Engineering mathemagics

118 comments

Full bridge rectifier¿
Thick eye brows intensifies!
- First thing that went through my mind lol
  
  Yes, with Mehdi's enthusiastic pronounciation, +1

looks at schematic
FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIAH!!
eyebrow dance
- I heard the "OUTCH!" In this image.
- it gender transitions the AC to DC
  
  And generates heat!
  
  Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
  
  so, from bi to either gay or straight, unless it passes an inverter, then becomes bi again

the diagram is an AC to DC converter.

That diagram is just heat with extra steps.
- I mean, yea. The people designing the AC to DC power supplies often don't care what you use them for, why would they bother putting schematics for a real load on their diagram?
- That's what someone who doesn't understand magic would say.
  Follow the spell incorrectly and that is indeed all you would get.
- That's what I was thinking. Depending on the supply that'll start a fire.
  
  It's a basic AC rectifier, the resistor represents an arbitrary DC load. You use similar circuits all the time, though generally with additional failsafes and some mechanism of smoothing out the rectified current.
- That's not a resistor it's actually a BIG LOAD. The diagram would better show it as a reactive load (usually just a rectangle) since most real loads are reactive. Get it?

RF engineer here, living the life of magic in the air and space!

Yeah but it's too realistic, I want something convenient! Let me read one book and gain the power to create floating ice! Not read like 5 giant books and stufy for years so that I can create a microwave 😔
No shade to microwaves, one of my favorite magic items
- Hello every wizard protagonist in every fantasy YA novel ever.

https://xkcd.com/730/

Squint at this (from this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons_in_the_Ars_Goetia) and these might be either ancient sigils or electronic symbols*.

EDIT: Fixed a typo
- This one's a bit interestingly shaped...
  
  It's a house fly!
  
  Hang on. I've seen that tattoo!
  
  Got a lot going on there mister
  
  If that is a dick, it looks like it has some very serious STDs.
- Okay, this is dying for me to learn Godot and make a game
  
  Doooo it!

Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke: Any technology is indistinguishable from magic, to the sufficiently ignorant.
- Clarke's Maxim: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
  Corollary / Contrapositive: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
  
  My version seems like another good corollary.

Said it before and I'll say it again: just because you understand the magic doesn't make it any less magical. A wizard may know the ins and outs of their spells, but they're still spells. Our entire universal is fucking magical, we just happen to have a decent understanding of why (some) of it functions the way it does. Jiggle a quark here and another may jiggle the same way somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, that's fucking wild and magical and incredible, and just because we have some level of understanding behind the mechanics doesn't make it not magic. It just makes it a hard magic system.
- Like the way you think Dharms
  
  I'm not sure if "Dharms" was a typo or a nickname, but that's the first time I've gotten that, and I genuinely like it. Like, what a great nickname. Love it.

We always joked it was black magic but its literally on the name.
- An actual textbook cover. I mean... An ancient grimoire of the dark arts
  
  Edit: I almost forgot about the sequel
  
  The bible of my people
  
  Omg I cant believe this is real.
- I always thought that would be a good style for a dart board. Score would be -dB(return loss)
  
  Genius concept. just need a catchy name.

Lightning would be wild magic
- Makes sense. Could be harnessed to do something probably but incredibly dangerous to do so.
  
  And some people are wild mages
  
  Just ask Doc Brown.
  
  1.21 jigawatts.

That summoning circle is gonna need some filtering... Jus sayin...
- While it helps the ritual it isn't strictly required, so it can be easier for an apprentice to achieve.

Um akshually, that's a rectification circle.

It's chemicals that make signals jump between neurons in your head. Electricity acts entirely withing single neurons.
Also, that's a control spell, not a summoning one.
- I was really hoping someone would catch this. I'm glad someone else was also paying attention in biology
- that's crazy to think about. which NT is responsible for sending a signal along my vagus nerve to my brain? what NTs regulate the functions of the sympathetic nervous system? how can transport as quickly as my body reacts? I need to know more!
  how quickly do NTs even travel? it feels like electricity because it's nearly instantaneous! how do they do that so fast???
  
  it feels like electricity because it’s nearly instantaneous!
  It takes hundreds of ms for a signal to go from your brain to your foot. Electricity on wires travels several times around the world in that time.
  But for most of the distance the signals do travel as electricity. (At least the ones that get to be electricity, our brain has several kinds of signals.) It's just a particularly slow form of electricity.
- Listen here witch!!

We don’t know what the fuck consciousness is.
- In any case, it's powered with electricity.
  
  Is it even something that’s powered?

You think a rectified transformer is a magic circle? Get a load of the Smith Chart

I'd expand it to electromagnetic fields or something instead of just electricity.

When we figure out how to manipulate elctro-weak at scale, it will be magic.
Electro-mag is pretty crazy already, I agree. The ICP can't even figure out how they work.
- Explain, please
  
  When the environment is energetic enough, the electromagnetic force and the weak force unify into the electroweak force. The weak interaction controls radioactive decay.
  We can control electromagnetic force "at scale", IMO. It's not freely, but we have networks of electromagnetic systems that span continents.
  If we could control the weak force at the same scale... I'm not sure what wonders we might unlock. At the very least, I imagine we could "clean" instead of just "contain" radioactive waste, at least low-level stuff.

For me, the weirdest thing is that when a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, it experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion; this results in the particle tracing out a curved path through the field. Like ... what the actual fuck? Why in hell would the universe be this way?
- That's... huh...
  Hey!!! Physicists!!! Can we get your input???
  (Unless you're a physicist, in which case... fuck)
  
  I mean, imagine if friction worked like this. You'd push a heavy object ... and it would move to the left (or maybe the right?) like it was on ice.
  FWIW I do have a Physics undergraduate degree. It doesn't help in this case.
  
  Yea I only have a bachelor's in physics, can't explain the black magic fuckery that is electromagnetism. Go find someone with a PhD, I bailed to be an engineer
- Why in hell would the universe be this way?
  Bcz it's a simulation, or god is fucking with us. Who knows which one it is 🤷‍♀️

Gotta love the progression in this.

While I fully agree, I thought the distinction was unbreakable rules.
The laws of physics can’t be broken, even, under any circumstances, everywhere, at any time.
Whereas magic is more like there is an exception to every rule kind of deal. It’s far more like software, as in it’s mostly fully logically consistent except for random spots where devs took some shortcuts to make life easier.
- I think the “exception to every rule” part is really dependent on which type of magic the writer is using. Many writers do establish hard rules for their magic. In those cases, it’s less “magic is the exception” and more “magic is engrained into the laws of physics.”
  
  Hard magic systems are my favourites, usually. The limitations are more interesting than the possibilities.
- I don't think magic is objective; I think it is in the eye of the beholder.
  If the audience don't understand it, or can be distracted from seeing the truth of it, it's magic or a miracle or whatever to them. And the magician - if they know what they're doing - can wield power over the rubes.
  So before you understand - say, magnetism - better, lodestones can be seen as magical or heaven-sent.
  There'll be physical phenomena today like 'spooky action at a distance' or something where even quite learned observers might not 100% know the laws of physics. Some exploit of that can appear as magical until the laws are figured out and well communicated.
  If it turns out that the underlying laws are stochastic rather than deterministic, then there's always going to be some grey areas i think.

The mages of Electrical Engineering reseach the tools and formulars to control the magic. The mages of Hardware Engineering develop under great effort the sigils and rituals of how the rocks must be processed. The Warlocks of the CPU use the near infinit possibilities of algorithms and the power of the evolved rocks to create worlds nobody could ever have imagined (in exchange for the ability to go outside).
- (in exchange for the ability to go outside)
  Real

Only thing dumber than a mechanical engineer is an electrical engineer trying to design a housing.
You want to understand the deep magic, talk to electricians and technicians.
- There's a lot of machinists who think they are hot shit, so fitting username.
  
  Yup. Thing is, it's known that 'machinists' coming out of trade school aren't worth a damn for years. The same is true of enginneers, yet they turn them loose on CAD and they create designs that make everyone miserable.
  This is one of the big problems with SpaceX/Blue Origin/Firefly. The designs are piss poor because the majority of their engineers are green.
  Engineers shouldn't have design authority until they've spent a few years manufacturing.

Hm, the stuff in wires is electrical current, but the stuff in nerves is static electricity based on an electrochemical gradient. Yeah i guess that all falls under the heading of electricity. No quibbles, carry on.
- current does flow in nerves
  
  The spice must flow

But the summoning circle doesn't do anything on its own, you have to build it and then go and find the electricity to plug into it yourself
- Pretty sure that’s how it works in a lot of fiction. You draw the circle then activate it by putting in mana.
- Many summoning circles require a sacrifice, and this one is no different. This one requires a sacrifice of AC to summon DC.
  
  The law of equivalent exchange...
- Sure it does, it summons hot rock using the mana generated by torturing other rocks