Not to be that guy, but science is basically anything that gets studied/tested/researched. If you have the ability to cast spells and someone notices similarities and tries to categorize spells, that’s science. Studying how spells are made would be science. Studying the limitation of spells would be science. Testing news spells would be science. Etc.

So the big question is really how well understood is the science of magic in your world?

Does anyone actually know how it works or is it more like quantum mechanics with lots of theories but each still has limitations?

If magic is widespread and the beings using it are curious, chances are they’ve experimented with it and possibly taken notes about their experiments.

If magic offers great advantages then knowledge of it might be closely guarded by practitioners and not easily learned.

If magic can only be practiced by a certain species/family/etc. then general knowledge of how magic works could be much less accessible to the general population making it much more mysterious.

If not, then it’s likely there are schools that teach it to those who can use it and even those who can’t use it would likely still be taught about it. I mean, if you’re an engineer and you want to shape titanium and some spell can do that more easily than a mill or lathe, you’re going to want to know.

If you can heal with magic, non magic doctors would still want to be in the know about what can or can’t be cured with either medicine or magic.

If you mean science as in advanced physics or having digital devices, things will get more complicated if you want to make a logically consistent world. Like very complicated to the point it might take the joy out of world building. For example…

If there’s a spell that creates light/heat, where does the energy come from? You either violate thermodynamics or that energy comes from somewhere. OR the energy disappears after a while which might be a cool thing to think about.

If there’s a spell that freezes things, it violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way unless more heat (entropy) is generated somewhere else. If this generation somewhere else is somewhere really far away, you can create an infinite power source pretty easily.

Arguably teleportation may or may not violate relativity which, fun fact, might be the reason gold is gold colored and not silver colored so if you break relativity you might break some weird shit from the color of chemicals to the laws that hold your proteins together.

If magic has any visual effects, like an aura, it means magic interacts with the electromagnetic fields in a way that generates or manipulates photons. This could fuck up lots of digital stuff but also might be dangerous because color corresponds to frequency. If you can change the frequency could certain spells emit gamma radiation? Do invisible spells produce infrared or UV? If some spells interact with photons but some don’t then why?

Furthermore, air is a substance. If you cast a spell that explodes objects how does the spell know when it hits the object and not an air molecule? If the spell isn’t instant why does it have a specific speed? If it’s effected by matter then would casting a spell under water go slower? Does water explode if you cast an explosion while in it or does the spell hit the nearest solid before causing an effect?

If magic doesn’t interact with matter between the caster and the object, what medium transfers the information? What particles carry the magic force(s)? If magic particles don’t interact with physical matter how does a being made of that matter cast a spell? How does the being specify a target?

If spells have incantations, what makes those work? Can any sound create magic? Could a parrot accidentally cast a spell? If it’s in a specific language, why? What beings created that language? If magic just randomly happens to be a set of sounds that humans can make that seems rather coincidental yes?

If only certain creatures/races/families can use magic, why? How does the genetics of a being effect if it can or can’t interact with a fundamental field of this universe (magic)?

If it is genetic or physical in any way, with enough scientific study it should be possible to replicate it or remove it.

If it is metaphysical like it comes from the ‘soul’ then religion and science will overlap. Furthermore beings would likely use this to be prejudiced against any living thing that can’t do magic.

If all living things can do magic what about viruses? What about single celled bacteria? What specifically defines “living” in the context of magic and by what mechanism do those criteria enable the use of magic?

Anyway, the point is that if you try to get to technical and logical, it’s going to become a pain. The best bet, in my opinion, is to try avoiding the abundance of magic. If magic existed in our universe it would already have multiple scientific disciplines devoted to it. You’d be able to major in magic but more importantly, most of the general population would know fundamental things about magic and its limitations which means you’d likely need to explain your magic system more.

If you don’t want to get technical it might be best to not let your characters get technical. Keeping the knowledge of magic secretive/mysterious would help with this.

Or you can get completely lost in the world building and start writing out how many different magical fields there’d need to be and how they interact with elementary particles and how the thermodynamics of spells is rectified by events in those fields giving the illusion that thermodynamics was violated while still preserving the typical physics required for chemistry to remain unchanged and then think to yourself wait, wasn’t I going to write a story? Why am I researching theoretical math?

I would argue that most magical fantasy eventually starts treating magic as science. If you live in a world where chanting can summon water, that can be studied scientifically.

It would be quite hard for magic to be unscientific. I’ve bandied about a story setting where magic works until you figure out why it works, then it stops working. This eventually devolved into a reverse arms race where factions are researching magic to deny its use to their enemies.

For it to make any sense you really need to think through the timeline of both things and how they interact.

When were they learned and what did that process look like? If magic is just some inherent force that people can use innately, did that remove the motivation to study science? Or at least to find applied uses for science, for things that magic can already do?

What is the relative effort of achieving things with magic vs science (including the accumulated effort of discovering and researching how to do it)? Nobody is going to spend the time and money to build a scientific solution if someone can just wave their hand and achieve the same goal.

And the first questions is: how does science explain magic? What are the rules for magic, energy sources, limitations, etc

To make it interesting I think you need to have inherent limitations in magic that creates a niche for science, things that magic can’t do or that is very costly for magic to do. And then once you have a reason for science to be invested in, you have to consider the ways that magic can enhance the pursuit of science. You don’t need to invent microscopes if you can use magic to see tiny objects.

And then you have to consider the combinations of magic and science. What does warfare look like if you can use magic to teleport a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world? What does space exploration look like if you can use magic to create oxygen?

To do it with any kind of facade of realism is extremely complex, but presents a lot of opportunities for interesting and unique worldbuilding.

There’s a lot of ways to handle it.

You can have magic still be mysterious and not understood.

You can have magic be studied scientifically, whether or not the nature of magic itself is understood.

You can have them overlap; where they can each do the same things, but differently.

You can have them mutually exclusive, where one precludes the other from functioning, or interfere with each other to some degree

That’s just a limited list of possibilities, an entire novella could be done listing all the possibilities, even with tiny explanations and examples of each. The point is to show how I tend to think of magic and science as part of constructing a system to play in (be that through game play, or writing). Magic demands an answer in world building; you have to have an idea of how and why it works, and how it does or doesn’t interact with real world forces. It doesn’t have to be seen/known by the reader or player, but if you don’t have that idea in your head, you get inconsistent results as you build, which breaks immersion.

Now, pretty much all of my fiction, be it via role play gaming, writing, and even some of my painting, have the same underlying premise regarding magic. I choose to treat magic as a fundamental force, like gravity, electromagnetic, strong & weak nuclear. I do vary it some per each application; my role play main world has magic as a partial unifier of all forces. My secondary ttrpg setting it is separate from, but can interact with the others. In my main fictional world, it’s more that magic is an expression of the interaction of intelligence (deific, mortal, or universal) with the physical world, though that explanation hasn’t shown “on screen” at all yet.

Originally, back in the late eighties when I started playing d&d, the seeds were planted for the world I started building in the early nineties. It was the idea that there could be a god, or gods, of magic that had power over magic itself, but couldn’t totally cut the use of magic off from other gods that was the seed.

For me, rectifying that paradox meant that any god of magic must only be a filter of sorts, giving magic it’s own form of intelligence, a form of personification. In turn, that meant (to me), that all the gods in my world would be similar. The god of death wouldn’t be any more capable of entirely preventing or causing death with no limits because the gods aren’t really controlling the forces they represent. They are that force, that “thing”, but given intelligence and a face for “reasons”. Those reasons changed over the years, but amounted to the universe itself being one single intelligence looking at itself infinitely.

None of my ideas are particularly new. Piers Anthony, as an example, wrote an entire series on the gods being “incarnations” of a force that can change. His incarnations of immortality series was part of the inspiration for the specific gods I chose for my worlds.

Which is tangential to magic vs science, but key to the reason why the world builder needs to know the answer, even if they never show it, or allow it to be known in-universe. If you don’t have an underlying set of rules, a system in your head, you end up with plot holes and contradictions like you see in the Harry Potter books and movies. Those stories are still engaging and fun, but those holes can break immersion if you don’t ignore them.

The other end of the spectrum is something like the wheel of time series, where it’s very apparent that the writer had the system of magic nailed down very tight in his head, because there just aren’t many contradictions in the function of magic across the series (and, tbh, not many contradictions at all, dude kept great notes apparently).

You can look at Jim Butcher’s two series and see a solid middle ground, plus the Dresden version of science and magic interfering with each other to varying degrees. He has an obvious underlying set of rules, but isn’t afraid to change them if the story needs it.

I find the greatest fun as a writer/DM to be had when they can both exist in their fullest forms, both interacting with and interfering with each other based on in-universe rules. My best example of that is the imagical drive (hey, it’s a lame name, but I was fucking 17 when I came up with it).

It requires a fictional substance to work, called heartstone that has the property of being a magical channel, with different applications based on whether it conducts it freely, or acts more like a semiconductor. You channel magic in, and you can tune the output of the crystals to give desired effects. In the case of the drive, that’s bending the space around the drive to generate faster than light travel. I’ve got an unfinished story of a human that learns how to run an I-drive after being abducted by aliens, even

But! That drive is still connected to otherwise normal materials and technologies (though some of the fictional bits aren’t properly “science” fiction, I’m not too much of a stickler for adherence to real world physics if it gets in the way of narrative lol).

I’ve got magical computers too, which use the same premise of magical gear working in tandem with “real” technology to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s the kind of sandbox I like best when worldbuilding for myself; damn near unlimited. I tend to not like having limits beyond internal consistency. Doesn’t have to be realistic here, in reality. It just has to not break immersion within the setting.

I dunno, I could go on for hours about this because it’s something I’m passionate about, but I think I’ve already hit wall-of-text limits for anyone trying to read this on a screen.

You would be probably interested in Arcanum.

Mandaloregaming did a video on it

I think too often “magic” ends up existing in that sort of story as just alternate technology. It can make the dichotomy between them seem like little more than an aesthetic difference, and it’s especially obvious when the magic is highly systematized. A wizard who threatens to shoot fire from his hands, who is loaded up on his mana resource and has great aim with his hand-blasts, seems to me like little more than a person with a fancy gun.

There are some examples of “system” magic that still feels distinct though, like in Earthsea or Discworld, where magic is a tool that interacts with the world like technology, but cannot be manipulated without something special that is difficult to exploit. Discworld’s magic is basically 40k orks, magic that stems from collective belief, which is hard to manufacture inorganically. Earthsea’s magic comes from understanding things deeply, being able to capture the essence of things in a word and then being able to manipulate it. The “magic” ends up being the same hard-to-define relationship between the world and the words we use to break it into pieces. In a way, it’s like technology’s shadow, the same drive to control and understand but in the opposite direction.

Watch Flight of Dragons (1982) for an interesting way to do it.

Magic and science can perfectly coexist. Magic is an attribute of the world, science is a process about the world.

Magic and technology on the other hand… my understanding that’s the usual clash. Magic is the death of technology (and, to an extent, vice versa).