‘indistinguishable from magic’. And they do depend on the basics of the universe, but those parts of the basics of the universe that resist being expressed in English (as opposed to PDEs with complex-valued functions and/or integrals in infinite-dimensional spaces) are not basic in the ordinary conversational sense of the word.

You can get more with the basics and a laser than you can with the basics alone.

]]> By: Slovenian Guest https://www.isegoria.net/2015/10/magic-and-persuasion/comment-page-1/#comment-2403966 Slovenian Guest Sun, 04 Oct 2015 13:58:56 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=38988#comment-2403966 Or to quote Ryu from Eradica, who put it this way:

“It’s always the basics that are important and where the slip-ups happen. There are no magical secrets in this world – that is a trick employed to intimidate the uninitiated. The only trick is being very good at the basics.”

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