Magic, Science, Energy, Beasts

Putting together an end-of-semester event for my class close to Finals is probably not the best idea. My excuse? I was constrained by Hollywood and Holidays.

The Fantastic Beasts movie sequel was released in the U.S. the weekend before Thanksgiving. I make it a point not to go to the movies on opening weekend to avoid the crowds. The next weekend was Thanksgiving. Then the next weekend was my General Chemistry take-home Exam #3. That left this weekend, more specifically, today. Amazingly, three-quarters of my small Honors class came out to lunch at a nearby mall, and most of them also watched the movie. But to warm up for the event, we had a class discussion on magic, energy and science yesterday afternoon.

As pre-reading, I had directed my students to an early blog post that hinted at the relationship between magic and energy, both mental and physical. In class, I gave a brief intro as to why I thought the topic was interest and its relationship to interdisciplinarity, inquiry and the liberal arts. I distinguished between spells, potions and imbuing objects with magic – and why one might choose different approaches. I had the students suggest magic spells of interest (mostly with reference to the Harry Potter series). Once we had about fifteen on the board, we divided up into small groups to analyze the spells, in particular the students would attempt to rank the spells by energy cost and difficulty.

The ‘fun’ part (at least for me) is that figuring out the difficulty of a spell requires thinking very specifically about how exactly the spell causes matter to interact. For example, a levitation spell could involve diminishing local gravitational effects. How would you do that? Do you decrease the mass of the objects, and if so how? Or do you move air particles underneath the object to push the object upwards? Or you could create a vacuum above the object by moving air particles away? Depending on how you effected the spell, different energy considerations would be required. We’ve been learning about the properties of gases in general chemistry, and not surprisingly many of the student ideas had to do with moving particles around.

Creating water via aguamenti was deemed one of the easier spells, if the method used was to draw water vapor from the surroundings and condense it in a particular location. More difficult would be finding a source of hydrogen to react with the relatively abundant oxygen in air to create water; this would also require a sufficient source of energy to break chemical bonds before the atoms can recombine to form H₂O. Resurrection would be the most difficult, and certainly more difficult than a killing spell.

The vanishing spell brought up discussion about whether you were making an object merely invisible or whether the object was teleported or even whether the spell was used to manipulate a hallucination in the mind of someone else. Memory spells were thought to be difficult – as the neurobiology isn’t well understood, and perhaps hallucinatory perceptions would be similarly difficult. I briefly brought up invisibility cloaking in real life although forgot to mention the related ‘ring of protection’. We did discuss how a shield spell such as protego might be effected by moving particles in the air to create a barrier.

I was a little disappointed that the movie (in my opinion) did not provide much interesting fodder for future discussion on magical theory. There wasn’t as much about the magical beasts either, unlike the first Fantastic Beasts with the demiguise. The climax did have energy-beasts, but otherwise there wasn’t anything too fantastic. I did enjoy seeing Nicolas Flamel saying he was immortal because he was an alchemist, and also having no food in the house. Apparently being immortal didn’t require him to eat. That being said, the movie was well executed, had good special effects, a somewhat interesting storyline (although a little convoluted) and had the prerequisite set up for its sequel. My overall rating: the movie was good, enjoyable, but not fantastic.