My father took magic very seriously and went way beyond simple slight of hand that this article suggests. He could make coins disappear without a trace. Our mother was often astonished when she found all the money in the house and bank had vanished. One day he wanted to show us a disappearance trick with a cigarettes carton. He didn't have one so he went to the corner to pick one up. He hasn't been seen since. A true magician never reveals his trick.

From the article:

> If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how.

Tangential but that's one of the reasons I actually migrated away from sleight of hand towards juggling. IMHO it's far less stressful when your performance doesn't require fooling the audience.

> I became my father’s assistant, carrying props, rehearsing patter, acting as the straight man. But I was also his skeptic. If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. When he succeeded, I applauded; when I found the secret, I felt the satisfaction of uncovering a law of nature.

I find this beautiful

> My father taught me to vanish before I learned to appear. Science taught me to appear without vanishing — to stand by evidence, to let truth emerge even when it contradicted the spectacle.

Poetic

>>"The real wonder is in the human mind that constructs reality from fragments, that can be fooled by a flourish, but that can also be illuminated by experiment. "

Beautiful.

Talmudic test of Abrahamic faith.

Bit of Jungian parapsychology: tell the physician to forget everything he knows prior to undergoing psychoanalysis.