That’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while as part of my Seelie Court series. The conclusion that I’ve come to is, no, not really. The Fae as a whole don’t really have any interest in science. There are a few individual fairies who might try science, but even they are hampered by two key factors.
Before I get into those factors, it would be helpful to clarify what I mean by science. There are two commonly used definitions that refer to different things. The first definition of science is that it’s a process we use to learn about the world. The scientific method consists of observing things, coming up with a theory about how things work, designing an experiment to test that theory, doing the experiment over and over again to be sure you’ve got the right result, and then, assuming the experiments turned out the way you thought, tentatively adopting your theory as truth—though always with the caveat that future information might force you to change your mind and adopt a new theory.
The second definition of science is a body of knowledge organized so as to be useful. This is what we mean when we talk about, for example “political science.” Politics doesn’t really have testable hypotheses or the ability to rerun experiments, but we do know something about how politics works, we can write about those general trends, and organize those writings, and teach what we know.
So, when I say that the Fae don’t believe in science, which definition am I talking about? Well, both. And the two problems I mentioned above relate to those.
The first problem that a potential fairy scientist has is that experimental science doesn’t really work in the Fae Realm. Now, this is the point at which my college roommate would start scoffing. She never accepted the idea of science and magic being incompatible. “It all starts with the inclined plane,” she used to say. “Things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill, right? All of mechanics proceeds from there.”
The problem with that argument in my Fae Realm is that, when you ask, “Do things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill?” the answer is, “Well…usually.”
In the Fae Realm, magic is not a discrete force, just one of many. It permeates everything and everyone. “The ball rolled up the hill rather than down, because the ball didn’t want to go down” is a perfectly legitimate thing to happen in the Fae Realm. Obviously, this is a hinderance to science. It’s not that science can’t be done, but there are so many factors that have to be taken into account: the moods of not only the artifacts in your experiment but of any powerful Fae who might affect the place where you’re experimenting; the nature of the experimental location itself; astrological signs, whether or not the moon is a waning gibbous or Venus is in the fifth house; and many more. All of these, which would be so insignificant in the real world that they’d have no measurable effect, can change things in the Fae Realm so drastically that you get diametrically opposite results.
(As a side note, I will say that I have another fantasy world where magic is a discrete force, my friend’s argument is valid, and magic and science can work together to form magitek engineering. But that’s a subject for another post.)
So, any would-be fairy scientists have a big hill to climb. And they have to do it alone, which brings me to the second problem with Fae science: the Fae don’t really believe in organizing knowledge in a way that will make it useful.
The Fae, as a whole, are not a curious bunch. Again, there are individual exceptions to this rule, but as a whole, there aren’t many of them who sit around and wonder about things. Not just scientific things like, “How does this gizmo work?” or “If I throw something in a westerly direction in the lands of the Lady of the West Wind, how long will it take to blow back to me?” but also historical things like, “How long has the Seelie Court existed?” or “Who built the Spire of Time where the Seelie Court meets?” much less philosophical questions like, “Why do the Fae exist in the first place?” Thus, there are no libraries, neatly organized by subject, where you can go and find out about fairy history or culture or, well, science. There are no survey papers or books that present a general overview of any area. Therefore, each individual with an interest in these things has to start from scratch.
Fairy scientists exist. One of them has made himself at home in my skull, and I’ll probably have to tell his story at some point in order to get him out of it. But consider how being such a scientist would be. Imagine trying to study astronomy under such conditions. You have no books to read about the stars or the planets or their movements. You have no one you can ask. All you know is what you can see and what you can deduce based on that. And now imagine that the moon might randomly not show up one night, or that the sun might decide to say, “Eh, screw it, I’m sleeping in this morning.” Is it any wonder that science is not a major force in the Fae Realm?