Magic Particle

[Lucia]

Im trying to make a fantasy-esque magic system in which everything works pretty much the same as real life, except there's a sort of "magic particle" that makes magic possible, but with physics.In my story, this magic particle permeates the entire universe, and has been there since the creation of it. Half of the population of earth can control this magic particle to some extent. (Animals are also affected by this, and thus there's a couple of species of animals that specifically evolved alongside magic.)Basically, all this magic is supposed to follow the laws of physics, so for example an actual laser beam would never instantly vaporize things in real life, so it can't here either. The problem here comes with making that magic actually happen. The main problem is ceating the laser beam, not really how it'd work.My main goal here is to marry magic & physics to make a compromise between the two: the magic particle.

I think you rethink your question, as creating a "magical particle" which would smoothly fit into modern scientific understanding would require at least a degree to get it somewhat plausible to an expert and go right above most reader's heads anyways. Instead, I recommend you go a different route that will solve your problem (or at least what I think you want to create.

You can use these curves to calculate what sorts of spells that a magically-capable creature would be able to accomplish. To ensure the spell is possible to cast, you just need to make sure that the power levels and caloric costs never exceed the max. For example:

The spellcaster focuses themselves on converting their own power output into radiation. Converting from the spellcaster's chemical energy to radiation is something that mana particles can just do. The spellcaster needs to be skilled enough to manifest where this radiation escapes to be a concentrated point and needs to get all the radiation onto a proper wavelength and pointing in the right direction. How the particles get the energy from the spellcaster and into the point of conversion isn't important, you can just say that mana particles move on a different plane of reality, or like electrons, don't have a precise location but rather a probability distribution of where they're likely to be. Then, you can just use standard laser power levels and their effects. For example, a 60 watt co2 laser can burn through plywood around a centimeter or two thick provided it's properly focused. Now if you throw in some realism in the form of spell efficiency modifiers (presumably no fantasy spellcaster knows the most efficient mana pattern possible to convert to radiation) and have the beam loose coherence after distance (as focusing the beam takes immense spellcaster skill), you can have a "realistic" laser spell. The spellcaster might be firing off 80 watts of laser power (at an expenditure of 200 watts) and such laser beams would be able to instantly blind people, and give nasty burns at a distance. 80 watts would not be enough to cut anything at range. At the extreme, if a skilled spellcaster goes "all out" and is able to get off a 2000 watt beam before they fall unconscious from exhaustion that could do some damage. 2kw laser systems are cable of cutting centimeter-thick sheets of metal with ease.

A means of generating tychions could achieve things like: influence the weather, influence a person's decisions, or influence the flip of a coin. If you fell out of a window you would land in a huge pile of cushions. If you bought a lottery ticket, you'd win but not the main prize because that would attract attention that would be bad luck.

Generating anti-tychions could be a method of bestowing a curse. Imagine the victim doused in them. He might never win a game of luck. He might have bad weather every day. Unless he wanted rain for his garden in which case it would be sunny. If HE fell out of a window, he would land on a big stack of kitchen cutlery.

Having a black cat cross your path could actually be unlucky because they suck up all the tychions in the neighborhood. Breaking a mirror could drive them away. The triangle a ladder makes could be a place that tychions are excluded. A horseshoe could be a structure that catches them and holds on to them.

Creating good luck particles might also create bad luck particles in equal number. Getting rid of the bad ones might mean you needed a victim. Or you might have to invest a lot of time accepting bad luck in order to save up for that one important time when you need all the luck you can manage. Or, you might get robbed of your stored good luck. What a stroke of bad luck!

One possibility is that it can, under special circumstances, interfere in specific ways with the normal fundamental forces so as to alter their effects. For most magical effects, really, you need only alter the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions.

For instance, in a specific area, it might increase, decrease, or redirect the effect of gravitational force. The applications of that are obvious; flight, levitation, increasing or reducing weight, tossing things around, and so on. Fool around with the electromagnetic field and you can do things like alter light, create lightning, throw around magnetic fields, fool with chemical processes, or even break down an object into its constituent elements (aka, the disintegration spell).

You could technobabble it by saying it's something like visible light: most of the time it's incoherent and doesn't have a huge physical effect. Focus it and make it coherent, and like light now you have a laser that's potentially capable of a great deal of physical effect.

Your particle could be one that modifies the fundamental forces around it depending on how it is manipulated (I'll leave the details up to you). The fundamental forces, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravity, and electromagnetism, together control literally every particle interaction in the known universe. If your particle can affect even one of those forces, say it could increase or decrease the local weak nuclear force, you could do virtually anything. You could change atoms into other atoms, affect interactions with electrons, even create elements that would otherwise be unstable. From there you could affect gravity to focus radiation, and boom you have a magic laser based in physics.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a physicist, there's probably something heinously wrong with my scenario, but from my amateur understanding (watching a lot of physics lectures) the statement about being able to do virtually anything by modifying the fundamental forces should be accurate.

The dark matter is unlikely to appear in clumps let alone planets we would recognize, or else the gravity from those ghost objects would make itself apparent on less than a galactic scale. So there's a different physics - maybe the dark matter is as homogeneous as gas, but if you can see it you can see there are intricate patterns of earth dark matter, fire dark matter etc. that look like dragons and unicorns and what not, and those patterns are stable even if the particles whiz through them rapidly.

This is unknown fantasy physics, so you'll have to drib-and-drab it out in teasing morsels, interspersed with any reasonable-sounding dark matter research that comes up. The key thing though is you need some self-consistent explanation of what makes dark matter sometimes interact with the muggles, rather than none of the time as we think.

The Higgs field contains a non-zero potential in a vacuum, and it's this non-zero vacuum potential that couples to charge giving charged particles their tiny bits of intrinsic mass. And, because these basic charged particles are moving around at relativistic velocities, this tiny intrinsic mass is greatly multiplied to the basic masses of the particles we know.

It's possible this magic particle is what gives the Higgs field that strange seeming energy from nowhere. Maybe, additionally, the magic particle couples through mechanisms like the Higgs to create the intrinsic electroweak charges.

Frankly, this is the premise of thaumaturgy in The Thaumechanical Man. Thaumaturgy is a field, similar to electromagnetism, mediated by the thaum particle. It behaves a lot like electromagnetism, complete with its own rules for conductance, transmission, and energy translation efficiencies. Thaumechanics use it to power their machines and homunculuses, which are effectively thaumechanical robots.

The issue you'll run into is that, if you define it tightly enough, it stops being fantasy and becomes science fiction. This is why TTM is categorized as sci-fi instead of fantasy. It's "sufficiently advanced magic being indistinguishable from technology."

The magic particle can store a maximum amount of energy and then release it later. It normally interacts weakly with matter so can easily go through regular matter. They can bind together to do telekinesis. They maybe can resonate with each other to connect to distant energons.

It takes magical stamina (Mana points, mp) to cause the magic particle to store or release the energy (both directions cost the same). The mage can then steal energy from one system and then release it later, but limited by how much mp the transfer costs.

Context. The large jet kinetic power and non-thermal processes occurring in the microquasar SS 433 make this source a good candidate for a very high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray emitter. Gamma-ray fluxes above the sensitivity limits of current Cherenkov telescopes have been predicted for both the central X-ray binary system and the interaction regions of SS 433 jets with the surrounding W50 nebula. Non-thermal emission at lower energies has been previously reported, indicating that efficient particle acceleration is taking place in the system.

In this work, a search for VHE emission from the microquasar SS 433 with the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescopes (MAGIC) and High Energy Spectroscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) is reported, following dedicated observations of the source spanning several years and taken at orbital/precession phases where gamma-ray absorption should be minimal. The SS 433/W50 interaction regions are also investigated, for which a wider data set is used that is not restricted to the low-absorption phases criterion applied to the study of the inner system. The observations and analysis results are described in Sect. 3 and are later discussed in Sect. 4.

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