Thoughts on magic and science in "The Doctor"

Here are some thoughts (some new and some that I previously posted elsewhere) that occurred to me after seeing Dr. Frankenstein’s statement that his worlds science is more powerful than the Enchanted Forest’s magic. It makes sense that science would never really develop in a world with magic. Science depends upon recognizing repeatable processes in nature which eventually lead to finding natural laws that control the behavior of the world. In a world with magic, there are no natural laws – or rather, what laws there are can so often be changed by magic that identifying natural laws would be very difficult. In our world, if I throw a rock in the air, I can study how it falls and eventually understand it because it follows the same law every time. But Regina could make the rock fall faster or slower, or even just keep rising forever. So who would spend time trying to identify laws which could be changed at a whim, especially when studying magic could produce more immediate results (at a price)?

Of course, Mary Shelley/s original Frankenstein, like the legend of Faust on which it was based, really was more about magic than science. The lasting image she gave us of the “Mad Scientist”, working alone to master secret powers is really the image of the wizard controlling secret knowledge. Shelley never acknowledged that real science is a process that depends upon the open exchange of ideas and independent verification. One person working alone in a lab is not really doing science, by the modern definition.

Of course, the modern Scientific Method developed slowly over centuries, from the empiricism of Francis Bacon to its culmination in the work of Isaac Newton. But in the beginning, scientific knowledge was seen as something mysterious and known only to a few “philosophers.” One of the earliest figures in this transition may have inspired one of OUAT’s character names.

The name Henry has a strong connection to the history of magical themes when expressed in its German form, Heinrich. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (Sometimes given in Latinized form as “Henricus”) was a sixteenth century German theologian who wrote several influential works on magic (Coincidently for a show which features such strong female characters as Emma, Regina, and Snow White, he also wrote a book which argued for the moral and theological superiority of women, entitled Declamatio De Nobilitate Et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexus, or in English Declaration on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex). His book De Incertitudine Et Vanitate Scientiarum Atque Artium Declamatio Invectiva (Declaration Attacking the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and the Arts ) revived some of the ancient Greek ideas of skepticism toward unverifiable claims of “ultimate truth” presented by authorities and prefigured later thinkers such as David Hume. Agrippa’s most famous work, De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy was an important stepping stone from the magical worldview of medieval times to the scientific view that began to take shape in the Renaissance. Although he was writing in a pre-scientific age and describing a worldview that was based upon magic, he would have an influence on later ideas because Agrippa argued that the world had been endowed by God with “natural magic.” Disease, for example, could be treated by herbal medicines which were seen as having magical properties. This was in contrast to the medieval view that illness was a punishment sent by God which could only be cured by prayer. Much of our modern understanding of the world would evolve from such contemplations of “magic”; botany would evolve from studies attempting to determine the magical properties of plants, astronomy would emerge from the superstition of astrology, and chemistry from the magical quests of alchemy. The flowering of the sciences would eventually grow from the key idea of the Scientific Method: that ideas must be tested by independent experiment and open debate. But at first there was still a strong sense of the medieval idea that mysteries of the world could be explained by magical knowledge that was only available to a few. The human tendency to attribute the unfamiliar to “magic” was stated by novelist Arthur C. Clarke as Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

More than a century after the death of Agrippa, Isaac Newton would be born and would become the Enlightenment symbol of a rational understanding of the world when his famous work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) created the foundation of the science of physics which persists to this day. But Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than he did on physics and he devoted more time to studies of theology than he did to alchemy. John Maynard Keynes said
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”