Mazra wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
And a plot point of Thor was to stress that the human perception of magic was just science. They explain the Bifrost as a wormhole, Loki opens the Tesseract gate with science, energy weapons are "Tesseratic" energy (or whatever).
Thor wrote:
Thor: Your ancestors called it magic...
Thor: ...but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same.
The way I understand it, he's saying that magic is science, and science is magic. Much of the "science" taking place in Thor would fall into the magic category, because we cannot explain it with science. Yes, the Bifrost could be a wormhole generator, but trying to justify such a machine's function with science would be impossible. As such, the Bifrost is both magic and science at the same time, which is what Thor means with "they are one and the same."
If magic is science and science is magic, everything that is one is the other. So following from that, there
cannot be something "magical" that science cannot explain, because they're just two words for the same thing. It's just not possible, logically.
Think about another quote "How much dark energy did the Allfather need to muster up to conjure you here?"
Even though it's using magical language in the term "conjure," the gist is understandable. Odin needed to harvest a whole lot of dark energy to transport Thor to Earth, since the Bifrost is still broken.
I don't believe this meant Odin called upon dark forces he didn't understand. I think it means he literally had to harvest dark energy, a somewhat understood (or at least somewhat defined) term in human science, and use that to open a gate to send Thor.
Is it possible Odin did that by meditating, just sat there and syphoned dark energy until Thor poofed to Earth? Sure. Because it's absolutely possible that Asgardian technologies are such that Odin could do that. Or maybe it's more like the lightning harvesters from Stardust, and then he used an artifact designed to create portals to send Thor.
What I don't believe is that Odin could do that at random. I think it would be possible because Odin built a world where those mechanisms would be available.
Ultimately, I think the point is that human!Magic is seen as that which is unexplainable from Science - it is essentially the antithesis to science.
Asgardian!Magic, however, is the same thing as Asgardian!Science. Magic is just what they call it, and it's completely explainable. It's just that humans don't understand it yet. Or, hell, maybe they can't understand it yet. Maybe their culture and their thought patterns and their language just haven't evolved to a point where that information could be translated into a coherent thought.
And the last point I'd make is that a floating building is to Thor as a computer is to Jane. They're both unique to their own race's technologies, and neither understands the other. The difference is that Thor sees no problem believing the computer to be possible, because of his cultural understanding of science, where Jane has a lot of problems with the former, because of her own cultural belief in the limits of science.