Timothy Stout

The distinction between engineering and magic is entirely a modern linguistic conceit. To the ancients, a wizard, a magus, a sorceror, was not a man who commanded forces outside the laws of nature. He was a man who commanded the forces of nature, by manipulating them through his understanding of natural law. But the modern word for a man who commands the universe by understanding its laws is "engineer". Yes, the ancient sorceror would try to commune with the spirits of the dead, or read the destiny of kings in the stars, or perform fertility rites to make the crops grow, but this wasn't some special supernatural discipline to him. This was simply his model of how the natural world worked. He would not have made a distinction between understanding heat and phase changes, and thereby distilling alcohol, and cutting out the intestines of a bird to predict the fortunes of a business venture. Both, to him, were philosophy and natural law. But as our understanding of the laws of physics grew more sophisticated, we gradually exiled the term "magic" to that which had not been proven to work, and to that which had been proven not to work. Were we given the opportunity to take an ancient Egyptian king on a tour of modern society, riding in an electric car, he would remark that we are a rich people, because we have many powerful magicians. Some of us might hasten to correct him, telling him that there is no magic used here. But he would not, in fact, be wrong.