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... Isaac Newton, whose name is associated more than any other with physical mechanics, dabbled frequently in alchemy.

This is misleading, since he was struggling to establish a rationalistic chemistry based on alchemistic techniques.

- but to the main point of the discussion ...

This history provides a key to understanding the role of magic in Joanne Rowling’s books, for she begins by positing a counterfactual history, a history in which magic was not a false and incompetent discipline, but rather a means of controlling the physical world at least as potent as experimental science. In Harry Potter’s world, scientists think of magic in precisely the same way they do in our world, but they are wrong. The counterfactual "secondary world" that Rowling creates is one in which magic simply works, and works as reliably, in the hands of a trained wizard, as the technology that makes airplanes fly and refrigerators chill the air—those products of applied science being, by the way, sufficiently inscrutable to the people who use them that they might as well be the products of wizardry.

"Truth forever on the scaffold," eh? Anyway, the point isn't technology, but science. Jacobs is glossing over the structure of these stories wherein the alternative reality coexists with the mundane world of the muggles. It's similar to Never Never Land ( just "Never Land" in the original ) in this respect, although it seems to be somehow co-located rather than displaced. Potter's world is our world, unlike the world of the Hobbits, and this is an important difference. It is a reified escapist fantasy and the elements of resentment against a world that somehow failed to give satisfaction to the author are unmistakeable. We might say that Tolkein's fantasy is escapist, but it's not ABOUT a character escaping from reality, if you see the distinction I'm making.

When I was a kid, I devoured Tom Swift, Jr. stories, and although these were fantastical, they were a fantastic projection of the powers of real science, so that they certainly inspired the reader towards a study of science, in emulation of the hero.

The Potter books show a world in which mundane science is properly eschewed in favor of a more powerful magic, and thus must surely inspire an interest in magic and the occult, which children, in their own lives, can see being taken very seriously and even championed by many adults.

Obviously, I am very sympathetic to the complaints made against the Potter books on the grounds that they promote magic and the occult, although I don't share the religious convictions that are the usual basis for them. I do take seriously the enlightenment values which are historically entangled with religious values, so my opposition to an easy acceptance of occultism is perhaps not so far removed from the more vehement rejection based on religious scruples. I guess there's a certain irony here, considering Alan Jacobs's position at Wheaton College - I live just down the street, BTW. Back in 1986 I debated Creationist Henry Morris at the Edman Chapel there.