Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum

"The most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is 'I do not know.' I do not know what that is, Sir."

— Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Sometimes, in order to establish how special or powerful something is, writers just take the easy way out and say that "science can't explain it!". It can be anything, from magic to ghosts to miracles to superpowers to whatever. One common tie-in statement is that it is made of no known chemical element.

Sadly, when this is done wrong, it seems to imply that science is only for mundane things.

A note on the most common usage of this: even if magic does not work via our universe's physical laws, in many works it follows its own rules and therefore can be observed, experimented with and theorized about. It might require a new branch of science, but if it can be observed and experimented with, then science can comprehend it. Sometimes magic will be a jerk and break patterns only when someone is actually looking for one, just to invoke this trope. If the scientists persist in offering "scientific" explanations that don't correctly explain the phlebotinum, then this idea has turned into the rather closely related idea that Science Is Wrong. If this trope is averted because magic does work via our universe's physical laws that's Scientifically Understandable Sorcery.

See also Magic Must Defeat Magic.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Zig-zagged in Death Note:
  • After L and Light capture the Death Note in episode 24, Light suggests analyzing it. L replies that the Death Note is the kind of thing that can't be analyzed. He is later confirmed when they do try to analyze it and are unable to determine what it is made of.
  • Light is, however, able to analyze the functions of the Death Note and determines what it can or cannot do. Ryuk wasn't even aware of some of these things.
  • Averted further when L decides the responsible thing to do with the notebook is acquire a better understanding of it, namely by systematically testing every rule written in it rather than take them on faith. This is the critical point that would have fingered Light as Kira (Light intentionally wrote fake rules in the book to exonerate himself once L found it), forcing Light to finally kill L before he's caught.

Fan Works

• The Bridge (MLP): Gigan is a cyborg who constantly complains that his scanners cannot detect or analyze magic.
• Fate Azure Destiny: The Shipgirls and Sirens of Azur Lane are both unaware that magic exists. Excited to see a weapon that can withstand all their attacks, they try to analyze and reverse engineer Mashu Kyrielight's shield, the Noble Phantasm Lord Camelot, but cannot even find out what it is made of, so they treat it like a Black Box.
• Oversaturated World: Magic in the human world was not intended to be particularly flashy or widespread, and as such actively resists any attempt to study or analyze it beyond the handful of permitted rituals.
• The Taste of Peaches: At least, Tinkertech can't understand Taylor. Any Tinkertech devices that attempt to analyze Taylor break down, because her Industry domain basically looks at the black boxed technology and says, "Science doesn't work that way. Cut it out."
• Weres Harry?: It is apparently a rule of this setting that magic cannot be logically or rationally explained. The minor wanded magics will submit to a certain level of rational comprehension, but the deep magics are fundamentally illogical.

Film — Animated

• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
  • In both the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games Shorts episode "The Science of Magic" and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Sunset Shimmer's Time to Shine, Sunset Shimmer's attempts to analyze magic go nowhere. A variation in that magic is consistent enough to be studied as a science in her world, it's just how it presents itself in the human world is completely different.
  • In My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games, Sci-Twi's attempts to analyze magic have more success, but it is clear that she is out of her depth and she eventually loses control of the magic. Given she has no idea of how it's supposed to work it's suggested that what was hampering Sunset's studies were her own preconceptions.

Film — Live Action

• In The Happening, the mass genocide of humans by plants is described by Elliot Moore as something that just "happened", rather than the unprecedented biological phenomena that it actually was. The film goes further than this as the lead character is a science teacher that "teaches" that nature cannot be explained by science and that any explanation given by the scientific community is only a "theory".
• Invoked in Primer when residue on solid evidence is taken in for some formal analysis and they discover that it's Aspergillus Ticor: basically, fungus that accumulates everywhere. The device they built a few days ago was caking with the stuff and they had just been wiping it off every five days or so, unaware that the amount they had wiped off up to this point would have required many years to accumulate to the level that it did. The scientist who identifies the fungus for them thinks this must be a bad joke.

Literature

• The eponymous object in The Accidental Time Machine is this for a very long time. Averted in that it is eventually figured out, once technology has progressed for a couple billion years.
• A Certain Magical Index: Scanners for psychic energy cannot detect or analyze Touma Kamijou's Imagine Breaker or magic.
• The Colour Out of Space applies this to the meteorite the titular color came to Earth in. The meteorite is ridiculously malleable, hot upon landing (real ones aren't, and the characters know this), dissolves into the air within a few weeks of landing, and has a strange bubble of something like a color inside it which pops when hit with a hammer, all of which confuse the geologists looking at it greatly. (The color is some sort of Starfish Alien Energy Being-type thing that sucks the energy out of its environment until it returns to space, killing any living thing in the area affected down to germs and turning anything that tries to live there gray and brittle.)
• The Dresden Files plays with this. Magic has a tendency to screw with any kind of mechanical and electrical devices, in particular anything made from WWII onwards, so most methods for documenting magic just don't work, despite Dresden's attempts to go public. None of this stops Butters from trying, and he makes some noticeable strides. Wizard longevity is (probably) due to a lack of telomere shortening, for instance. The metaphysical rules governing magic change over time, possibly even in response to human beliefs. For example, strong magic users used to cause flames to burn odd colors and milk to sour back before technology. This would make it very difficult to quantify how magic works under prevailing scientific paradigms, although not impossible if new ones could be developed for that purpose and magic's effect doesn't "catch up".
• Played with in House of Leaves. When material samples from inside the house are analysed, the summary is that they're nothing out of the ordinary, chemically speaking. Oh, and by the way, that's a fascinating range you've got there. The oldest samples must have come from meteorites, because they're older than the solar system. Where did you say you found all these, Antarctica?
• The squeezer in Red Thunder can't be duplicated by anyone other than its inventor, despite being made from off the shelf parts. The perfectly hard, perfectly reflective bubbles it produces stymie any analysis they are exposed too.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel in Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" appears to be this for dumbfounded humanity when an alien invasion force attacks that operates on 18th-century tech levels. The subject turns out to be more complex once the aliens are interrogated; anti-gravity is so simple a principle that most races discover it before gunpowder. They don't progress from there because anti-gravity has no side applications aside from FTL, in stark contrast to electricity. Too bad for the aliens they attempted to conquer Earth 20 Minutes into the Future.
• In Sphere, all the chaos erupts because of the scientists accidentally using the eponymous alien device improperly. By the end of the story, they never have figured out how to use it right or even what it's actually supposed to do, let alone how it did what it did.

Live-Action TV

• One example from House has a priest who has lost his faith. His first symptom is a hallucination of a floating Jesus, followed by more life-threatening symptoms. House tries to find a single diagnosis that accounts for everything, but the real disease eventually accounts for everything except the visions. The priest concludes it must have been a genuine miracle which led him to seek House's help. Overlaps with Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane in this case because he may have been hallucinating due to his alcoholism (an early theory that was ruled out when he presented other symptoms).
• One of the standard pieces of equipment in The Middleman is a B.T.R.S. scanner, which looks for things Beyond the Realm of Science.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • Tollan technology is so advanced, it contains no apparent circuits, wires, or moving parts. Earth scientists have no hope of reverse-engineering their devices.
  • Not that it matters much, as they have the entirety of Asgard technology and more. The Ancients also had phasing technology, but only Janus was shown using it. Apparently, Ancient, Asgard, and Goa'uld technology is much easier to figure out than that. Which is strange, as the Tollan are human, while the others are alien. You'd think they would have similar thought processes.
  • The only other tech they have trouble with is Wraith biotech. This is because you need a mix of McKay and Beckett.
• A good portion of the items being hunted and hoarded in Warehouse 13 fall under this trope.

Tabletop Games

• One of the main sources of Tension and Drama in Genius: The Transgression. All attempts for the Wonders to be analyzed actually causes it to stop working and/or go haywire.
• Zig-zagged in Shadowrun. There are two main schools of thought when it comes to magic in the Sixth World. Shamanistic, which believes magic is an art that you feel rather than analyse. And Hermetic which believes that even Magic can be analysed to the smallest detail and can fit into a grand unified theory. Needless to say, there are some tensions between the two schools of thought.^note Most magic has shown signs of Clap Your Hands If You Believe, but as a natural phenomenon that migrates periodically, so technically, they're both right.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Gilgamesh and his lost Genji Armor, aka the Protorelics, are from another dimension. Chadley says they have substances not found in this dimension that cannot be analyzed.
• A key part to Tharan Cedrax's characterization in Star Wars: The Old Republic. He is a freelance scientist and gadgeteer, specializing in lost or obscure technology. Despite being personally fond of Jedi Council member Master Syo (and potentially just as fond of the Consular), he does not trust the Force, and gets annoyed when the Consular suggests using it to solve problems over mundane, practical solutions. He has an especially intense dislike of the Jedi Mind Trick. He's aware that the Force exists (at least in the sense of Jedi and Sith having powers that they attribute to it), but the fact that he has no way to detect the Force (and thus can't directly analyze it) is deeply frustrating.

Webcomics

• An odd variant in El Goonish Shive. Magic, in this world, does run on Magic A Is Magic A and obeys set rules that can be scientifically deduced. Indeed, much of Tedd's plot is about his continued research into magic. However, the Will of Magic is capable of changing these rules (within certain limits), and does so whenever magic becomes too widespread or too well understood (Magic wants to be used and understood, but only by a select few).
• Gunnerkrigg Court:
  • It's revealed that a Blinker Stone cannot be explained by scientific methods. The divide between magical beings and scientists is a critical point in the comic, to the point that the latter dislike even referring to the former as "Magical." They prefer the term "etheric sciences."
  • Zimmy declares the whole divide between "science" and "magic" to be missing the point entirely. She insists there's no such thing as magic, and just because you can't understand something doesn't make it magic. What the Court terms "magic" or "etheric sciences" is just them trying to comprehend something that is, by its very nature, incomprehensible, at least in her opinion.
    Zimmy: 'cos what you call "magic" is just a bunch of stuff that is only explained by not having an explanation! You're both right and wrong at the same time!

Web Original

• Averted by the SCP Foundation. Half of its mission is to try and scientifically explain the scientifically inexplicable by running lots and lots of experiments until they figure out precisely how it works. (The other half is to uphold the Masquerade.) If it is scientifically explicable, the anomaly is classified as Explained and safe for everyone else to know about. If it isn't... well, they've made some interesting strides in their research, it's just in fields that prove the physical laws we've ascribed to the universe are about as strong as tissue paper.
• The researchers in The Sick Land try to study the eponymous Eldritch Location. They aren't very successful.
• Want to scientifically analyse the world of Tales of MU? "Well, this is where a lot of the unique undead, cursed artifacts, and tainted lands come from. This is how magical abominations are created."

Western Animation

• In Jackie Chan Adventures, Captain Black insists on trying to fight magic with science. Uncle insists this is impossible, and since he gets more screen time...
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Feeling Pinkie Keen", Twilight Sparkle runs herself ragged trying to analyze/disprove Pinkie Pie's "Pinkie Sense". In the end, she gives up and admits that maybe the "Pinkie Sense" can't be analyzed (which turns out to be the "doozy" that Pinkie predicted would happen). It's explained in the same episode that magic in the general sense in My Little Pony is comprehensible by science, so most of the series averts this. Pinkie Pie and her "sense" still plays this trope straight, as whatever she's doing is still a unique form of "magic" in the series itself.

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