Superscience Paranormals An Academy of Super-Heroes Information File copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen ========================================================================== INTRODUCTION - Where are you, Reed? After posting ASH #107, I was involved in a discussion that attempted to answer the question, "Who is ASH's Reed Richards?" In other words, a superscience paranormal who isn't just a Super-MacGyver gadgeteer type, someone who also understands all the cutting edge theoretical science too. In the end, the consensus was that while one of the characters in The Reverse Engineers had the potential to fill that role, there really wasn't a Reed Richards type, whether prominent or obscure. On the one hand, no big deal, right? A lot of iconic Marvel and DC characters have no obvious analogues in ASH (in part because when I turned the ASH Champions campaign into the ASH fictional universe I ripped out a lot of Hero System characters who filled those roles and I didn't replace all of them). There wasn't anyone even remotely like Captain America for the first several years I wrote in ASH. There's no Superman. No unequivocal Batman. So if there's no Mr. Fantastic, that's just another of those roles that we haven't gotten around to casting, right? But as I thought about it more, I realized that the very nature of Violation Physics makes it very difficult for a Reed Richards to exist. And by Reed Richards, I mean someone who has superhuman powers, but can advance the frontiers of normal science in meaningful ways. And it all comes down to something called "confirmation bias." CONFIRMATION BIAS - Not so fast, buddy! In real science, confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on results that agree with your theory or your worldview, while overlooking, ignoring or downplaying anything that is contradictory. It's often cited to explain why people believe patently absurd things like "you're safer being thrown free of a car than you are wearing a seat belt." People have heard of one case that supports their view, and ignore all the evidence to the contrary. But it's not limited to untrained non-scientists. Even notoriously methodical scientist Robert Millikan would tend to check his equipment more carefully for flaws if the result he got didn't agree with theory, than when the experiment matched theory. And if Robert Millikan can make up excuses to toss out data that looks fishy, what happens when the scientist in question can actually alter reality to make those negative results go away entirely? As a result, even a very careful and conscientious superhuman scientist will tend to get irreproducible results if their powers lend themselves to fudging reality. This makes it very hard for a superscience paranormal to make meaningful progress in advancing "real" science. SUPERSCIENTIST TAXONOMY - Mages and Savants It's useful to split superscience endeavors into two "tracks", although very few paranormals are purely on one track or the other. These two major types of parascientist are the Mage and the Savant. MAGES A Mage is just what it sounds like. Someone who is pretty much just doing magic with technology, science or mathematics as a pretext. This can range from subtle effects like making a car work 5% better than it should to blatant magic like making a quantum teleporter out of coathangers. The effect being generated violates natural law to some degree, though. The scientific trappings serve the same purpose that ritual magic does for a more traditional sorceror, helping focus the mind and minimize how much natural law needs to be broken. For example, pure Magene willpower could make something suddenly split in half. But it's a lot easier to forge a sword with a "monomolecular blade" and use that to sunder the target. It takes more time, but the real world doesn't have to be shouldered aside as roughly. An intermediate-difficulty method might attach a scalpel to an electric toothbrush and invoke technobabble about precise molecular bonding frequencies to let the blade slide through a vault door. Most Mages, be they Technomages, Mathemages or Alchemists, will tend to believe on some level that what they're doing really should work. That they've found the "truth" of the world and know better than those fools at the University, or maybe they just trust their gut and lack a formal education to tell them any different. A number of "shadetree technomages" can make the impossible happen only as long as they don't understand how it really IS impossible. If you explain carefully how changing the pitch of a riding mower's blades and cranking up the RPMs isn't enough to let it fly, their flying lawnmower may well stop working. Other Mages accept that they're really doing magic, and that their scientific trappings are no more or less valid than poetic spells in dead languages or strange sigils or esoteric meditation practices. The Third Age mathemagician Aleph Null earned a PhD in Mathematics before discovering his mystic powers, but he never claimed that the magic came from the mathematics itself. The formalism simply helped him focus his will. Similarly, Essay of the Fourth Age Academy of Super-Heroes is well aware that much of what she makes is impossible, although it took a lot of careful training to let her learn real science without losing her edge. In any case, Mages definitely have powers that let them change the way physical laws work. Aleph Null's most devastatingly destructive spell, for instance, changed a small region of space so that 2+2=4.000000001 within that volume, which caused the complete breakdown of physics, space and time. Fortunately, reality "cauterized" around the hole made by his spell. But the upshot of this is that anyone with significant "Science Mage" powers will find it very difficult to avoid confirmation bias and other strangeness in their experiments. A Mage wishing to work on real science has to stick to purely theoretical pursuits, and even then should have someone as far away as possible double-check the results of any calculations, just in case. SAVANTS A Savant is someone whose power lets them understand the rules of the game at a superhuman level. Savant abilities on their own are purely interpretive, and often intuitive, meaning that the Savant may get the desired answer but have difficulty explaining why it's right. After all, it's all fine and dandy knowing that the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything is "42", but not too useful without knowing the ultimate question. Still, knowing what you're working towards is rather useful in science, so superscience Savants are much in demand even if they can be frustrating to work with. Unfortunately, a Savant who is also a Mage will learn the rules of a slightly different game than normals. Their own ability to warp natural law will tend to get factored into their intuition even if they're really careful about trying to avoid that result. Savant/Mage superhumans can become frighteningly effective at creating useful supertech because they're good at understanding why the things they make work the way they do, despite reality insisting they shouldn't work at all. But a Savant/Mage "dual class" won't be very good at doing real science, because it's too hard for them to isolate their own "super observer effect". Pure Savants are exceedingly rare, and not all of them even have a talent for "hard science", instead having superhuman understanding of language or music or social interactions. And even those with an aptitude for hard science tend to be steered into theoretical fields rather than risk that they have an as-yet-unrevealed Mage power. So, while there certainly are Savant Super-Scientists in 2026, they tend not to show up in stories because they're doing deep-background Basic Research rather than running around in self-made power suits or even working on plot devices that might let them get a speaking line or two in a story. Gimble (Macy Graves) is the only known TechnoSavant, who can intuitively find ways to make devices that do astounding things without violating natural law. But she can't explain why they work, and a number of laboratories funded by various governments and corporations exist solely for the purpose of trying to reverse-engineer Gimble inventions. Warden is a kinesthetics Savant. While many telepaths can quickly or even instantly absorb skills from other people, most of them require extensive practice to use those skills to full effect. But Warden has a Savant's grasp of how the humanoid body works, and can immediately put new skills to good use. (He still benefits from training, of course, just as a science savant will benefit from traditional study.) Scarlet of The Reverse Engineers is a Technomage/Technosavant, with Doctor Developer's influence being a big part of why she's nurtured her Savant side rather than simply being a Technomage. But even focusing on "paratech" (see http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH/Supertech) that her adoptive father can use isn't enough to let her be a Reed Richards type who can simultaneously advance real science and still throw around weird cosmic powers. There may be a few other previously-seen ASH characters who would qualify as more Savant than Mage, but they're a rare breed even among supernormals, and the setting encourages them to be behind-the-scenes actors. CONCLUSION - ArrArr? When you come down to it, the very nature of the ASH setting makes it hard to be a proper Reed Richards type of character, specifically because I declared most superhuman powers to be explicit violation of natural law rather than trying to handwave a different set of laws that would let superhero stuff happen (which is how most superhero settings work...they simply say that things like causality and conservation laws aren't actually true, even though the world as we know it couldn't work if they weren't). So, by making super-technology easier to swallow, I excluded actual super- science from the mix. Ah well. Ironically, if there's going to be anyone who can successfully take advantage of Violation Physics to advance Real Physics, it'll be a normal or even an Anchor. They'd be able to sort out the replicable results of the Savant work from the lunacy of the Mages, and they'd be forced to figure out a Savant's results in a way that others could understand. In other words, the closest the ASH Universe has to Reed Richards may be...Doctor Developer. Who just happened to be on a four-person team with his wife. ;) ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! 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