I don’t want to be taken for a curmudgeon. I love things that seem magical, I love to be amazed by illusions, but I’m annoyed by magical thinking. After the Plato Code, I’m more than usually primed to pull back the curtains. The “magic trick” attributed to Albertus Magnus by William Kalush, founder of the Conjuring Arts Research Center, is an interesting bit of the history of magic and magicians, but don’t you wonder how it works? Isn’t it also a kind of experiment—part of the history of science?
By fotogranina
The trick was this: if you hold a fly under water it will drown, but if you then bury it in ashes, it will come back to life. Nice trick if you want to handle a fly, plus it has a little Christological twist. How does it work, though?
Clearly it tells us something about how flies breathe. If you were a medieval saint-in-the-making like Albertus Magnus, and you only had the tools available in the 1200′s, I don’t think you could design a better experiment to test this hypothesis: flies breath through the surface of their bodies.
from biology-resources.com
Insects don’t breathe through their mouths. Instead they have openings in their exoskeletons, called “spiracles,” that lead to tiny “tracheal tubes” that take oxygen straight to their cells. Albertus’s “trick” might make you suspect this because, while the water suffocates the fly (as it would you), all the ashes can really do is dry it off, which allows it to breathe again and revive (you wouldn’t be so lucky). The next step might be to cover flies with finer and finer powders to see whether a fine enough powder wouldn’t also suffocate them, which would tell you something about the size of any openings through which they were getting air. You might also try submerging different parts or amounts of their bodies to see where they’re breathing.
Magic tricks and illusions should amaze us. They’re a lot of fun. But after we’re amazed we should always ask, how did that work? and try to figure it out. In his interview Mr. Kalush was in a bind. He was showing off his library, but he couldn’t reveal to much about the knowledge it contains. In an almost Borgesian way, it is a library he can’t let anyone use because magicians need a steady supply of people who don’t know any better or their tricks will stop amazing. Kudos to Mr. Kalush, though, for his teasing presentation intended to to encourage the curious rather than just impress the lazy. He went on:
“I’ve already told you that it’s somewhere in this book in Medieval Latin,” he said, “You might be able to find a copy of this book someplace and find somebody who can translate it… I wouldn’t mind helping you find the method, but I wouldn’t want to just tell you the method, because what we’re doing here is teaching more than just exposing secrets.”
If you’re going to tell somebody something that’s already known, you might as well make it entertaining. That’s what teachers do, and if you’re entertained enough by relearning what’s already discovered, you make go on to enjoy making discoveries of your own.
