Science has been telling us that the flow of electrons is the force responsible for lighting our homes, allowing us to see news anchors behind news desks across the globe, and for making tall objects burst into flame in the midst of a downpour.  But does this really sound like the work of mere subatomic particles? Of course not. The real explanation is actually much simpler: it's magic.

    I got my first clue of the truth from a man who I believed was teaching "electronics."  He explained that capacitors – those things that store up “electricity” and release it in pulses – work by magic.  Before my very eyes, he broke down a capacitor into smoke and mirrors, the two primary components of simple magical generators.  He let the smoke out by hooking up the device backwards; when the smoke was gone, all that remained were tiny bits of reflective metal.  Although, at the time I thought he just had an imaginative excuse to make things explode.  It wasn’t until more recently that I realized how serious he was when my physics class studied raw, unfocused magic in its natural state; more commonly known as lightning.

    Most scientists say that lightning is the result of electric charges moving around inside storm clouds.  Some will even say that it has something to do with the interaction of the ice crystals and water vapor that make up the cloud.  Then there are the select few who will admit that they don’t really know what it is the water and ice are doing to make the lightning happen.  Again, the obvious is being overlooked.  Clouds are a natural form of smoke, and ice is a natural mirror.  Weird things start to happen when the two are mixed together in the violent winds of a storm cloud:  flashes of light, falling chunks of ice, spinning clouds on the ground, and other weather phenomena we’ve come to accept as “natural.”

    From there, I quickly realized that most reflective surfaces can act as mirrors.  The easiest way to see this is to watch how easily some people are distracted by shiny objects like tin foil.  Fortunately, most mirrors don’t seem to have much magical force without being shaped to focus their magical potential.  Otherwise, magical levels would be almost toxic in jewelry stores and ice rinks.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that all jewelry is safe, however.  Some jewelers have been known to fluke a magic ring, but except for a few rare cases, there is barely enough magical force to change the color of a person’s skin.

    Unfortunately, this is still a new concept for me, so test results are slow in coming.  Especially when my equipment keeps turning into white rabbits and wandering off.  And what information I do have keeps disappearing.  The aluminum-field and the tin-field are fairly simple, but most of the other metalic-fields I've tested so far have been either too strong or too complicated to get any conclusive results; especially the copper-field.

    Be watching the Square Root of Cheese for the latest advances in magical force studies.