[08:03] WATNEY: Good morning. Quick report on yesterday’s EVA. Southern and western weather stations are fully operational. Northern weather station has lost its anemometer mast and one solar panel, so I’ve set it to daily data dumps instead of constant transmission. Eastern weather station got smashed by debris. Several parts are missing and the CPU is wrecked. Not repairable. The farm is coming along nicely, on pace for a harvest between Sol 109 and Sol 112. I took out some trash to the green flag, but I doubt Martian raccoons will come along to steal it, so it’ll be there if I need it again.

Dragonfly has pronounced the repairs to the pony spacesuits complete, so all the ponies except Starlight are go for EVAs again. This is good, because I need Dragonfly and Fireball to help with the pony radio tests. You do have a procedure ready for that, right guys?

[08:15] JPL: Good morning, Mark. Venkat Kapoor here. We have the procedure, but there’s something a little more urgent we want you to work on today. Since your friends have space suits that provide unlimited Earth-quality air and circulation, and since you have the water reclaimer tank plus a spacesuit full of surplus water, we want you to power down the atmospheric regulator, the oxygenator, and the water reclaimer and do a complete diagnostic and inspection on all of them. We’ve got some bonus procedures in an email to check against specific issues we think might crop up in an extended mission with as many people in the Hab as you have.

While you’re doing that, I’m going to take this chat private and speak to Starlight Glimmer. She sent us some truly fascinating material, and I’m hoping to get some details straightened out. The diagnostics and other procedures will take you most of the transmission window, so you should probably get on those now.

Oh, and one final thing: Dr. Douglass of Astromaterials Research has some proposed adjustments for your cave farm. I’ve sent them to you in an email. Discuss them with your guests and let us know if you decide to go forward with any of them. This has nothing to do with your botany work, by the way. Our botanists here are still arguing about how many things about your farm are impossible. I signed up for nine in the betting pool.

[08:31] WATNEY: You’re still depositing my pay in the bank, right? Take some out and put me down for zero, because if a thing exists, it can’t be impossible. I’ll go get Starlight on a computer.

[08:43] JPL: Sorry, Mark, but Mitch Henderson beat you to it.

[08:55] WATNEY: Well, shit. Here’s Starlight.

[08:58] WATNEY: Good morning! I am Starlight Glimmer, scientist and wizard for our ship. Please, why does your language have a word for “user of magic” when you say you don’t have magic?

[09:11] JPL: Hello, Starlight. In ancient times anything we couldn’t explain was magic. People who could do things others couldn’t were often called wizards… if they were lucky. The unlucky ones tended not to live long.

I’ve been reading your reports. I only skimmed your history and your technical specs before forwarding them to our engineers. But I’ve been focusing on your treatise on magic. Could you answer some questions about it?

[09:26] WATNEY: I’ll try. Be careful: I’m still learning your vocabulary. Also, most of the theorems and equations in the essay apply to our world, which has a universal magic field.

[09:39] JPL: That’s fascinating by itself, Starlight. Our models of physics recognize either four or five primary physical forces, depending on whether “dark energy” exists. None of them are universally uniform. All of them originate from matter in some fashion. A universal force sounds to us like “aether,” a discredited theory that held that some intangible substance permeated the universe in order for light waves and other forces to travel through it. An energy field that is the same at all points in the universe breaks our physical laws.

[09:44] WATNEY: The four physical laws you mention are gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear force, and… ?

[09:56] JPL: We divide the nuclear force into strong (holds atoms together) and weak (breaks them apart).

[10:10] WATNEY: I see. We regard strong and weak as poles, just like positive and negative in electricity. Very little work has been done with atom physics in our world apart from magic. We haven’t needed to.

[10:23] JPL: When you get back home, tell your scientists about our theory. I’ll have a colleague of mine send you a simple write-up of the theory. We have experimental data that backs it up solidly.

Speaking of experiment, you claim that all life produces its own magic field. Could you explain that a bit more? We’ve never detected it on Earth.

[10:38] WATNEY: Sure. In our universe the strength of the ambient magical field can never dip below what we call the magical constant. But the presence of life forms strengthens the ambient field through production of new energy. We aren't sure how life produces magic, but it does. These fields are only detectable to non-unicorns by changes in the visible light spectrum within the fields. If the field is really strong, it glows as if a spell is being cast.

[10:42] JPL: That’s interesting. So a spectrograph will show the difference between a zone with magic and a zone without?

[10:55] WATNEY: Pardon me, but the dictionary isn’t helpful. What is a spectrograph?

[11:08] JPL: A spectrograph is a test we do. We put a prism in a beam of light from something, usually a flame. It makes a rainbow. If the rainbow is big enough, it shows little gaps in the spectrum that indicate the presence or absence of certain elements.

[11:23] WATNEY: Oh! That’s a curious test. We don’t use it. Pegasus ponies make rainbows for weather purposes all the time. I think the strength of our magic field makes light operate a lot differently than what you’re used to. I don’t think your “spectrograph” would work for magic.

[11:36] JPL: That’s unfortunate. What do you use to detect magic fields?

[11:51] WATNEY: We have a device. I can’t tell you its name- ***meter or something. The first part of it is our word for the thing that carries magical force from one atom to another. The one we currently have doesn’t work well because it’s set for our home universe, so anything less than the magic constant barely shows.

I hope you don’t mind if I eat lunch while typing? Spitfire is helping.

[12:04] JPL: That’s fine, Starlight. Can you tell us how to make magic-meters of our own, so we can test and see if Earth has magic?

[12:19] WATNEY: Um, that’s pages 21 through 24 of my essay, with pictures. The steps are really simple.

[12:32] JPL: I think the problem is, you’re assuming knowledge we don’t have. For example… what is an array? What does it do?

[12:48] WATNEY: I’m using your word “array” to refer to an organized magical graph that sets out the instructions for a spell. When the array receives a magic charge, it performs the spell.

[13:01] JPL: Okay. Do we engrave the array into the crystal? You use the word “enchant”.

[13:15] WATNEY: It depends. Powerful unicorns can write arrays with chalk, charcoal, etc. for one-time use. Earth ponies sometimes use gold, copper, or glass to create arrays that unicorns can charge many times. But for arrays that run themselves you need to enchant the object that holds the array. It’s a spell that makes the array a part of the whole.

[13:28] JPL: I’m getting a sinking feeling that I know the answer to this next question, Starlight, but I have to ask it. Assume I’m an earth pony who can’t cast spells. How do I charge a drawn array? How do I enchant anything?

[13:42] WATNEY: Um… you don’t. Only unicorns can do that. I know some alchemists who create medicines with magical effect, but I doubt their methods would work in a low-magic environment.

[13:55] JPL: That’s too bad, Starlight. We can’t even test to see if we have magic unless we have some way of using magic. Do you see our problem?

[14:08] WATNEY: Yes. I’ll ask my teacher at home about it. Maybe we can figure something out.

[14:23] JPL: We’d appreciate that. In the meantime, I have a couple of other questions. Do you understand the concept of entropy? In a closed system everything tends towards maximum disorder.

[14:37] WATNEY: Yes! In the absence of magic a closed system will tend towards disorder. But not chaos. I know Chaos personally, and he hates entropy. He says it’s boring. There are lively debates at home about whether or not our world is a closed system.

[14:51] JPL: Remind me another time to ask you about Chaos. Skipping for now. Doesn’t magic violate entropy?

[15:09] WATNEY: We don’t know for sure. The majority opinion is not, because active use of magic requires an act of will plus magic as an outside energy source. We have a theory that magic exists at a sort of higher energy state than normal matter and energy, so when it’s brought down to our level a little goes a long way. Also, we aren’t certain of the way life generates magic, so for all we know energy might be lost converting food or body activity into magic.

[15:24] JPL: Okay. Last question for today. I noticed that one of your devices in your ship converts magic into electricity. How do you reverse the process?

[15:38] WATNEY: You don’t. All attempts to turn electricity or motion into magic without using more magic have failed. We think it’s because magic exists on a higher energy level, and the cost of making enough electricity to push up to that level is too high. Believe me, if I knew how to do that we’d be halfway to your planet already.

[15:52] JPL: I believe you. I was just hoping we could help in some way, but if we can it doesn’t look like we’re going to use magic for it.

[16:07] WATNEY: I’m sorry. I will ask Twilight Sparkle about it. She knows more about everything than I do. She went to the best school in our land and was the personal student of Princess Sky-and-Everything-In-It. I taught myself.

[16:21] JPL: Based on your reports, you’re very good at teaching yourself. Thank you for your help, Starlight. Please ask Mark to email his reports when he’s done. Venkat out.

[16:34] WATNEY: You’re welcome! I wish it was better. Starlight Glimmer out.

Author's Notes:

Yeah, so I just shot down a bunch of plans. Just call me the Red Baron.

It's worth remembering that the Romans never knew how concrete functioned on a molecular level. They never had equations for the tensile strength of the materials they used to build things. Roman engineering was very Kerbal; "We found a thing that works! Let's throw this solution at EVERYTHING!" And James Watt built his version of the steam engine a century before Boyle formulated the gas laws that explained how steam engines can function at all.

Most sciences, including materials studies, began in an organized fashion less than three hundred years ago- but the materials were in use for millennia before. You don't need to understand the fundamentals of things to use them.

And it's worth noting that we humans are at present able to manipulate at most one of the four basic forces. We can only use gravity by dropping things, and we only use the strong and weak nuclear forces through fission or fusion. If Starlight had told Venkat that magic was the strong nuclear force and that ponies knew how to manipulate it like clay, he'd be up the exact same stump.

Wrote about 1500 words today; if I can find the energy, I'll work on CSP tonight. After that all writing will go to rebuilding the buffer, because I just got pulled off the wait list for a booth at Mid-South Con in Memphis in five days, so I don't have the time off I thought I had anymore.

So... now to go to the kitchen and cook all those groceries I bought for next week...