[ WP ] Science and Magic are merely opposite sides to which the pendulum of time swings . It has leaned for the past few centuries towards the Laws of Science but even now it begins to return ever faster back towards the Laws of Magic .

A rainbow snow of pixels pulsed across my monitors, tone-shifting and obscuring the paper I was grading until it faded away like droplets three seconds later. For a few moments I was transfixed, as if the unfamiliar pattern the pixels rippled was more than noise. As the last fluctuations collapsed toward single pixels and off of my screen I sighed. 
 
 `` Chris'', I shouted across the room to one of my grad students, `` any idea what would cause a monitor suddenly tone-shift what I'm working on?'' He looked up from the lab table he was working atop with a small pressure chamber and its connected laptop. 
 
 `` You too, professor? I just had something like that on this screen as well.'' He glanced at the monitor on my desk -- the only desk in the room. His pupils narrowed and surely lost focus as he looked past me and my computer in thought. 
 
 `` Chris?'' I'd thought this had more to do with his electrical and hardware field than my materials science, but he was surprisingly unresponsive. 
 
 `` If you had the issue as well, it would make sense for it to be a network issue but it looked more like fingers pressing on an LCD.'' He turned his stool toward me with a troubled look on his face. `` But it went away real fast. Maybe there was an EM pulse?'' 
 
 I shrugged and calmed down. Somehow I'd gotten agitated by the screen without noticing my emotion. Seeing my student troubled, my role of mentoring and providing a calm sounding board took precedence over phantom anxieties. 
 
 Gently, I probed his response. `` Did this look like an EMP wave?'' I assumed not. 
 
 `` No, ma'am. I've seen electromagnetic fields cause a sort of shaky image or normal snow but this was made of moving points. At a field strength enough to have pixels magnetize into weird patterns the monitors should have lost signal.'' 
 
 I was by now turned away from my screen and had rolled the deskchair toward the open tile to show Chris he had my full attention. `` So,'' I began slowly, `` what does that leave us?'' 
 
 He began to list off possibilities as he rested his tilted head into an open palm. `` A virus that causes a specific pattern without other issues -- unlikely, if this was a pressure change in the room -- we would have felt it, and I ca n't think of something magnetic or electrical that fits. It was like an invisible swarm of bugs pressing on the screen with their footsteps.'' 
 
 `` But if it was n't air pressure and not a magnetic wave then that leaves a network issue,'' I concluded. 
 
 `` So someone maybe hacked the campus just to play a pattern over the monitors?'' He seemed content with that. `` I'll check the resource use then. This sort of complex look would put at least minor strain on the CPU or GPU.'' 
 
 `` No luck.'' Chris turned back toward me. `` Resource Monitor does n't show any weird spikes or processes. I guess that's fine since we do n't have to notify site security but it does n't solve the puzzle.'' 
 
 *Damn. * I cursed in my mind that I'd have to leave this alone. 
 
 `` Is your experiment still fine, by the way?'' If the same thing that affected the monitors affected the apparatus then Chris could need to replace the sample. Our hope was that by stretching the alloy by reducing ambient pressure it would permanently lose some bonds and form certain patterns. The smaller the scale these patterns could be made regular, the more useful this material would be in future computer chips. It was standard Materials Science work, but any shock to the apparatus could ruin it. 
 
 He was silent a long while. `` Actually, no. Around when the thing happened to the monitors, there was a sensor glitch and afterwards they're contradicting.'' 
 
 `` As in the sensors need to be fixed?'' I had gotten up and started walking toward Chris and the experiment. `` Or the sample is doing something weird?'' 
 
 He looked stumped as he checked over the instruments so I took one of the thermal cameras from a cabinet. His experiment was relatively stable temperature so it had n't needed any of the cameras, which would view hot areas as blooms of red and white against the purple and black of cool objects. 
 
 I turned the camera on and it seemed to boot just fine. The objects in the room were a standard blue cloud. As soon as it was responsive I began narrowing its range of sensitivity by swapping its lens and settings. 
 
 When I pointed it into the experiment, something was very wrong. The alloy pulsed with colors somewhat like my monitor had. 
 
 `` Chris,'' I tapped him on the shoulder and passed the camera over. `` Your sensors are probably fine.'' 
 
 He tilted his head into the camera rather than hold it in front of himself, probably to keep the image on the screen visible to me. 
 
 `` Ma'am, what the *hell* is this? Temperature spikes? But there should only be under a watt of electricity running through it right now.'' 
 
 As the screen on Chris' laptop once more pulsed and sparkled with the strange snowlike patterns, I shrugged. My heart was beating fast and I knew I should be excited, but an unscientific part of my mind was wary and even afraid. At least in the room I was in, physics had begun to break down. 
 
 Slowly the pulses across screens as well as the background interference that showed on our sample would become more common. Eventually these deviations from order began to form heartbeats.
