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Comment by umsm | Hacker News Reader

A professor in college once told me that if you can't explain a technology, you might as well assume it's magic.

Cue the Arthur C. Clark quote:

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable 
   from magic.”

I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.

That's Clarke's Third Law. I'm fond of the First Corollary to Clarke's First Law (allegedly first mentioned by Benford):

    "Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

There's work to be done, fellow hackers, so let's get to it. ;)

Can't edit my comment, and no one will care at this date, but...

s/First Law/Third Law/

Obviously the quote I posted is the corollary to the quote negativity posted. Derp derp derp.

Isn't that how medicine works?

I agree. When I first started looking into medications like Aderall, it was surprising to find how little we actually know about how medicine works.

Take the above example - we really don't know how it works. We measure the amount of dopamine/serotonin in the spine before and after you take it so we assume it increases the presence of those chemicals in the brain, but it's not really mapped out.

A lot of people have the misconception that we understand the body the way we understand other technologies. That you can balance a chemical equation and deduce how something will effect the body.

While we understand a lot, this really isn't the case. And for all practical purposes it sometimes is treated like "magic".

We even have a Ministry of Medical Magic in the US now: http://nccam.nih.gov

Thats really depressing.

You know what they call alternative medicine that works?

Medicine.

(cf: Tim Minchin, 'Storm' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U)

The brain (and how it works) specifically is an area that modern medicine really hasn't figured out yet. I learned this when my father had a stroke. Talking to the doctors I learned that, unlike the rest of the body, our understanding of the brain is still sufficiently primitive that it's treated as sort of a black box.

Yes. As an example, you'd be surprised by how few MDs that are experts in their respective fields have a detailed understanding of the pharmacokinetics of the drug they're prescribing. They just take the dose the drug company did trials at and go with it.

One reason is that it takes a lot of modeling to understand why to dose 1x twice a week vs 2x once a week, so everyone gets roughly the same dose.

that wasn't really very helpful or education of your professor. What, I wonder was, their point? I can't explain why the earth's core is still so damn hot after cooling for several billion years, but I know it's not magic. I could name you many areas that I'm not an expert in, but I know for a fact none of them rely on magic, except possible quantum mechanics. The jury's still out on that being magic.

The cooling of the earth and why the core is hot is actually a very interesting topic. Lord Kelvin (who has the temperature unit named after him) came up with an argument that the earth had to be 20 to 40 million years old if you assumed it started as a molten lump of rock and solved the equations for how long it would take to cool. (This age for the earth made both the evolutionists and creationists unhappy, by the way.)

He had a very clever argument, but the factor he was missing was radioactive decay, which provides an additional heat source. He also carefully figured that the Sun couldn't be more than 20 million years old, but here he was missing the existence of fusion as a power source.

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