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Fistly, thank you for your time.

I'm currently trying to build a system based on the treatment some metals get in different beliefs or works of fiction, more specifically, metals. Iron, for example, is and has mostly always been the Go-To for deterring or outright nulling magical entities like Fae in Celtic myth or Druids, who can't carry many (or any) items made out of such thing for various reasons depending on the author -really, from nature, vegetarian-like abstinence to it burning them if they do, there's about everything-.

I want to take this a step further and inject some science into it. Talking from a purely material science perspective, how would different metals react to magic, should this behave similarly to radiation or thermal conduction? And if so, which ones would be best? Would purity matter as a whole, like it does for Steven Universe's Gems or Earthbenders in TLoK?

Again, thank you for your time and answers. If there's anything wrong with how this question is posed, do let me know and I'll change it as soon as possible.

Facundo zanatta
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    from a purely material science perspective, how would different metals react to magic? From a material science perspective magic doesn't exist. – L.Dutch Sep 27 '22 at 15:35
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    I’m voting to close this question because it's something a book could be written about, not just an answer. – Nepene Nep Sep 27 '22 at 15:43
  • "Iron, for example, is and has mostly always been the Go-To for deterring or outright nulling magical entities like Fae in Celtic myth or Druids": no it isn't and not it hasn't. (And although quite a few classical authors speak at length about druids, not a single one of them mentions anything special about druids and iron. If the druids had trouble handling iron implements then surely Caesar, Cicero, or Diodorus Siculus would have mentioned it -- after all, the druids were powerful figures amongst the Gauls, and the Romans would have been interested to describe any weakness.) – AlexP Sep 27 '22 at 16:25
  • It's your magic system. You can have materials interact with your magic system however you want it to. Perhaps you use a strictly elemental definition of iron, and even a single iron atom will affect magic. But it's equally likely that something needs to be made of iron, for it to affect magic, permitting you to safely ignore the iron that exists in the mitochondria of plants and animals. Or iron could have no influence on magic in your world. Since literally every answer will be equally valid, this question is highly inappropriate for this site. – sphennings Sep 27 '22 at 17:16
  • @Nosajimiki: I am mildly amused by drag-and-drop being given as an example for "always". Fun fact: drag-and-drop became a thing in the early 1980s, and became truly popular in the early 1990s, when Microsoft Windows and System 7 (as the operating system of the Apple Macintosh was called at that time) made it really useful. – AlexP Sep 27 '22 at 18:15
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    Hello Facundo. Our job is to help you create and consistently use the rules of an imaginary world of your own creation - but we won't create that world for you. SE is not a discussion forum and our [help/on-topic] warns that we're not a place for brainstorming. Our job is to help you overcome problems you are facing in your worldbuilding efforts. What's stopping you from assigning reactions to magic? As you write a Q for here, you should ask yourself, "why do I need their help?" If you don't know, you're not ready to ask the Q. If you do now, that's the Q you should ask. – JBH Sep 27 '22 at 20:27
  • @AlexP Oh if you want origins, then lets go back to a 6000 year old fairy tale: "The Smith and the Devil". In this, the art of smithing was forbidden knowledge taught to mankind by a malevolent supernatural being in exchange for the first blacksmith's soul. But using the forbidden knowledge the smith gained power over the evil spirit and nailed it to the ground and escaped his fate. 6000 years ago, there was no distinction between the idea of gods, demons, fea, genies, titans, etc. So as this folk tail has evolved, iron has been described as being used to bind all of the above. – Nosajimiki Sep 27 '22 at 20:52
  • ^keeping in mind that before the iron age, iron would have exclusively been meteoric iron which had extreme mystical/divine significance to a wide range of cultures. – Nosajimiki Sep 27 '22 at 20:56
  • VTR --- This is another example of so many community members misapplying the concept of "science" & "science based" when rejecting questions like this out of hand. To say that "from a material science perspective magic doesn't exist" misses the point of not only the question but also the entire forum itself. The point of this question is that "materials science" and "magic" do in fact coexist. That is the nature of the fictional world that is placed before us. It's not for us to bitch that something can't be done. Leave that for the physics stack. Our job is describe how & why it happens. – elemtilas Sep 29 '22 at 13:56

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Magic is fundamentally controlled by magnetic fields

In order to answer this question you need to look at the properties of iron and find one thing about it that no other material available in your setting has or at least where it is a remarkable outlier. If you treat magic like radiation, then iron has a lower density than many other metal options like lead or bronze which would work better, so the radiation explanation does not work. If you are looking at magic like it is flowing electricity then iron as a semiconductor could neither be good for redirecting it as a copper alloy could nor at absorbing it out right like leather cloth. If you look at magic like flowing heat, iron has a pretty low specific heat so, you can't think of it like a thermal insulator. There is only really one property of iron that stands out in in how it interacts with any sort of know "magic like" forces, and that is its ferromagnetisms.

There are very few materials in nature that can meaningfully interact with a magnetic field. These are called ferromagnetic materials. In the pre-modern era, Iron was the only known ferromagnetic material, although cobalt, nickel, and certain rare earth metals may also make good magic resisters, they were not isolated as elements until the past few hundred years.

How you can explain it is that the world around us exists in some kind of magic scalar field that can only be manipulated by a physical being through magnetic fields. A lot of fantasy settings already have something like this: the weave, the aether, etc., but don't explain how it is manipulated. So for the sake of your setting, lets say wizards can create complex magnetic field patterns to manipulate the aether, and it is only through precise control of it that he can release its stored potential energy into a useable form.

The thing about iron is that it causes magnetic fields to change shapes; so, if a wizard is trying to make precise magnetic fields, any near by iron will change the shape of that field causing the spell to misfire.

Why does iron purity matter?

It has to due with crystalline structures. High purity carbon steels then to have crystalline structures that run in veins which are responsible for its ferromagnetic properties. However, many steels have higher concentrations of paramagnetic crystal structures like cementite and austenite that have much weaker magnetic properties. These special crystalline structures often come from "desirable contaminates" such as nickel, vanadium, molybdenum, chromium, magnesium, etc. So iron ores containing trace amounts of these metals were often recognized by blacksmiths for making higher quality steels, but they would have also been less magnetic.

In this regard you can sort of create a direct relationship between how good of a weapon/armor grade ore you have, and how good of spell resistance it will have.

Nosajimiki
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  • Questions looking to brainstorm or generate ideas are not permitted on this site. As a longtime member of this site we expect you to set a good example by not answering questions with obvious issues. Sharing your opinion to a question with many valid answers, runs contrary to site policy, and the fundamental proposition of a Stack Exchange site. – sphennings Sep 27 '22 at 17:55
  • @sphennings On the contrary, the question is asking what scientific property of iron could make it uniquely effective as an anti-magic material. Of all of its properties, ferromagnetism is the only property that is unique to iron that no other materials available in a typical fantasy setting would have. Other answers are not equally valid because they would not be able to explain why a give property works for iron, but not copper, silver, wood, glass, etc. – Nosajimiki Sep 27 '22 at 18:11
  • OP isn't asking "What material properties unique to iron make it antimagic?" They're asking "How would different metals react to magic, should this behave similarly to radiation or thermal conduction? And if so, which ones would be best?" That question is entirely open ended. Even if your reduced scope interpretation was correct, that would still be a poor fit for this site since any property unique to iron will be an equally valid answer the question. We review questions as they're written, not as we wish they were written. You can always work with the OP to resolve the issues with their Q. – sphennings Sep 27 '22 at 18:18
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    +1. I like honest attempts to give good answers to bad questions. They may not be a perfect match for the site, but it's nice to meet them where they're at and try to help them anyway. – Qami Sep 27 '22 at 18:25
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    "In the pre-modern era, Iron was the only known ferromagnetic material": only in the sense that the original magnetic material, magnetite, is ferrimagnetic not ferromagnetic. The difference is subtle, and the entire class of ferrimagnetic materials was separated from ferromagntic materials only around the middle of the 20th century. (Fun piece of history: the original Magnetes were a Greek tribe; they founded a colony in Lydia, which they named Magnesia, after their home country. Magnetism is named after the magnesian stones found nearby.) – AlexP Sep 27 '22 at 18:30
  • @sphennings I read this at first as he has a setting where different metals interact with magic differently, and inside the context of this world he is specifically asking about why iron would be an magic nullifying metal, but re-reading this question I think you are correct that he is looking for an exhaustive list of metals, what they do, and why: which would certainly be off topic. I think I read his example about iron and assumed he was asking specifically about iron. – Nosajimiki Sep 27 '22 at 18:54
  • @Nosajimiki Even if it was only about Iron the question still would be a brainstorming ask and too POB to be suitable for this site. – sphennings Sep 27 '22 at 19:48
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    @sphennings Again, I admit I misread the question and that VtC was appropriate. But if the question where more narrow like how does iron nullify magic, then it would be a very similar question to https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/178310/what-would-be-the-benefits-of-cauldron-usage-for-witchcraft or https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95043/why-would-a-staff-increase-the-magic-power-of-a-mage. Just because a question can have more than one answer does not automatically mean they will all answer the question equally well. We see this a lot in questions about magic – Nosajimiki Sep 27 '22 at 21:29