Einstein and the magician · ↗ medium.com

A friend told me the other day that I might enjoy the writer Chuck Klosterman. He pointed me toward his famous “23 Questions I Ask Everybody I Meet In Order To Decide If I Can Really Love Them”, a set of hypotheticals meant to be argued over at a bar.

I haven’t read the whole list yet, but I did get a chance to argue a little over the first question:

Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can’t learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he’s doing these five tricks with real magic. It’s not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the aether and he can move the coin through space. He’s legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?

So what is more impressive, to uncover the laws of physics or to break them in relatively trivial ways?

My mind jumped to a related distinction. Presumably, the magician’s abilities are innate, whereas Einstein’s discoveries were the result of hard-fought intellectual effort. This, in turn, reminded me of Aristotle’s distinction between virtue and self-control. The virtuous person does the right thing easily because his desires are properly ordered. The self-controlled person must struggle against his desires but succeeds anyway. Aristotle considers the first person more fully virtuous, although the second may strike us as more impressive.

Still, I think I am going to go with the magician here. Smashing the laws of physics is its own kind of discovery, no?