Science as a process came to be between Leonardo and Newton. If a physician washes his hands between patients, it's for ceremonial/esoteric reasons and not because of germs. He clearly invoked the right spirits to protect his next patient.
We come here to be freed of our preconceived ideas, not to get what we want. If people can't deal with diverging viewpoints, this is not a place to visit.
I find it weird that someone who wants to be different cannot stand others being different.
and how do bonisagus researchers work out which ceremonial actions to take? I see it as the scientific method...
Agreed with Tugdual on science as a process. In Mythic Europe, we're not there. "Science" is in fact part fact, and part Lore, and maybe some art. Geometry has hard facts. Everything else in Artes Liberales and Philosophae are almost exclusively lore. There's no empirical demonstration of Plato and Aristotle's view of the universe. They were merely the wisest men, some would call them divinely inspired. There are very few hard facts out there. Not just in the magical sense, although that helps. I don't find the conversation uninteresting. I just think the idea that you can deduce whether an advanced experiment will produce A or B plain wrong. Remembee that the game's answer to the question of "Is Plato or Aristotle's view of the universe closer to the truth?" is "Adapting magic theory towards either's viewpoint produces the same exact result."
No. This is the lore & art part. You're just wise enough to have some inkling of symbolism and become a better artist with those symbols.
I have to disagree about this. The "experimental method" (observe reality, deduce a model, verify it via experimentation) is one of the lynchpins of Aristotle's thinking - and one that he passed down to his students, e.g. Teophrastus.
In fact, when Galileo was arguing against Aristotelian physics, he claimed he was much more true to Aristotle's thinking - because he refined Aristotle's physics model based on experimental observations, i.e. following Aristotle's own scientific model - than those who slavishly clinged to the letter of what Aristotle had stated about physics.
Incidentally, note that Aristotelian physics are not that wrong. They are (useful) approximations, just like Newtonian physics are useful approximations of relativistic mechanics. The fact that two things of the same shape (a caveat that Aristotle is very clear about but oft goes unmentioned) fall with speed increasing with their weight is true if they move in a fluid causing attrition - which is a much more useful regime to analyze than movement in vacuum. And the fact that something moving through a fluid gets pushed forward by the pressure of the fluid behind it is astoundingly, counterintuitively right in modern fluid mechanics.
At the same time, the fact they are somewhat wrong/incomplete was widely accepted even in antiquity - for example Archimede's principle, that explains why an empty clay pot/vase can float in water despite clay being denser than water, is an extension of Aristotle's physics that I think most troupes implicitly assume actually holds in their games.
This is a cool and interesting question (even though saying that this forum is a "tar pit" is definitely not cool: if people spend time to answer your question, you should be grateful rather than disparage them, even if you do not agree with the answers provided).
It should be noted that according to Aristotle each element can turn into the others through a process of generation and corruption. So, fire (hot and dry) can be generated by the interaction and resulting corruption of air (hot and wet) and earth (cold and dry). Or it can be generated when some air (hot and wet) loses "wetness" through condensation, e.g. when it rains: the resulting "dried-out air" is what you see as lightning.
Now, it seems plausible to me that, just like fire can be generated, it can also easily and quickly get corrupted, dying out and perhaps degenerating into hot air. For a magically created - rather than magically sustained - fire this would probably be no different. In fact, the observation that the sun, planets and stars do not go out and stay burning uncorrupted made Aristotle postulate the existence of a fifth, incorruptible element - aether - in the superlunar region.
Do note that the "elemental" Hermetic forms do not strictly correspond to the elements as understood by Aristotle. For example, Ignem is (among other things) heat, but accoding to Aristotle heat is a property equally of air and of fire - what distinguishes fire from air is that the former is dry while the latter is wet. Similarly, Aquam tends to cover wetness, but wetness is equally a property of water and air. Auram covers weather phenomena including lightning, but as I said, according to Aristotle lightning is air turned into fire by the loss of wetness. Finally note that, while change of one element into another can occur naturally, this does not imply that Hermetic magic can instantly bring such a change into being (just as fatigue recovery occurs naturally, and can in fact be produced near-instantly by a mundane theriac, but Hermetic magic cannot instantly bring it into being).
The elemental fire in the fuel escapes via burning, which leaves some elemental earth (the ash) and vapor (which disperses into the air). The fire dissipates and generally escapes to the outermost sphere, the sphere of fire above the sphere of air.
It's understood that blowing on burning fuel makes it hotter and that lack of air extinguishes flames. Fire in a sealed container would go out, unless magically sustained, in which case the container gets very hot and the fire is distributed as heat.
The natural process of burning does not create fire, it releases it.
Another good example, who is alive (iirc) in period, is St Albert the Great. He was known for putting some of Aristotle's (and others) natural philosophy to the test, sometimes in quite amusing ways (e.g. attempting to feed ostriches iron, which many people at the time thought they ate). He is often considered a kind of proto-empirical-scientist, but I think that description neglects the fact that "let's have a look and see what actually happens" is a pretty obvious way of doing things. Medieval science was definitely hampered by an intellectual tradition shaped around mastery of texts (which is well replicated in Ars Magica, where academic abilities, and of course Hermetic magic, are almost exclusively text-driven, though magi carry out experiments at a rate few medieval scholars did). But medievals were not universally blind to empiricism, especially after the re-introduction of Aristotle's corpus into Latin thought.
There is another important point here, which is that we tend to assume Hermetic theory is objectively "right" in its categorisation (and therefore, in this case, that Aristotle or modern thermodynamics is "wrong"). Like the magi we play, we are so used to thinking within that paradigm that we might dismiss opposing theories. But it is acknowledged in the game (and central to the idea of Original Research) that the Hermetic paradigm is wrong or incomplete in several respects.
We are also much less bound to the "all of medieval science is true" viewpoint than one might assume: the core of Ars Magica from the beginning is that legend and folklore are true - the philosophers and theologians may well be mistaken about many things, because their theories are rarely relevant to, say, the existence and activity of faeries. Even where they are relevant, they may go in the opposite direction: Theological accounts of angels differ greatly from the behaviour of angels in folklore - e.g. the Nephilim are often thought to be the offspring of angels and humans, which most medieval theologians will say is absurd - but in an Ars Magica context I think we should err on the side of the latter.
Similarly, though many medievals believed in witchcraft, many theologians thought magic was impossible, and this cannot be true in Ars Magica. St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, as one of the reasons you shouldn't practice magic, that the promised results of magic are mostly bunk! This is on top of the usual "all supernatural power is from divine or infernal sources; magic isn't in line with God's will; so you can draw the implication" - again, however compelling for a medieval theologian, this is simply untrue in Mythic Europe where we have four Realms of Power, not just two.
Edit: to reach a point with these rambles, we have much more freedom with "the ground truth" of Mythic Europe than we tend to assume, and we are bound neither to medieval natural philosophy (which was not a universally-agreed-upon body of knowledge anyway) nor to the framework of Hermetic Forms & Techniques when interpreting the world. If you think it's more entertaining to go full-throttle with Aristotle, go for it! If you want to say "actually, 21st century physics is accurate, except with the addition of (irrefutably-real) supernatural forces", that's equally valid in my book
I don't think the question is if their universe follows the same natural laws as ours. The real point is that their mindset is alien and most of them won't have the flexibility to accept our reality.
I believe the practical knowledge of surgeons is beneath the theory carried by physicians. Winning some rhetorical disputadio is how truth is accepted. I may be wrong on that, but I play ArsMag to think things differently.
@Tugdual that is 100% right in an "at the table" sense, but part of the fun of these forums (for me) is also seeing the different ways people make sense of Mythic Europe as a thing in itself, not just a setting of play
