Why Science Feels Like Magic

There’s a line you’ve probably heard before: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s quoted so often that it feels cliché, but when I think about what science actually does in our lives, it still rings true.

Science isn’t just about equations, labs, or white coats—it’s a way of pulling hidden patterns into the light. It’s how we know the age of the stars, the chemistry of the soil under our feet, or the way neurons fire when we fall in love. These are things people once only explained with myths and stories. Science doesn’t erase that wonder—it gives it new form.

Take something as ordinary as your phone. Inside that little rectangle is a cascade of physics, chemistry, and mathematics so deep it’s almost absurd. Electrons racing down circuits. Glass engineered at the molecular level. Satellites orbiting the earth, bouncing signals back and forth so you can look up a recipe or video call someone across an ocean. If that doesn’t feel like spellcraft, I don’t know what does.

The real magic, though, is how science collapses distance between what we can imagine and what we can actually do. Fire once felt divine. Flight was once a dream. Now we carry fire in our pockets and cross oceans in hours. Science gives us rituals of testing, failing, and refining until what seemed impossible becomes ordinary.

And yet—science never fully explains away the mystery. Knowing how photosynthesis works doesn’t make a tree less beautiful. If anything, understanding the machinery behind life makes the beauty sharper, deeper, stranger. The same goes for galaxies, bacteria, or even the way language evolves. Science lets us peer behind the curtain, but the curtain always stretches further.

That’s why science is magic to me. Not because it solves everything, but because it keeps expanding what’s possible while reminding us how much more there is to explore. Wonder doesn’t disappear in the face of knowledge—it multiplies.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.