[liber8]

>>the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws<<

It's interesting that this is how you defined magic, because in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.

Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."

I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)

[implements]

The “laws of nature” aren’t proscriptive (decrees on the order of nature as commanded by a divine superpower), they’re descriptive - observations about related phenomena that appear (or are theorised) as being universally true.

When humans achieved “heavier than air flight” they didn’t do so by modifying (or subverting) any physical law - they applied imagination to state of the art knowledge of what the laws suggest about reality to create technology that overcomes gravity by harnessing natural phenomena (thrust + angle of attack + properties of air = lift).

[schoen]

I'm going to be prescriptive and say that you meant "prescriptive" rather than "proscriptive".

"Prescriptive" means "requiring" or "normative, specifying, prescribing", while "proscriptive" means (more specifically) "forbidding". It has only a negative sense of saying something is not allowed, while "prescriptive" includes a broader sense of specifying or ordaining something in any way.

[implements]

I was going to argue, but, yeah - that makes sense.

[tsimionescu]

> in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.

I don't agree at all. The purpose of science is to understand physical laws well enough that we may predict how various objects work. Sometimes this allows us to make things that we previously believed impossible possible. Sometimes physical laws and limits turn out to be different than we thought, other times we simply find a better way to work within the same laws we always knew.

> Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."

I don't think anyone has ever believed that one of the physical laws of the universe is "human beings can't fly". We have always known that heavier than air flying was possible (since birds do it). The notion of humans flying (or breathing underwater, or seeing really small things) with some kind of assistance has existed probably since pre-history, but definitely since antiquity - have you ever heard of Pegasus, or Hermes' winged sandals, or flying chariots and such? Airplanes are just a scientific realization of those ideas.

> I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)

This is also something you are wrong about. If you look at the progress of science, at least since the 1600s or so, we have almost universally discovered new fundamental limits, not the other way around.

Given Newton's laws of motion, we thought that we could reach any speed we wanted to, if only we had the right technology. It was a new discovery that actually speed is limited. We also thought that an object can have any density, until GR showed that past some density, it ceases to be an object in the usual sense (it becomes a black hole). We used to think that energy can vary continuously between any two values, until we discovered that it can only vary by fixed quanta. We used to think that we can measure the position and velocity of an object to arbitrary accuracy, but then we discovered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

So, as science advances, I'm looking forward to finding out what other thing we currently think is possible will turn out to be impossible.