Agents of Shield - Season 4
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Although in real life, I hate it when people invoke quantum physics as an excuse for oogy-boogy pseudoscience and thinly veiled mysticism, because it's a complete misunderstanding of what quantum physics is. People still have this idea that quantum theory is some vague, nebulous new idea that defies all the rules of everyday reality, but the fact is that it's a well-established set of quite rigorous physical laws that are the basis of a lot of everyday technologies like transistors and diodes and lasers and MRI scanners, not to mention cutting-edge cryptography and computing. Heck, ordinary everyday classical physics is quantum physics as applied to large ensembles of particles. The problem is that public schools approach science classes as science-history classes, going through stuff in the order we discovered it, and they usually run out of time before getting to quantum physics, creating the false impression that it's still new and mysterious even though we use quantum-based devices every single day.
So I'm not sure that the phenomena harnessed by Asgardian science and Darkhold sorcery are based on quantum physics specifically. Quantum physics is too everyday by this point. You're reading my words right now because of applied quantum physics. That would be magic to people from centuries ago -- but the kind of physics that's magic to us today is probably something as far beyond quantum theory as quantum theory is beyond Newton, or even Aristotle.
Comics have always used the latest scientific catchwords to justify superpowers. In the Golden Age, it was "heavy water" and "electricity" and blood transfusions. In Silver Age, it was "radiation" and "transistors" and "mutation." Nowadays it's going to be quantum nano super-strings .... 
Except, arguably, for the magic characters who still pick up powers from lost temples and ancient scrolls and crystal balls and such. DOCTOR STRANGE's origin is pretty much identical to the one in CHANDU THE MAGICIAN back in 1932, albeit with much better special effects.
Except, arguably, for the magic characters who still pick up powers from lost temples and ancient scrolls and crystal balls and such. DOCTOR STRANGE's origin is pretty much identical to the one in CHANDU THE MAGICIAN back in 1932, albeit with much better special effects.
Comics have always used the latest scientific catchwords to justify superpowers. In the Golden Age, it was "heavy water" and "electricity" and blood transfusions. In Silver Age, it was "radiation" and "transistors" and "mutation." Nowadays it's going to be quantum nano super-strings ....
Yeah, but that's the thing -- radiation and transistors are quantum phenomena. So is mutation, at the fundamental level. Heck, so is every damn thing in the universe at the fundamental level. The weird thing is that people still think of quantum physics as something new and obscure when it's actually right at the heart of modern physics and technology and has been for decades. The physicists who devised quantum theory were of the same generation as the creators of the atomic bomb, or even earlier. (After all, "atomic" devices are based on particle interactions, which is what quantum theory is all about.) So it shouldn't really be "the latest."
^ I think you somewhat missed the point.
Yeah, the only difference between that and what we saw in Doctor Strange is context. Strange is a modern story, so it's told in a modern context. The actual story beats should be largely unaffected.
For contrast, look back at how CA1 as a pulpy period movie handled elements like the tesseract and Hydra's crazy super science. Sure, as the audience we know this is an alien artefact but within the narrative it was all "I shall use science to harness the power of the gods!!!" which felt very appropriate for the time and the tone they were evoking.
Comics have always used the latest scientific catchwords to justify superpowers. In the Golden Age, it was "heavy water" and "electricity" and blood transfusions. In Silver Age, it was "radiation" and "transistors" and "mutation." Nowadays it's going to be quantum nano super-strings ....
Except, arguably, for the magic characters who still pick up powers from lost temples and ancient scrolls and crystal balls and such. DOCTOR STRANGE's origin is pretty much identical to the one in CHANDU THE MAGICIAN back in 1932, albeit with much better special effects.
Yeah, the only difference between that and what we saw in Doctor Strange is context. Strange is a modern story, so it's told in a modern context. The actual story beats should be largely unaffected.
For contrast, look back at how CA1 as a pulpy period movie handled elements like the tesseract and Hydra's crazy super science. Sure, as the audience we know this is an alien artefact but within the narrative it was all "I shall use science to harness the power of the gods!!!" which felt very appropriate for the time and the tone they were evoking.
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It's a self-organizing matrix of intermediate vector skull bosons.
True, a lot of the comics themselves have taken that approach, where magic is essentially super-science in fancier dress. But my favorite stories about magic were ones that didn't go that route. I suppose I'm mainly thinking about those comics that play into the poetic and metaphoric potential of magic. For example, there was a Loki story a few years back where he stole the reflection of Surtur's Twilight Sword -- as in the reflection the sword made in a reflective surface, as if that were somehow a tangible thing. And then when he wielded it, it turned out to not be a sword at all but a pen, because as the sword's reflection it was actually its antithesis. And so instead of a sword with great destructive power, it's a pen with great creative power, able to make anything Loki writes reality. The MCU's take on magic doesn't seem to have room for that kind of story, and that's a shame.
The New Gods are actually a good illustration of my point. I think those characters' strongest stories are definitely the ones where they feel like actual gods (Kirby's stuff, Grant Morrison's), as opposed to the ones where they're essentially just pretentious aliens, which I feel is an awkward fit.
Good stories have come out of that take on magic, certainly, but there's value in other takes as well, and I don't think the MCU should close itself off from them. The fundamental appeal of these shared universe, where super-soldiers exist side-by-side with gods and robots, is possibility. I think Neil Gaiman, in DC's Books of Magic series, gave the perfect depiction of how magic that inherently contradicts science can co-exist:
But you're forgetting that Chthon is much cooler than Hive.
My point, though, is that from a literary standpoint, their "super-science" is essentially magic to begin with. It only has the most superficial trappings of science and is written indistinguishably from magic, in the sense that it isn't bound by anything resembling real physics, conservation laws, or the like, but does whatever the story needs it to do. Saying "Bruce Banner was exposed to gamma rays and turned into a green rage monster" is functionally no different from saying "Bruce Banner was cursed by a wizard and turned into a green rage monster." Marvel's "gamma rays" work nothing like the real thing and might as well be a magic spell, and the Hulk transformation violates numerous laws of physics and rules of biology and is closer in its characteristics to a werewolf curse than to a genetic mutation. Comic-book "science fiction" is usually the softest possible kind, the kind that tells stories with the syntax of fantasy dressed up with the superficial semantics of science and technology. (Although there are some comics writers who have made game attempts to bring more scientific literacy to the fanciful powers of comics, like Claremont and Byrne on X-Men.)
Okay, I think I see what you're saying there. But I'm sure there have been equally non-physical or conceptually abstract things that have been portrayed as the result of comic-book science. Like Mirror Master in The Flash. Or any character that makes shadows tangible (shadows aren't even things, they're just parts of a surface less brightly lit than the adjacent parts). Since the "science" is just a set of handwaves for whatever weird stuff they want to include, anything that's functionally supernatural can be passed off as superscience just by switching up the vocabulary a little. I mean, Proteus's mutant "reality-altering" powers could do any of that weird, abstract stuff, and his extreme mutant ability would be a catchall excuse for it. The underlying principles are the same; only the surface trappings and labels are changed. Reed Richards is a wizard, creating impossibilities as casually as Stephen Strange does; it's just that Jack Kirby drew Reed's magic wands and talismans to look like technological devices.
I'm talking less in terms of the effect as the cause. You could get a comic where Reed Richards transforms a sword into a pen with a "molecular re-arranger" or whatever, but it'll never be the case that the gadget's ability to do so is *because* a sword and pen are conceptual opposites. Stories of magic treat the things in our minds -- conceptual frameworks and narratives and whatnot -- as having some kind of physical reality to them.
Well, I wouldn't expect to see Mirror Master-style sci-fi in the MCU, either. That was my original point: Places the MCU won't go.
Oh, I'm sure I've seen examples of sci-fi or cartoon "science" that posited equivalently conceptual transformations with some vague sciencey-sounding handwave. What about Doctor Who's block transfer computation from "Logopolis," where just chanting mathematical equations can transform the physical universe? Or TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before," where they entered a realm in which "space and time and thought" became the same thing and people's wishes and fears became physically real?
What places won't they go? Apart from my earlier question about the "science" of Ghost Rider, you also have people being brought back to life by using the blood of children in Daredevil.
...And when Star Trek used blood in a sci-fi setting to bring people back to life, many took to calling it magic blood.
I wasn't talking about the actual science, just the catchwords and jargon.
In real life, neither heavy water nor radiation nor super-strings are going to give you the ability to breathe underwater and run faster than the speed of light.
Which is my point -- the disconnect between the public perception of "quantum" as some newfangled buzzword and the reality that it's been the basis of modern science and technology for decades. I mean, it made sense for people in the '40s to see atomic energy and radiation as novel, cutting-edge things, say, or for late 19th-century writers to treat electricity as a mysterious new science. But while people in past eras were legitimately basing their sci-fi on stuff that actually was relatively novel, we've somehow gotten stuck in a rut, continuing to imagine that quantum physics is novel and futuristic when it's actually pretty darn old and we use it every day without realizing it.
Clearly, we need some new science to give us some new buzzwords.
Although "nano" and "genetic" seem to be doing a lot of heavy lifting these days.
I really wish you'd quit saying it.
It hasn't been the "basis for technology for decades." It's being used to redefine/explain why and how some of the technology works on a deeper level, but it was not the basis on which it was created. Especially most of the stuff you mentioned in a previous post, like lasers.
At least, they've both replaced "radiation" as the origin of superpowers in Marvel movies. The Ang Lee Hulk had an origin based in nanotech, and I think both Raimi's and Webb's Spider-Men were bitten by genetically engineered spiders rather than irradiated ones.
Then there's The Flash's use of "dark matter" as the source of metahuman powers. That's still so new that we don't even know what it is yet, which gives writers a lot of leeway. (Although I'm convinced that once we do figure out what it is, we'll give it a more specific name than "dark matter." That's sort of the equivalent of "Terra Incognita," a placeholder label for an unknown.)
You're saying that magic lends itself more to poetry. Probably true.
We should put our branes together and come up with something.Clearly, we need some new science to give us some new buzzwords.
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