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people underestimate how much of science RELIES on people being willing to get creative with it and test out something ridiculous and slightly insane through a highly elaborate, systematized process akin to ritual. Depending on your experiment, if you fuck up one step the whole thing is garbage. You cannot always perfectly predict results - sometimes you think you've accounted for everything, and reality throws you a loop and you scrabble to figure out why. Explain to me why that's different from performing magick of the spell-casting type.

Chanting specific words, using specific tools, drawing symbols, creating sigils, visualizing, breathing a specific way, measuring ingredients isn't what makes something magick. It's the ritualistic aspect of it, the intense focus it requires, it is the devotion of your energy to it. It requires consistency. Explain to me why that's different from dedicating your life to a research career.

The only difference between science and magick is that science is a systematically taught open practice. You don't need to convert religions to learn it the way you would the magickal secrets of an order. It's not hidden. In fact, it's possible to entirely self teach most science topics if you are dedicated enough to independent study; all it takes is relevant textbooks, time, and occasional collaboration. That is what a university is for. The structure a class and major plan provides, to get people to do something that's difficult to motivate yourself through on a fixed timeline, and give them support while they do it by means of direction from an instructor and collaborative work with classmates.

This was not always the case, and this is the reason I do not think magick is truly something distinctly separate from science: magick, science, and religion were the same fucking thing for centuries. If you were devoutly religious and had the resources, you were studying and doing all three, and you were probably only calling things magick if you thought they were immoral and evil.

Let me tell you a fun little story about the guy who invented the planetary orbit modeling that forms the basic foundation of orbital mechanics. Johannes Kepler's belief in God directly motivated his study of the planets because he believed there had to be a system governing how they worked in a mathematically consistent way, and he's why we have modern astronomy. He figured out a mathematical relationship governing planetary orbits before we had equations about fucking gravity. His religion was motivation itself for his research, and he accepted the answers he found when they conflicted with his view that there must be symmetry among God's creations. On the contrary, his mother was an herbalist and medicine woman and was repeatedly tried as a witch for doing like, basic chemistry shit (while her son was off inventing new physics and not being tried). One of the most famous mathematicians and astronomers of all time had to defend his mother in court from accusations of witchcraft.

These sorts of things are why I'm interested in occult history. Alchemy is the historical predecessor to chemistry, dedicated independent study after attending schools of divinity is why monks and nuns and the ulama were historically among the best educated people in the world, and the level of devotion and focus it takes to learn that much shit about religious ritual is the same fucking thing as learning science.

Science is based on proving step by step why each thing you're doing works, why each thing you know to be true is true. it starts with small observations, it grows in scope to larger ones and the idea is that you start working with ideas that embed condensed information in tandem, and a lot of them at once.

I'm barely at this point yet in my physics career - the two things where I've really felt like this so far are in my quantum computing class and astronomy - but once you reach a certain point of education in one of the more mathematically-based sciences there is a level of abstraction required and a level of information density packed into explaining the functionality of a specific type of thing that it becomes impossibly tedious to do any serious work with it. So you create a word for it to easily reference the concept. In your math, you create a symbol. Congratulations, when you nest enough of those words or symbols, your physics becomes indistinguishable from magic/magick to someone who has no relevant experience to your field.

It starts feeling like what you're doing is magick, because yes, you know how it works, but dear god is it insane that any of this works because it is too much information to cognitively process every step of individually. You're working with the limitations of how many things the human brain can hold in the forefront of its attention at once. And as a result, you're doing things that do not seem possible, but you've already proven that they are. It's just unbelievable when you take a step back and look at the whole process. And when you look at the process.... is it not symbolic magickal work?

This is a set of different types of notation that are frequently found in quantum computing. What is shown above is pure math; there is no actual physical modeling or computing going on, just mathematical equivalences and showing how they're read in frequently used notation. Notice on the bottom group of equations that the tensor product definition shown (the X with a circle around it means tensor) has two definitional equivalences; it is every element of a matrix A multiplied by the entirety of the other matrix B, individually, and that expands into a big ass matrix. And then the inner product equivalence shown directly to the right of that contains two tensor products multiplied by each other, and in Dirac notation that is a five character expression.

Dirac notation's entire purpose is to condense things in this manner, and there is no upper limit to how many times you can shrink your equation to something easier to write. Someone (Dirac) had to make up this system to represent information in a condense form, to suit their needs in working with absurdly, annoyingly long equations that took very long to write out the solutions for.

When someone does this same kind of thing with religious, spiritual, or cultural beliefs that aren't so mathematically based, it's seen as more definitely magickal in nature. When someone uses a symbol or set of symbols to refer to a spiritual practice understood only by those who've researched or learned the practices of their beliefs, that's more likely to be interpreted as magick.

But to me, it's no more or less magickal. The math is literally what sigils are. Sigils represent ideas and concepts that people have put into the world for whatever purpose or intention. Whether or not you believe in any literal spiritual force or power behind sigil work is irrelevant, because it is still magick when their only purpose is a focused expression of the creator's intent. An uncharged sigil is still a sigil whether or not you believe some kind of energy must be put into it to provide power. Explain to me why expressing that intention in the form of math is any different from magick. Why isn't the work of scientists considered divination or sigil work? The intent is prediction. Physicists and nuclear/quantum chemists do quite literally predict the future (by modeling the state of physical systems) or predict the existence of things we have no proof off.