Science is magic in the same sense that knowledge is power. To say knowledge is power we at least need to know what knowledge is. Not easy. After that it is pretty much impossible to know what power is. For example, to squeeze the problem down as much as we can, take potential energy. Where is the energy? The simple example is a round rock at the top of a hill. It has the potential to roll down the hill. It has this potential because it has not rolled yet, so already we get the idea that power is not, but there are so many other situations that could also create potential energy, so many that potential energy is really impossible to define. Thats just one small part of what power could be. So to say knowledge is power, or even Foucault’s power is knowledge, is very pessimistic. It assumes that power isn’t anything more than what we know about it. How do we know that? We don’t. We just sort of wish our knowledge were that magnificent. Or in Foucault’s case, we wish our power could always be known, maybe by the magnificence of our power.

So science has the same relationship to magic as knowledge does to power. It is silly to say as soon as it becomes a science it is no longer magic. That is merely an uninsightful, semantic argument. But magic could be so much more than what has been reduced to a science. We choose to keep our eyes where the flashlight beam in the dark is shining, maybe because we like to see (know), maybe because the vague, shifting shapes we would see in the dark, if we looked beyond our beam of light, are too frightening.