Backwards, O Backwards

Magic, physics, metaphysics

One thing you constantly see in role-playing games, and frequently in fantasy novels, is that magic can simply undo other magic. Someone is turned into stone, and can be turned back into flesh. Someone is poisoned by magic, and can be healed and utterly restored to health. Someone is aged by magic, and can be made young again.

Without magic, poison frequently can not be stopped, and when it can, it often requires a long recovery and still does life-long damage. And there are no magical antidotes that reverse its effects. Any drugs that help attack certain symptoms -- and can often be dangerous in themselves. (There is at least one pair of poisons that directly reverse each other’s effects.)

Can magic, in fact, undo?

If magic can, we are getting some metaphysics that is uncommonly heavy in physics. If magic can undo, it reverses entropy. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. Which is the driving force behind a lot of lovely things, such as life itself.¹

A determined physicist might investigate the spellcraft to conclude that it only does so locally, that entropy increases elsewhere to compensate for what the magic does. If, indeed, he can figure out a way to show that.

A stubborn physicist might insist that magic must increase entropy in the closed system. Reasonably, he could point out that when a rule like the second law of thermodynamics appears to have been violated, the usual reason is that someone misinterpreted something.

On the other hand, someone else could point that magic appears to be a wholly different kettle of fish. It operates by different principles, so why would it operated by the same rules? This would start to get into what models you can use for magic.²

The counter-argument could also bring up that ghosts are notoriously associated with cold spots. To turn heat into useful energy is the very definition of reversing entropy.

More philosophically, he could point out that the very nature of the second law of thermodynamics, and also of the Big Bang, indicate that the physicists are dealing with a limited subsection of reality.

Indeed, cosmologists propound a vast expanse of maximum-entropy quantum flux that no man hath seen at any time, which, after a a long enough time, randomly fluxes a high-entropy universe. (Long enough time being a few nonillion years. Is that not enough? A few duodecadillion years. Still not? A few vigintillion. The biggest logical issue with it is the Boltzmann brain: namely, that random fluctuations are more likely to produce, momentarily, a brain with false memories of the universe.)

A hearty soul might propound that magic is, in fact, quantum fluctuations.

A more modest soul might reason that the necessary existence of something outside of physics indicates the possibility that the magic is drawing on it, and possibly may have indications of what it is like.

Like many metaphysical issues, it may be wiser to leave that offstage,³ because of the very difficulty of working out something grand enough to suit the scale of the matter. And, unless you make the working out the plotline, you also have the importance of getting on with the story.

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