I find general science interesting and I know enough to recognize technology I’ve not heard of before. Your protestation of “it’s science” would draw more curiosity from me, not less, because science is something I know I can learn. (Not, mind you, in full expert detail. Nobody could know ALL of science. Even having a wide specialty makes a person a bit of a dabbler.)
I think the reason people switch off hearing “science” is because it means not so much “someone else knows”, but rather “as it is written in the books of Dogma and Creed”. It’s an indicator that this effect is “permitted magic”, and need attract no further corrective attention. If you had said your glowy thing was caused by “invocations to the dead god Fnargle”, that would be non-permitted magic. They don’t care about the reason, but they are determined to ferret out the heresy. They would try to find an explanation in terms of the dogma—“He’s got some gadget up his sleeve”. And then they would be happy, because you are no longer a scary priest of Fnargle whose magic works, but a pitiable charlatan secretly using invocations to Science.
I find general science interesting and I know enough to recognize technology I’ve not heard of before. Your protestation of “it’s science” would draw more curiosity from me, not less, because science is something I know I can learn. (Not, mind you, in full expert detail. Nobody could know ALL of science. Even having a wide specialty makes a person a bit of a dabbler.)
I think the reason people switch off hearing “science” is because it means not so much “someone else knows”, but rather “as it is written in the books of Dogma and Creed”. It’s an indicator that this effect is “permitted magic”, and need attract no further corrective attention. If you had said your glowy thing was caused by “invocations to the dead god Fnargle”, that would be non-permitted magic. They don’t care about the reason, but they are determined to ferret out the heresy. They would try to find an explanation in terms of the dogma—“He’s got some gadget up his sleeve”. And then they would be happy, because you are no longer a scary priest of Fnargle whose magic works, but a pitiable charlatan secretly using invocations to Science.