“Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.” Arthur C Clark

Science seems to be in an uproar these days, with so many people refusing to believe basic science (like the Earth is round) and others fighting tooth and nail to hold on to straight science as we know it today, as if science isn’t a fluid thing.

Science isn’t perfect. Facts are tested and retested, and conclusions are reconsidered—this is the nature of science. So when I recently posted ‘Magic is simply science without an explanation yet’ on one social media platform, you would have thought I said the Earth was flat from the number of attacks this statement received.

Historically, conjuring tricks used scientific phenomena like magnetism and chemical reactions to wow uneducated crowds, and called it magic. Once those things became common knowledge, we no longer viewed them as magic because we learned the science behind them.

If you were suddenly plopped into Europe with an operational cell phone during the dark ages, the mob would have shaved your head and burned you at the stake as a witch.

Electricity and telephones are commonplace now, yet when they were first introduced a great majority of people were scared of them, called them evil, and refused to have anything to do with them. Most of those people, however, were older.

The younger crowd have always been early adopters of all the newest tech and still are. They accept what seems magical to the older generation and incorporate it into their world.

Science literally changes daily, as do scientific facts. When see we things that seem to us to appear to be ‘magic’ and call people who are exploring and researching those things names, believing they are duped, easily fooled or stupid, we are actually behaving in an ignorant way ourselves.

In science, facts change. All the time. Some ‘facts’ that have been tested using the methods we current have available will be disproven when we can test differently. It’s the way science works.

Just because we think something shouldn’t be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t. We have just too many instances of un-(scientifically) explained phenomena for us to continue to dig our heels in and refuse to accept them.

Einstein once famously wrote “There are two ways to go through life… Like nothing is magical, or like there is magic in everything.”

I prefer to believe that everything is magic. Some things just don’t have a scientific explanation . . . yet.