I always think that magic should reflect the "real" world. Devices of the time in general didn't do anything new; they took tasks and made them easier and faster. A device like that, I would expect it to take magic and make it easier to do, maybe put more powerful magic in the hands of people who might otherwise not have access to it. Things that used to require a lot of power would suddenly become things people can't live without. And of course the old fashioned way is "better" and some people would be disgusted with the new, cheap knockoffs.
I like the predictive idea, you could take omens and assign them a mathematical value; I dunno, have the machine analyze the angles and curves of the veins on a chicken's liver, as opposed to the diviner eyeballing it. Or reverse it, rather than the geometry of a particular omenous thing being important, have the geometry itself be the omen, and the machine could assist in picking out what mathematical patterns reflected in nature mean what. Maybe Pi and Phi have a special meaning when they turn up in strange places, or sine, cosine and tangent correspond to cardinal, fixed, and mutable per astrology, positive and negative results of a formula indicate a positive or negative answer to a question. Maybe certain formulas would be used to answer certain question and there could be rules on how to assign values to people involved in the question and where the values would be placed in the formula, and the famous constants represent certain figures or larger constants of the world, maybe important locations or something.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yati
no subject
Date: 2010-06-04 01:56 am (UTC)I like the predictive idea, you could take omens and assign them a mathematical value; I dunno, have the machine analyze the angles and curves of the veins on a chicken's liver, as opposed to the diviner eyeballing it. Or reverse it, rather than the geometry of a particular omenous thing being important, have the geometry itself be the omen, and the machine could assist in picking out what mathematical patterns reflected in nature mean what. Maybe Pi and Phi have a special meaning when they turn up in strange places, or sine, cosine and tangent correspond to cardinal, fixed, and mutable per astrology, positive and negative results of a formula indicate a positive or negative answer to a question. Maybe certain formulas would be used to answer certain question and there could be rules on how to assign values to people involved in the question and where the values would be placed in the formula, and the famous constants represent certain figures or larger constants of the world, maybe important locations or something.
My 2 cents.