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'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.
I have some sort of learning disability when it comes to math. I barely passed math classes in high school. I had one required math class in college, took the "anyone can pass this class" one and still got a C.
So basically, once math is involved, it's all magic to me.
Hooray ~~magic~~ science!
I felt the same way until I had to take a statistics class for a second bachelors I'm working on as a middle aged person. The class was "statistics for non STEM majors" and the extremely chill, aging surfer dude prof approached it like we were all easily spooked horses and math was a snake.
He didn't even tell us when we took our midterm, he told us it was a quiz that he was offering lots of extra tutoring sessions for. He didn't tell us until weeks later when someone asked when the midterm would be. He really went out of his way to explain down to the roots of each equation about how and why it works.
By the end of it I didn't feel like I was missing the part of my brain that can do math anymore.
A lot of math involves just moving things around until the problem is easier. It's just a bunch of tricks that work for relatively simple reasons. But you just memorize them to make it easier.
Statistics is more like magic than other kinds of math. Like when you have more than 30 random unbiased selections from a population you can start guessing at the composition of the whole, no matter how large it is. The explanations require someone who really knows what's going on.
Then you have modern LLMs that use statistics to produce the next word in a sentence. They can be so complex the designers don't really know why they do what they do. It's just trial and error testing the outcomes.