Hogwarts: From Selling White Peppers to Becoming a God

Chapter 254 The Exponential Explosion of Technology

"Your Majesty." Murphy waved his hand, and the boot that had turned into a bat and flown away was transformed back into its original form, and put on Sophia's foot.

Then he stood up and said, "Actually, what I want to do has never changed."

"From the moment I came into this world, that thought has been brewing and accumulating in my heart. After graduation, it began to sprout and grow. Now, I am just continuing to water and fertilize it."

"My path is consistent throughout. This path is the understanding of magic."

As he spoke, he waved his hand, and flowers bloomed continuously on the spear made of tree vines, turning it back into an ordinary flower vine.

Since his last battle with the shaman, Murphy has gained a deeper understanding of the "wand." Now, he can use his fingers instead of a wand as the tip of magic to achieve some minor magical effects at will.

"What I really want is to understand magic, to understand it more clearly, more intuitively, more accurately, and to get closer to the essence and truth of magic."

"Whether it's selling potions to Muggles, starting Muggle businesses, or now trying to save the State of Sue, it's all for this purpose."

The Queen gently tapped her foot on the ground, feeling that the pain had subsided. She tilted her head slightly in confusion. "Excuse me, Mr. Darkholm, I don't see any connection between the two?"

Murphy smiled. "What does Your Majesty consider magic?"

"Magic?" Sophia thought for a moment. "Isn't it just magic?"

"Yes, for most wizards, magic is as natural as breathing and eating."

"That's why very few wizards attempt to understand magic."

"Wizards are simply using magic, just like they use fire. We know that fire can bring warmth, can be used to cook food, can light up the night, and can also burn enemies. To do all this, we don't need to know what fire is."

"However, there are limits to such application. Simple summaries of life experience cannot replace rational deduction and reasoning."

"If we don't know the exact temperature of a flame, it will be difficult to design a blast furnace, and we won't be able to mass-produce steel. If we don't know why fire can boil water, we won't be able to invent the steam engine, let alone build a power plant, and we will forever be in the era of using candles for lighting."

"The same applies to magic; we can only use it better when we have a deeper understanding of it."

Murphy then took out the bottle of Whitening Spray that he had just used on Sophia.

"For example, Dictamnus dasycarpus can heal wounds. Most wizards only use it to treat obvious external injuries. But when we know that sprains, strains and other injuries are also tissue damage, and Dictamnus dasycarpus can act at the cellular level to promote cell division and tissue healing, we can reasonably guess that it should also be used for sprains and bruises."

The Queen nodded slightly. "I understand why you want to understand magic, but what does that have to do with what you're going to do to the Muggles of Sumer?"

"Because studying magic requires the application of science," Murphy said.

"Science, do you mean the knowledge of Muggles?"

"Science is not just knowledge, but also a set of effective research methods," Murphy said. "Wizards are not good at using these methods, but Muggles are, so I need Muggles to study magic."

"But then, we'll be exposed to Muggles!" the Queen said. "Even Alkaim must abide by the International Wizarding Secrecy Act. Are you really going to break it?"

"Your Majesty, I do not intend to deliberately defy this law."

"However, the wizarding secrecy law is bound to be broken," Murphy said, throwing out a bombshell statement. "In the next fifty years, it will be broken not only by me, but by someone else."

"Are you saying there are other wizards trying to break the Wizarding Secrecy Act?" the Queen asked.

"No, not a wizard, but a Muggle. Your Majesty."

"We live in the same space as Muggles, we breathe the same air, and we stand on the same ground. Although we use spells to hide ourselves, this hiding is not perfect. As Muggle technology advances, it will become increasingly difficult for us to hide ourselves."

"science and technology?"

"Yes, technology based on Muggle science is technology. You can think of it as a kind of Muggle magic."

"I know what technology is. But... the secrecy law has been in place for three hundred years..." The Queen clearly didn't believe it.

"That is precisely the problem, Your Majesty."

"The law of secrecy has been in place for three hundred years," Murphy said. "In these three hundred years, our magic has hardly improved at all. Our most powerful spells have existed for three hundred years, and even spells from over a thousand years ago are still effective. In these three hundred years, we have not become stronger; on the contrary, we may have regressed quite a bit."

"But in comparison, the Muggle world has undergone a complete transformation in the past three hundred years."

"Three hundred years ago, Muggles were still using oxen to plow the fields and drawing water from wells. They had no trains, no airplanes, and no powerful cannons and weapons. But now, their weapons can destroy a city and even wipe out an entire race. Their satellites can see a train on the ground from 36,000 kilometers away."

"They don't have magic, but technology is their magic. They don't have flying brooms, but their planes can fly at supersonic speeds, transporting hundreds or thousands of people from one end of the earth to the other in a matter of hours. They don't have wands, but believe me, a Gatling gun kills a hundred times faster than the most powerful wand."

"What's even more frightening is that Muggle technology is still developing, and it's developing exponentially, explosively."

"Two hundred years ago, they invented the steam engine; one hundred years ago, they invented the telephone and the light bulb; fifty years ago, they invented the atomic bomb; and just last year, they had the Internet."

"Technological development is not linear; it is an exponential curve that opens upwards. The technological progress achieved in the past thousand or hundred years can be accomplished in ten or even five years today, and in the future, it may only take one year, six months, or even one month."

"That explosive technological singularity is coming soon. In the next few decades, Muggles will be updating the world at a rate of one disruptive invention or discovery every month or even every day."

"Their capabilities will become stronger, the area they can control will become larger, and the precision of their satellites, radars, cameras, drones, and other detection and monitoring equipment will become higher and higher, making it increasingly difficult and impossible to deceive them."

"Not only that, at the microscopic level, they now have femtosecond-level observation capabilities. They can see the movement of an atom, and in the future, they will even create attosecond-level lasers."

"Do you know what that means? 10 to the power of -18 seconds, which is one hundred quadrillionth of a second. I told you before that lightning is very fast, but even the fastest lightning bolt can't move the distance of an atom in one attosecond."

(End of this chapter)