SPELL OF THE GAME

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell speaks to witches, physicists, Tarot readers, game designers, and amateur botanists about what ‘magic’ means to them – and how videogames portray it

- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS AND HALF-LIFE 

When you know how it works, it’s still magical

For scientist and author Felix Flicker, magic is that which is “hidden in plain sight”. Helpfully, this also describes Flicker’s personal passion, condensed matter physics, which is essentially  “the study of the stuff that’s all around us” that we take for granted. For example: the fact that ‘solid’ objects are not actually solid but consist of molecules held together by electromagnetism.

In his book The Magick Of Matter, Flicker whimsically redefines condensed matter physics as a form of sorcery, taking inspiration from stage magicians, fantasy books such as Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea quartet, and videogames such as Half-Life 2. The book begins with a depiction of a wizard conjuring light from an object and using it to blast through a door, before winding back to show that all this is perfectly possible by exploiting the everyday physical properties of matter.

Is this spoiling the fun? Arguably, it’s adding to it. Flicker describes physics as an exercise in breaking our world’s spell in order to rediscover the magic at a deeper level – like a budding stage performer seeing through a trick while marvelling at the other performer’s sleight of hand. “If you learn how some of that stuff works, you come back to the original sense of wonder, because it’s appreciating it all with the insight of the professional magician.”