Magic VS Technology

I just watched ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix’ today and can't help seeing the obvious parallels between magic and technology. Harry Potter's world portrays an alternate reality. In his world, newspapers (The Daily Prophet) could display movie clips and photographs show moving pictures instead of static ones. Mails and envelopes could fly to their recipients and even talk and disintegrate automatically after delivering their messages. These ideas may not be as far-fetched as they seem. There is already much research done on thin, flexible active matrix displays for several years by companies such as Siemens, Philips and Plastic Logic. These displays are as thin and as flexible as paper and can display moving images and store thousands of pages of text. Some of these displays are already in the prototype stage and we can expect to see them in the market in a few years time. As for flying and talking mails, I do not think that will be necessary, for we already have e-mails which are faster and allow us to add file attachments such as voice or movie clips.

In the realm of transportation, Harry Potter’s world depicts wizards and witches riding on flying broomsticks and using port-keys, which transports people to another place in a somewhat fashion to teleportation. Well, we may not have flying broomsticks but we do have flying cars. Yes, you did not read wrongly. There is a company called Moller International that produces personal commuter Skycars which as the name suggests, take you to the sky. The Skycar is a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicle and does not need a runway. In the recent ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’ movie, the Silver Surfer rides on a flying ‘surf board’, but the difference is that the ‘surf board’ is supposed to be a piece of advanced alien technology and not magic. As for teleportation of human beings, such technology may not exist now but that does not preclude such a possibility in the future. Scientists have already succeeded in teleporting a single photon via a process called quantum entanglement. But to teleport a macroscopic object like a human which consists of trillions of atoms is far beyond our technological abilities currently. In the process of teleportation, the object to be teleported is to be split into the individual constituent atoms and sub-atomic particle and then the quantum states of all these particles are recorded and the information transmitted to the designated teleporter to be reconstructed. So effectively, the teleported object is destroyed and then reconstructed. In Harry Potter’s world, doors could lead you to another place or rooms that are much larger than they look from the outside. To achieve something like this, we will have to enter other dimensions. String theory states that there are 10 dimensions, 6 of them being spatial dimensions and the remaining 4 are time dimensions. In M-theory, there are 11 dimensions. We are unable to see the other dimensions because we exist in three dimensions and it is difficult for us to visualize a higher dimensional reality. By moving in another dimension, we will appear to disappear and enter another place. We do not yet know how to move in these other dimensions or whether it is possible to do so in the first place, so extra-dimensional travel will remain a fantasy for now.

The ability to move objects without physical contact is also a prominent aspect in Harry Potter’s world. In fact it is possible to do so, using a method called acoustic levitation. However, scientists have only been able to lift very light loads using acoustic levitation till now. Perhaps in time we will find some ways of moving larger and heavier objects without physical contact. A professor called John Hutchinson has reportedly claimed to have devised a way of doing so by tapping into vacuum energy. However, there have been much doubt and controversy over his claims.

Metamorphosis is another thing which caught my eye while watching the Harry Potter movie. In the movie Sirius Black could transform into a dog and back into the human form. This reminded me of ‘Transformers’, which I watched recently too. The idea of machines that could transform might not seem too far-fetched but living organisms that could transform into other things stretch the mind. I have been thinking how this may be done in a scientific way but have not been able to think of any satisfactory idea. A cluster of nanorobots could do the job by reconfiguring themselves into any desired structure but it will be impossible for a living organism to do that as all the cells have to be reorganized.

There are many other things in the movie which I might have left out in my discussion but my main point here is that fantasy serves as a source of inspiration for invention and technological progress. The renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke stated in his 3rd law that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Indeed our current technology might seem like magic to cavemen and perhaps in time the magic depicted in Harry Potter’s world will become something common in our everyday life.