Stories of the Nature of Things

Why I bring science and magic together

Three crises, one answer. Why knowledge alone is not enough and wonder is missing.

When I mention that I am both a magician and a scientist, I usually get a frown. Do the two go together? Sober explanation here, staged impossibility there? I believe they not only go together, they belong together. And in this short series I would like to show you why.

Let us begin with a contradiction that has troubled me for years. Never has so much knowledge been so readily available as today. The phone in your pocket answers every question. And yet something is going wrong.

First, there is the growing distrust of science. The German Science Barometer of 2024 shows that only about three in ten people feel well informed, markedly fewer than the year before. Second, young people are losing interest in scientific and technical careers; the number of new students in engineering and computer science has recently fallen noticeably. And third, most deeply of all: society is splitting apart. More than three quarters of Germans experience their country as fractured.

The astonishing thing is this: these crises do not arise because we lack knowledge. They arise in the middle of an abundance of it.

One finding in particular shook me. The legal scholar Dan Kahan has shown that more factual knowledge does not reduce division on contested topics; it increases it. People with more competence use it, by preference, to shore up the views of their own group. Knowledge becomes a weapon, not a bridge.

But if knowledge alone is not enough, what is missing?

My answer, and the answer of this series, is: wonder. Not as decoration, but as an attitude. The philosopher Helen De Cruz describes wonder as a special kind of feeling: it tells us that the world is not, at this moment, as we thought, and that we ought to revise our picture of it. Wonder arises precisely in the moment of surprise, when an expectation breaks. And in that moment something remarkable becomes possible: the brain does not defend itself. It learns.

I call this the wonder paradox: knowledge without wonder hardens us. Knowledge that arises through wonder opens us. The difference lies not in the content but in the feeling with which we experience it.

And this is where conjuring comes in. It is, as far as I can see, the only art form that can produce wonder reliably, instantly and anywhere. No orchestra, no studio. A single trick is enough, at the kitchen table, in the classroom, in the meeting room. A ball vanishes, a coin turns up where it cannot possibly be, and in the spectator’s head the same question ignites, without fail: How can that be?

That question is not a trick. It is an invitation. Because every science begins with exactly that question.

In an age in which knowledge alone no longer carries, we need wonder back.

Next part: Play, Wonder, Understand. How we form a picture of the world.

Play, Wonder, Understand

The three steps: how we form a picture of the world.

How do we actually form a picture of the world? The answer is surprisingly simple, and it lies in three words that are, for me, the heart of everything: Play, Wonder, Understand.

Play means trying things out without anything having to succeed. My friend and co-author Jan Becker says that play is like a pencil sketch: you are allowed to rub it out again. No pressure, no marks, no scrutinising gaze at your back. And precisely in that pressure-free space something happens: you do things you would not otherwise dare to. You become more skilful without noticing.

Wonder is the moment in which something turns out differently from what you thought. You are fiddling about, and suddenly a small piece of magic succeeds that you would never have expected of yourself. You laugh in surprise at yourself. That feeling of astonishment, the gap between what we expected and what actually happened, is wonder.

Understand is what comes afterwards: we adjust our picture of the world to what we have just experienced. “I can’t do that” becomes “so I can do that after all”.

The beautiful thing is that these three steps are not just a neat formula for conjuring. They are exactly what good science does. Play corresponds to the experiment. Wonder corresponds to the moment in which a trial refutes your own expectation. And understanding is what researchers call a “model update”: we correct our assumption about the world.

So we do not learn by memorising answers. We learn when an experience collides with our expectation. The spark of learning almost always jumps where something happens that we did not foresee.

And here lies the real trick of conjuring, not a trick of the hands but an educational one: a magic trick stages that collision on purpose. It takes one of our firmest assumptions about the world, “things don’t simply vanish”, “matter doesn’t pass through matter”, and lets it break for a moment. This is not deception for deception’s sake. It is controlled irritation: a gentle nudge that makes entrenched assumptions mobile again.

A small distinction is worth making here. There are hard assumptions (a ball falls downwards) and soft assumptions (my proposal is surely better than my colleague’s). The finest moments of learning arise when a hard assumption breaks. And the worst discussions arise when we treat soft assumptions as if they were hard, when we take a mere supposition for a fact.

That is exactly what I train in my programmes: a feel for how effortlessly we mistake supposition for knowledge. Anyone who has once been astonished, in their own body, at how certain an error can feel becomes a little more careful in everyday life, and a little more curious.

Play, Wonder, Understand. It sounds like child’s play. It is the opposite: the most grown-up way of staying clever.

Next part: What happens in the head when we wonder.

What happens in the head when we wonder

Prediction errors, the “small self”, and why wonder opens us up.

When a coin vanishes before your eyes, something astonishingly precise happens in your head within fractions of a second. I find this inner process almost more beautiful than the trick itself.

Our brain is not a camera that simply records the world. It is more like a tireless weather forecaster: it predicts, without pause, what is going to happen next. You reach for the cup and expect a certain weight. You climb a staircase and expect the next step. Most of the time the prediction is right, and you notice nothing at all.

A magic trick does exactly one thing: it produces a prediction that does not come true. Specialists call this a prediction error. The coin ought to be there; it is not. For a tiny moment a gap opens between what you expected and what you see. And that gap is not a defect. It is the engine of learning. For a brain whose prediction has just failed knows: my picture of the world needs revising. It sets to work, attentive, alert, open.

That is why we remember things we have wondered at so much better than things we have merely been told.

But there is a second effect, and to me it is almost the more important one. When we truly wonder, before a starry sky, a thunderstorm, an inexplicable moment, a certain network in our brain briefly falls quiet. Researchers call it the default mode network; one might call it the “self network”. It is responsible for our brooding, for the constant circling around ourselves, our opinions, our group loyalties.

In wonder, this self steps back a pace. The psychologist Dacher Keltner speaks of the “small self”: we feel small in the face of something greater, and paradoxically, in the same moment, more connected. Smaller and larger at once. Experiments show that people are more helpful, more generous and more open after a moment of wonder. Not because anyone told them to be. But because the ever-defending self has, for a moment, vacated its seat.

And precisely there, for me, lies the link between conjuring and clear thinking. In that brief window in which our prediction has failed and our self grows quieter, we are less chained to our own preconceptions. We are, for a moment, genuinely capable of learning. Not defensive. Not self-righteous. Open.

This is not mysticism; it is measurable. And it explains why a good magic trick is more than entertainment: it briefly puts us into exactly the state of mind that a good researcher needs too, alert to the unexpected and ready to correct her own picture.

Next time you wonder at something, pay attention to yourself for a moment. You will notice: you are wholly present. And you are open. That is exactly what I wanted to show you.

Next part: The eight places where wonder waits for us.

The eight places where wonder waits

The eight sources of wonder according to Keltner and Becker.

Wonder often seems like a stroke of luck, something that simply comes over you or doesn’t. But that is only half true. Research has by now mapped fairly precisely where deep wonder comes from. The psychologist Dacher Keltner has distilled eight great sources from many people and many cultures, the “eight wonders of life”. My co-author Jan Becker calls them a map of wonder. I find that whoever knows the map finds wonder much more easily.

• The moral beauty of other people. Surprisingly, this is according to Keltner the most frequent source of all. Not starry skies, but kindness. A brave, selfless, unexpectedly friendly person is what most reliably makes us wonder.
• Collective effervescence. Being absorbed together in something larger: a concert, a stadium, a ritual, a dance. The moment in which many I’s become, for a while, a we.
• Nature. The storm, the sunrise, the sea, but just as much the veins of a single leaf that look like a river system seen from space. An almost inexhaustible source, and the most easily accessible.
• Music. That being moved which a melody can give us, without our being able to say why.
• Art and its patterns. Works and forms we experience as meaningful. Art is, in a sense, preserved wonder that speaks to us across centuries.
• The spiritual. Moments of stillness, of reverence, of contemplation, whether religiously framed or not.
• Life and death. A birth, a farewell, the great thresholds of existence at which everything everyday becomes unimportant.
• Big ideas. The moment of grasping, the “Eureka!”, when a connection suddenly lights up and you see the world afterwards with different eyes.

This last source is the one I most like to cultivate in my programmes: the wonder of insight. But the lovely thing about the map is that the other seven are not competitors but additional doors. A story of civil courage, an image from nature, a moment of magic shared together: all of these can open the door and then steer the awakened wonder towards what really matters.

One small note, because it is often confused: humour is not the same as wonder. Both begin the same way, with a broken expectation. But the joke releases the tension through the all-clear (“ah, so that’s what it meant”), wonder through insight (“so that’s how the world is”). Humour is a good neighbour of wonder, but a different place.

Why is all this useful? Because you no longer have to leave wonder to chance. Whoever knows where it lives can pay it a visit. This week, seek it out deliberately at one of these eight places. You will be surprised how much is waiting for you there.

Next part: Why wonder can be practised, like a word in a foreign language.

Wonder can be practised, like vocabulary

The awe walk and the wonder safari: wonder is trainable.

When Jan Becker first told me that wonder could be practised like vocabulary, I took it for mysticism. Today I know it is one of the best-supported findings in the whole of wonder research. And the best part: it is child’s play.

The psychologist Virginia Sturm sent older people on a weekly walk for eight weeks. One group simply set off. The other received a single, odd instruction: walk with a beginner’s mind; look at everything as if you were seeing it for the first time. It was called the “awe walk”.

The result contradicts everything one would expect. Normally we grow dull to repetition; the tenth walk along the same route bores us. But the awe group reported more wonder, more joy and less anxiety week after week. They did not grow wearier but more awake. Even their selfies changed: their own face grew smaller, the world around it larger.

Why does this work? Because wonder depends less on what we see than on how we look. The world is full of things worth wondering at; we merely walk past them, most of the time, with our heads elsewhere. The beginner’s mind is nothing more than the decision to pause briefly and really look.

I have turned this into a small exercise that I warmly recommend. Let us call it the wonder safari:

• Once a week, walk for twenty minutes, ideally somewhere you can find open space or nature. A park, a riverbank, a clear view will do.
• The only rule: look at everything as if you were seeing it for the first time. Actively search for a single detail that makes you wonder: the veins of a leaf, a play of light, a pattern in the tarmac.
• Take a photograph of it. Not of yourself, of it, the thing worth wondering at.
• And afterwards write a single sentence in a small notebook. A wonder diary, one page per day.

The odd thing, and almost everyone who tries it experiences this, is that the more often you search, the more you find. Wonder does not grow scarcer. You yourself grow more attentive.

And then, after four weeks, ask yourself a question: is it getting easier or harder to find things worth wondering at? The answer tells you something important, namely that attention can be trained. That same open, fresh attitude that seeks out wonder is, incidentally, exactly the attitude that distinguishes good research: to look as if you knew nothing yet.

Wonder, then, is not a stroke of luck that befalls you. It is a muscle. And like every muscle it grows stronger the more often you use it. Start small. A leaf is enough.

Next part: Why more knowledge divides us and wonder unites us.

Why more knowledge divides us and wonder unites us

Why more knowledge polarises and wonder relaxes.

There is an uncomfortable truth I do not want to leave out of this series, because it has given me pause: more knowledge does not automatically make us more understanding. Sometimes it makes us more stubborn.

The researcher Dan Kahan has shown this strikingly. One would think that on a contested topic, say climate change, people would come together more readily the more they knew about it. The opposite is the case. Among the most competent people the division was greatest. Why? Because we like to use our cleverness to shore up what our group believes anyway. The sharper the mind, the better the arguments for one’s own side. Knowledge then becomes not a bridge but armour.

That is discouraging if you believe that facts alone can heal division. They cannot, precisely. For the core of the division often lies not in the head but in the feeling: one distrusts the people on the other side, quite regardless of how large the factual difference really is.

And here something comes into play that gives me hope. The psychologists Daniel Stancato and Dacher Keltner brought people to wonder in experiments, for instance with images of nature, and then measured their political attitudes. The result: after wondering, people judged less rigidly. They perceived their political opponents as less hostile. The ideological temperature had dropped.

The reason is exactly the “small self” I described earlier in this series. Whoever wonders experiences themselves, for a moment, as part of something greater, and whoever feels part of a greater whole no longer has to defend their position so doggedly. Wonder, as Keltner says, seeks what is shared rather than what divides.

I once observed this myself, in two young people at one of my seminars. They clashed, loudly, nobody listening any more, the fronts hardened. Then a flock of birds passed over them, in those breathtaking, fluid patterns. Both fell silent mid-sentence and looked up. They wondered, together. When they resumed, the air was different. They did not come to agree. But they listened to each other again. Two opposing poles that repelled each other had become two poles between which current flows.

From this follows, for me, a very practical recommendation, for teams as much as for families: a short, shared moment of wonder before a difficult conversation is no gimmick. An overwhelming image, a baffling trick, a great open question: this does not distract, it prepares. It lowers the temperature before the matter itself begins.

The point is not to conjure differences away. The point is to negotiate them in a climate in which what connects us was, for a moment, palpable. Scepticism protects us from the lie. Wonder protects us from hardening. We need both.

Next part: Why I don’t reveal the trick.

Why I don’t reveal the trick

Secret and puzzle, Van Helsing, and “transparency is not truth”.

The most frequent question after every performance is always the same: “How did you do that?” And almost always I do not tell. That disappoints some people. So I would like to explain here why this is not meanness but the very point of the thing.

There is a fine but important difference between a puzzle and a secret. A puzzle is something not yet solved but solvable. A crossword, a sum, a criminal case. A secret is something else: a space one holds open. The French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle described beautifully how our age tends to turn every secret at once into a puzzle: everything must be unveiled, explained, made transparent. “Transparency,” she writes, “is not truth.”

When I explain a trick, I turn, in precisely this sense, a secret into a solved puzzle. And at that moment something is over: the suspended state in which you stood at the edge of your knowledge and wondered. It is exactly there, at that edge, that learning takes place, not before and not after. Whoever resolves the trick immediately ends the experience before it can take effect.

I like to think here of a character from fiction: Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Opposite him stands the sober Dr Seward, a clever, precise man who accepts only what he can explain. Van Helsing says something to him that has stayed with me ever since: “It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

That is no rejection of science. On the contrary. Van Helsing commands the methods, knows the facts, respects the craft, and he remains open to what the facts alone cannot grasp. He holds on to his “small truths” and values them, but he does not let them block his view of what is greater. It is precisely this double attitude I want to practise: the eye for detail and the eye for the whole.

The unrevealed trick, then, is not knowledge withheld. It is a space deliberately held open. As long as the question How can that be? keeps working in you, your perception stays awake and the world stays capable of answering. A world explained without remainder has nothing more to say to us; it has, to borrow another thinker’s phrase, fallen mute.

Do not misunderstand me: disclosing the principle behind a trick can be a wonderful moment of learning, and that is exactly what I do in my seminars at the right point. But that is something different from the quick “reveal” that merely switches curiosity off.

Hence my no. Not to leave you in the dark. But to let the light burn a little longer: the light of the open question, in which we see the most.

Next part: Newton was an alchemist. Why science and magic are siblings.

Newton was an alchemist: why science and magic are siblings

Science and magic as siblings: the historical punchline.

Whoever mentions science and magic in the same breath is met with a frown; that was the starting point of this series. Today I would like to dissolve the frown once and for all. For history tells a surprising truth: science and magic are not enemies. They are siblings with a shared origin.

The notion that the two are opposites is astonishingly young. For most of human history they were the same activity, practised by the same people, driven by the same engine: wonder at a world not yet understood, and the will to grasp it.

In the Middle Ages the separation simply did not exist. What we would today call superstition was then embedded in the accepted theories of the age. Medicine and astrology belonged together; astrology was part of the liberal arts at the universities. There was even a recognised field, the magia naturalis, “natural magic”: the investigation of the hidden powers in stones, plants and stars. It was the protected space out of which natural science later emerged. One might put it pointedly: natural science is a child of permitted magic.

The finest example is Isaac Newton. The man who described gravity spent more than thirty years on alchemical experiments. For a long time this was regarded as an embarrassing quirk. Historians of science now see it differently: it was precisely the alchemical idea of invisible action at a distance that allowed Newton to conceive of gravity at all, a force acting across empty space without contact. He translated the magical “spirit” into the mathematical concept of “force”. The foundation of modern physics is a successful translation of magical concepts into the language of mathematics.

Chemistry, too, was inseparable from alchemy until around 1700: the same laboratories, the same substances, the same people. The separation came only later, and it had very practical reasons: the young academic discipline of chemistry wanted to appear respectable and retrospectively declared alchemy to be quackery, while concealing how much it owed to it. The boundary between “science” and “superstition” was thus not discovered but drawn.

This little history has, for me, a large punchline. When I put a magician in the lecture theatre, that is no trespass; it is a homecoming. I claim nothing supernatural in doing so. Modern stage magic is, on the contrary, an invention of the Enlightenment: a magic that openly admits to being illusion, and precisely thereby trains scepticism. For more than three hundred years the enlightened magic trick has served as a teaching aid against the “false pride of knowledge”.

So when someone asks me what conjuring has to do with science, the historically correct answer is: everything. Newton was an alchemist, chemistry is alchemy under a new name, and scientific curiosity itself is the tamed descendant of magical wonder.

And honestly: is that not itself a small moment of wonder? Hardly anyone expects the separation of science and magic to be younger than the telescope.

Next part: Mara and Philemon, two ways of being wrong.

Mara and Philemon: two ways of being wrong

A narrative conclusion: two ways of being wrong, and the shared moment of wonder.

To close this series I would like to tell you about two young people. They are invented, and true all the same. Let us call them Mara and Philemon.

First day at university. Mara has sorted the room in under ten seconds. The chap in the expensive jacket, right at the front: arrogant, a know-all. The woman already asking a question: a swot. The lecturer: bound to be another one of those. Mara is so busy sorting that she does not listen at all; why should she, she already knows how the story ends.

At the same table sits Philemon. He too has sorted the room: everyone here is too slow for him. He skimmed the first weeks’ material long ago. In the second row he sees a girl with folded arms and thinks: the quitter. Nothing does he despise as much as giving up.

Two people who find each other thoroughly impossible at first sight. And both are proud of how quickly they have seen through the other.

Here is the point I am driving at: every one of those lightning-fast pigeonholes was a small claim about the world, and neither of them had ever checked a single one. It felt like knowledge. It was not.

Mara and Philemon are wrong in opposite ways, and perhaps you recognise a piece of yourself in one of them. Mara curled up early: “I can’t do that anyway.” Her error is resignation. Philemon saw through everything early: “I grasped that long ago.” His error is arrogance. And both share the same blind spot: they take their snap judgement for cleverness.

When the two see a magic trick for the first time, a coin that appears under a box which has been standing on their own palm the whole time, they react in character. Mara snorts, “cheap trick”, louder than necessary. Philemon at once, almost triumphantly, names a “method”. One has to snort the secret away, the other has to snap it shut. Neither can bear that there is an open question.

And that is exactly the question this whole series has circled around: How can that be? In Mara and Philemon it keeps working, whether they want it to or not. It is the first crack in their certainty. Philemon later makes a shattering discovery: that his quick understanding was not a wealth but an impoverishment. He had seen through so much so early that the world had gone grey on him. Perhaps, he thinks, I am not cleverer than the others. Perhaps I am only deafer.

What connects the two in the end is not being right but a shared moment of wonder: a flock of birds above them, beneath which they both, for a moment, become small and fall silent. Opposing poles that repel each other become two poles between which current flows.

That is the hope behind all my programmes. All of us sort, judge, snap shut, without pause. Wonder is the brief, precious moment in which we pull a drawer open again. In which we ask ourselves: is what I believe I know actually true?

Thank you for walking these nine stories with me. Next time “cheap trick” or “seen through it long ago” passes through your mind: pause for a moment. And wonder instead.

End of the series. If you like, experience the whole thing live: on stage, or quite small, at a table.

The training manual

The foundation of all the formats: a continually expanded work in six parts, written in German.

Behind the formats stands an extensive training manual, brought together from the workshop script and the theoretical text “Conjuring in Teaching and Support” (RWU Ravensburg-Weingarten, research sabbatical 2026), the discussion paper “Science and Magic for Teams” (with Jan Becker and Rainer Mees) and passages from Jan Becker’s book “WOW”. It pursues three aims: to bring the theoretical foundation to a uniformly evidence-based standard, to make findings from organisational research usable in teaching, and to create a document suitable for teacher training and organisational seminars alike.

Two narrative threads run through the whole work and are brought together in the epilogue: Mara’s diary and Philemon’s marginal notes, two opposite learning paths through the same stations. The appendices contain the lecture script, the pupils’ booklet, a glossary of evidence-based replacements for popular terms, the pamphlets for pupils’ and adults’ formats, the survey instruments of the evaluation, and card sets for association and value-and-colour exercises.

The accompanying studies

Whether wonder really produces better hypotheses is measured, not asserted.

The format is accompanied empirically. Four studies of its own have been documented so far:

• Audience survey after performances using marker cards (on the Plickers principle): wonder, rating of the text, rating of the performer, evaluated classically and with Bayesian methods.
• Gender bias experiment: “Do we really judge fairly?” A four-group design (gender by title) with anonymous live voting.
• Video study and field study on the Monty Hall problem: three online surveys on whether a moment of wonder increases willingness to revise one’s own intuition.
• Study 4: wonder and hypothesis quality. A randomised online study with two arms (a magic trick with the “Board of Wonders” versus mathematical reading texts), blinded consensus coding of the open answers, 53 evaluable cases. Field phase completed in August 2026.

A cross-study synthesis summarises the results; an empirical note is being prepared for the Journal of Performance Magic. The analysis scripts and survey instruments are part of the accompanying material.

Selected reading

The scientific basis in brief. The full bibliography with abstracts runs to several hundred sources.

• De Cruz, H. (2024). Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think. Princeton University Press.
• Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and Why It Matters. Penguin Press.
• Kahan, D. M. et al. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2, 732–735.
• Feldman Barrett, L. (2020). Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Kahneman, D., Sibony, O. & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Little, Brown Spark.
• Wiseman, R. (2023). Magic: How Conjuring Has Changed the World. Bloomsbury.
• Sousa, D. A. & Pilecki, T. (2018). From STEM to STEAM. Corwin Press.
• Norton, M. I. (2024). The Ritual Effect: From Mundane to Meaningful. Avid Reader Press.
• Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity. And: Rosa, H. (2020). The Uncontrollability of the World. Polity.
• Dufourmantelle, A. (2021). In Defence of Secrets. Fordham University Press (German edition: Matthes & Seitz).
• Epstein, D. (2026). Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Riverhead Books.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Questions about the reading or the manual? Write to me.