I too find the area between scientific and magical understanding very interesting, and exciting too Hoolahoopho, and have had many mental tussles over the past few decades.
I am a scientist, an atheist and a witch.
My magical path does not prevent me from looking at the world with scientific rigour, and my atheism does not prevent me from working with deity.
It is so interesting to hear of your experiences too Fashiontatts, I can imagine that these seemingly impossible phenomena pop up in many areas of science and medicine.
There seems to be a dichotomy between science and magic, but I have reached a place where I have squared the circle - apart from a few loose ends I mull over from time to time.
Scientific method gives us a great deal, life saving drugs, internet, a deep understanding from a certain perspective, has brought prosperity, but also brought many problems to the world. Pollution, nuclear weapons, toxins into life cycles. Magic was once the best "science" we had, but "progress" opened up a split, magic was bebunked, left in the hands of women mostly and all the so called "woo" ( I so dislike that word) dismissed.
I fear in the light of "progress" we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is a lot of power in traditional magical or folklore practices, the power of the Chi, the understanding of the relationship between our mind and body, and the unspoken glue that holds communities together, the energies that exist to maintain the fabric of the universe.
There are dangers within the magical community and its practices. There are many charletans, there are no regulations, we have few ways of protecting the vulnerable, and modern day medicine should always be the first port of call for anything serious. But that isn't to say complementary medicine does not have its place. Who doesn't feel the power of spoken words, the healing energy of touch.
In my early teens I was very excited to start learning about science at school. My father was a physicist, and we had many long conversations about my subject learning, his work, Einstein, astronomy, nuclear processes.
Around this time I remember being struck by the fact that all we perceive as matter- the table, the walls, even ourselves are in fact empty space. What we see as hard and substantial is not - 99.99% of every atom is empty space. That really captured my imagination.
The recent advances in quantum physics has shown the world, the universe, to be a much stranger and unpredictable place that many thought.
That time and space can be bent, there can be a time when time doesn't exist, that something can be in two places at the same time, that we have worm holes which join up far distant parts of our universe. That "dark " matter, the unseen is the largest component of our universe, string theory tells us the universe isn't composed of matter anyway, just ribbons of energy.
When we read about the advances in particle and quantum science we are taken down a rabbit hole, where all rules and bets are off.
I think this is the place where science and magic merge, like Kekule's snake eating its tail, ultimately they merge and come together and the dissonance disappears.