The romance of Science and the material world

Far too often, I hear and read folks complaining about science 'ruining' things. That science is dry and soulless - somehow without wisdom due to it not being from some place in deep antiquity. Because it gives us answers to ancient questions, often contradicting the "traditional" hand-waving explanation of men and women that roamed homeless in the wilderness, it is somehow less worthy? No.

Science is better.

Does this mean we hate things like magic?


I feel it's important to explain, being a stalwart lover of science and critical thinking, that it's inaccurate to say that we (we as in people that embrace science, the scientific method and critical thinking) don't like magic. Or magick. The fact is that we neither like or dislike magic, we simply have no use for it beyond the occasional illusionist act. It's wholly disinsteresting as a subject, so instead we focus on the things we love: observing nature, creating hypotheses, experimenting, replicating, retesting, confirming results, having others create more stringent experiments to make up for any weakness, blinding etc, until we, hopefully, FINALLY arrive at a theory. 

Figure 1; Example of 'breathtaking'

And then we dare the rest of Science (or anyone else) to prove it wrong.


It CAN be pretty boring and droll. Sure, there isn't a lot of romance in data - but that doesn't mean we don't find the world at utterly wonderful, breathtaking (figure 1) or downright and truly AWESOME in ways that can't put to words. We just want to figure out WHY it is that way in a very material and objective way.

While I can understand why folks feel that conclusions arrived at through a careful and self-correcting (sometimes it takes time, the Universe doesn't move at our measly pace) method takes away the romance, or magic from just taking the world in, but that deeper understanding of how our world works and how wonderfully intricate and delicate the relationship is between life and non-life has INCREASED our absolute AWE of our amazing universe. 

I mean... Science literally says that we are made from stars. Ancient MASSIVE stars had to live out their lives, then explode in a magnificent release of raw energy to create the particles that we are made of.

THIS is the true avatar for what created us.

What has magic(k) done lately?