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.”
Or perhaps, the insight of a game developer. Flicker is captivated by how bottles of fluid are portrayed in Half-Life: Alyx (still rumoured to be heading to PSVR2, though Horizon Call Of The Mountain has a similar string to its bow). “The fluid looks perfect – it’s amazing, but then you discover that it’s actually the surface of the bottle that ‘moves’,” he says. “It’s not that they’ve modelled the fluid inside the bottle. It’s a trick. So you could stop there and say ‘I was cheated – it wasn’t magical, after all’. Or you could say, ‘But isn’t that even more magical?’ Because, you know, the reason that game is able to run without infinite processing power is they’re doing tricks like that – not having to simulate an entire body of fluid.”
“IF YOU LEARN HOW STUFF WORKS, YOU COME BACK TO THE ORIGINAL SENSE OF WONDER.”