How to cast a fireball for real

Sometimes strange thoughts come unbidden into my mind. A lot of this has to do with being a writer, where so much of my conscious thought time is spent figuring out how characters would react to situations that I bump into walls and cabinets and walk over fire hazards.

One such thought I’ve had more than once is: how would someone actually cast a fireball? What would reality and the laws of physics demand? Now you might be thinking, what do physics have to do with magic? But I’m a big fan of internal consistency, so how could you cast a fireball without violating physics?

First things first: we need the fire triangle: Heat, Oxygen, Fuel.

How can we get fuel from nothing but the air around us? The easiest way (if any of this is easy) would be to utilize the hydrogen. We’d need a dense cloud of aerosolized fuel. Electrolysis or some other kind of “magic” (see what I did there?) would have to separate the hydrogen out of the water.

Assuming we now have a local, dense cloud of hydrogen, the next thing we need is ignition. Before the cloud of hydrogen disperses, we need to ignite it. This is the spark needed to light the fireball; the heat part of the triangle. One of my favorite topics from documentaries is the concept of piezoelectricity.

Piezoelectricity is where some materials like quartz (or even organic material…nudge nudge) can generate an electric charge in response to some stimulus like mechanical pressure. So now we’ve got fuel, we have an ignition, and the surrounding air should have plenty of oxygen. At this point, we’ve got a high school science experiment where we blow up the hydrogen balloon to impress everyone.

At some depth, you’re going to have to get hand-wavy with a magic system. But what I like is that science provides a lot of answers, and so a magic system would only have to provide “small” things like gathering fuel, creating a spark, and herding the flame.

Herding the flame (containment) is one of the hardest parts. As you cast your fireball, you’d probably not want to get swallowed by an uncontrollable expanding ball of heat-death. That sounds bad. Another thing that I find fascinating is that you can actually contain a fireball within an electromagnetic field. And if you can contain it within that field, then you can move the fireball if you can move the electromagnetic field.

So if your wizard can manipulate electromagnetic fields, then ipso facto ergo yolo, you’ve got fireballs!

Anyway, now you have shared in one of the many random daily thoughts that plague (inspire?) me. I’ve read a giant pile of fantasy, and very little of it actually attempts to use science or psuedo-science to explain it. I don’t even need the fantasy I read to explain fireballs or magic, but I do like internal consistency. This means I like it when all magic in a world obeys the same set of laws, even if they aren’t explicitly given to the reader.

Happy world building!