If you ask a historian what magic is, you will probably be told that magic is a word describing anything we do not understand. For example, a thousand years ago, electricity would have been called magic, cars would have been magic, and computers would have been magic. There is a fundamental flaw in this argument and even in the common analogies. A thousand years ago, electricity, cars, and computers were not called magic. "Would have been" is worthless when talking about the semantics of language, because there is no proof. A thousand years ago, the word "magic" (or the appropriate translation, since modern English did not exist) referred to things that people actually observed. It was also sometimes used in reference to things they imagined. Magic is not a word used to describe something that has never been observed or imagined. It is used to describe things that have been observed or imagined. Now, people can imagine things that they have not observed, however they can almost never imagine something that is discovered in the future, accurately. For instance, I believe it was H.G. Wells who wrote about space travel, but the ship was some kind of wooden boat. This is imagined magic. The real thing is a metal spaceship that makes copious amounts of fire and smoke. Electricity, cars, and computers had never even been imagined a thousand years ago, as such. The things that were magic a thousand years ago were things like divination (still considered magic by many today) and gunpowder. A few hundred years before that gunpowder was not magic though, because it did not exist. Electricity was not magic a thousand years ago, because you cannot call something magic if you cannot at least imagine it. In fact, nothing has ever been called magic before it was observed either in reality or in imagination. This leads to a different conclusion. Gunpowder was magic a thousand years ago, because most people did not understand it. Some people must have understood it though, otherwise it would not have existed to be called magic. So, something is magic if there are people who understand it, but they are very few.
Now, you might ask about natural events. For instance, is lightning not magic? What is the difference between magic, nature, and acts of God? Historically, lightning was not magic. Rather, it was just an act of God or nature. Likewise, rains and floods were not magic. The difference is the agent. If something happens without human intervention, it is not magic. An eclipse is the wrath of an angry God or a natural phenomenon, not magic. Now, if a human could convince people that he or she was responsible for the eclipse, then it would be called magic. Otherwise, though, it was either nature or God causing it through whatever holy or unholy power. So again, magic is something that people understand, but the people who understand it are very few. It is also something that is caused by human action (or at least perceived to be so).
Now that we have had this philosophical discussion on the definition of magic, I want to apply this definition to modern times. What things exist today that are understood, but only by a very small percentage of the population? Most of modern technology, it turns out. Electricity is still magic, even though it was discovered and harnessed hundreds of years ago. Computers and computer programming are magic. Most people do not understand how an internal combustion engine works, and modern cars have embedded computers, so cars are magic. Mechanical engineering is magic. Physics is magic and especially quantum physics (string theory is not magic because no one really understands it, or maybe it is the imaginary kind of magic because it has no "practitioners"). Biology and genetics are also magic. In fact, there is more magic today than there has ever been in the history of the world, because there has been no time in history where more people used technology that they understood less. So, modern technology is magic. Now out of the above examples, some things are well understood by those who understand them, and others are poorly understood by those who understand them. Electricity is fairly well understood. Computers and programming are fairly well understood, along with classical physics, cars, and mechanical engineering. Biology is not so well understood, and quantum physics and genetics are pretty poorly understood. All of these things have potentially powerful applications, but few of them are really accessible to the general public. Otherwise stated, part of the reason many of these things are not understood by most people is that they are very difficult to learn, reliable information is hard to fine, and they have prerequisites that must be met before they can be understood (for instance, mechanical engineering and quantum physics require advanced math). This is why most of them require at least four years of college to gain even a partial understanding. There are a few of them, however, that are not that hard to learn. Electricity and computer science are actually easy to gain a good foundation in. It is common for students in these fields to already have prior experience in them, which they gained through the use of tutorials found on the internet (this is, in fact, how I gained my foundation in electrical engineering). One of the reasons many people find these subjects to be difficult is that tutorials, and often even college classes, are poorly designed for people who have no prior experience. Technium Adeptus, aims to solve this problem.
Our goal is to teach people magic. Instead of starting with tons of theory that is hard to understand without any practical experience with technology, we are going to start with application. Our tutorials/lessons will be designed in more of a walkthrough style that explains bits of theory as they are used. This will allow people to successfully complete projects without necessarily understanding exactly how everything works, but it will still provide the opportunity to learn. Because electrical components are reusable and the software we will be using is free, people who feel they need to go through a lesson multiple times to improve their understanding of the theory will not have any extra costs besides time (another reason electricity and computer programming are easier to learn). Our instructions may sometimes be a bit involved, but following them correctly will lead to correct results.
We believe that this learning style will be more effective because it is more natural. Most people seem to learn everyday things by following instructions and slowly picking up on how things work as they go. This learning style may not be suitable for formal learning like school because it tends to be slower, but it also seems to result in better long term memory and understanding of the subject. We hope that our readers will keep this in mind as they work through the tutorials. We also hope that they will experiment as they go and even work through some of the tutorials multiple times. Doing these things will help maximize the learning and retention. Our hope is that we can make learning magic easy enough that many people who might not otherwise even try will be able to learn with ease.
