On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Alexx S Kay wrote: > For example, suppose that it's possible to build an electrical >battery, but that it has a significant probability of dissolving into >raw chaos. Heck, even if it releases its charge in an uneven and >unpredictable fashion, that's already enough to put a major dent into >electronics research and industry. Still, you can get a current flowing with some lemons and strips of copper and zinc. For that matter, how about static charges? Franklin's insights into the nature of electricity started with glass and amber and the small sparks you can get rubbing those materials with cloth, and the weird effects charged materials exhibit. Very basic stuff, and not requiring a high tech level to reproduce and investigate. Hmm. Maybe they *have* done such researches, and some of what they call sorcerous blasts, we would recognize as being massive electrical discharges. Other sourcerous attacks might be coherent photons (aka lasers), and some might be other phenomena that we would recognize but call by a different name. And some might just be sorcery. >There's an SF book (I forget the author, I think the title was >_Newton & the Quasi-Apple_) The author was Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog from 1979 or so. > about some advanced aliens covertly infiltrating a society of >approximately 17-th century tech development, I think in order to >oppose an oppressive government or some such. But the high-tech >tricks that they used had the unwitting side-effect of torpedoing >that society's equivalent of Newton, who was busily trying to >understand basic physics. He couldn't get anyone to listen to him, >because the aliens had easy-to-demonstrate counterexamples to all his >"laws". I think the aliens were actually human beings. They were rather horrified by what they had inadvertantly wrought, and tried to undo their mistakes. I think they had some sort of Prime Directive or reasonable facsimile thereof.