Science vs Sorcery: Wicked Edition

What really is the difference between science and sorcery?

In the novel Wicked, Glinda poses the question to her instructor during Sorcery class. She and her classmates had previously observed Doctor Nikidik’s “Extract of Biological Intention” imbue a seemingly dead inanimate object with a life of its own in… wait for it… Life Science class. Unfortunately, the details of the theory are not heard by the students, because Nikidik drones boringly – like Professor Binns if this was Harry Potter’s History of Magic class. I would have been very interested to know about the Essence of Life, but all the students heard was:

A little sauce for the soup [mumble]… as if creation were an unconcluded [mumble]… notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient [mumble]… and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the [mumble]… behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of [mumble]…

Then bam! Said object given new freedom of intention almost kills a student. Suddenly everyone pays attention.

I’d love to get my hands on some Extract of Biological Intention. It sounds chemical. Maybe the essence can be distilled from some mixture created by a Potions master, though none is mentioned in Wicked. The existence of such an extract would dissolve completely the already fuzzy dividing line between chemistry and biology, between a Physical Science and a Life Science. If I could make or acquire said potion sometime this year – no, I’m not actually going to bother trying – it would fit very nicely with the team-taught class I’m planning with a biology colleague next spring, since I’m still on sabbatical this spring semester! It would be a wicked demo (pun intended), and students would pay attention every class onwards.

Too bad there’s no other information forthcoming, so back to the story in Wicked.

Glinda is now in Miss (why not Doctor?) Greyling’s Sorcery class wondering about the division between science and sorcery. After all, what she and her fellow students observed in Life Science class looked like a spell had been cast on the inanimate object. Think about it. When you see what you thought was a dead thing behaving as a living thing would, you could imagine living things as being magically animated via sorcery. Let’s consider Greyling’s response.

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled… it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.

First, there’s a distinction between reductionism and emergence, the former associated with science and the latter with sorcery. My view as a scientist is that reductionism and emergence are two sides of the same explanative coin. Although reductionism is what students are mostly exposed to in science class, there’s a sort of symmetry that binds it to emergence – a harmony of constraint and diversification, possibly explaining why life is modular and why subsystems can be modeled using coarse-grained approaches.

Synthesis versus analysis? As a chemist, these two fundamental activities are once again two sides of the same coin. When I discuss research opportunities with students, I use the words Making and Measuring to broadly describe the activities of professional chemists. Some of us do a bit more of one than the other, but they’re both crucial to the chemical enterprise and to the chemical education of our students. We teach our students make molecules and measure their properties.

A distinction is also made between the arts and the sciences. Sorcery is the zenith of the Arts, according to Greyling. We might call sorcery a dark art today, but in stories involving magic, sorcery is presented more as a skill than an art. There’s a similar confusion over the meaning of a “liberal arts” education. We think the “arts” refers to Art, conjuring in our minds painting, dance, theatre, and the like. But in ancient and medieval parlance, the arts are what we would today call skills. Medieval science and engineering were “trade arts”. Sorcery, as least in its practical rather than theoretical form, would be more of a trade art.

I’ve previously argued that Potions is more science than art, chemistry being the natural equivalent of Potions in the non-magical world. I would further claim that scientific knowledge extends to superior magical prowess, but that’s another long topic. But even in our Muggle world, the distinction between science and art is not clear-cut. Expertise in the sciences has much in common with expertise in the arts. Novices bungling in the sciences bungle in the arts in similar ways. Different kinds of knowing, but still within Knowledge unified.

But the novel isn’t about science or magic. It’s about people and politics, societies and communities, friendship and betrayal, what makes us human, why we see others as less-than-human. It’s about the foibles and problems of life, some we think can be alleviated by science, so why not sorcery too? Wizards should try to improve dire conditions. Greyling continues:

Can there be a higher desire to change the world? Not through Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?

Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, has weaved a clever tale in creating the world of Oz. The main protagonist, Elphaba, who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, is born standing out with her green skin and sharp teeth. She eventually goes to college, but unlike her roommate Glinda, Elphaba pursues what we would call the natural sciences and not sorcery. It’s an interesting tale of growth, confusion, (im)maturity, and the aforementioned foibles of life. The nature of science and sorcery is a tiny figment of the story, a mere sideline that I’ve chosen to highlight.

I’ve yet to see the award-winning musical based on Maguire’s book, but I’ve been told there are significant differences. I’m now looking forward to experiencing the musical, as part of expanding my experience beyond the philistine. While I enjoyed parts of the novel and its overall intriguing storyline, there are scattered distractions that weaken the plot. The ending is rushed, messy, does not hang together well, and in my opinion this makes it a letdown ultimately. Perhaps I will better enjoy the musical reinterpretation, although I suspect it will not incorporate additional information about the difference between science and sorcery, at least in theory; but it might blend science and art on the stage in joyous sensation.