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Pavitra comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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How is it safe to Transfigure a desk into a pig? Pigs breathe.
This should be safe if done briefly, right?
When it turns back into a table, we get bubbles in the table and sawdust in the air.
If a large amount of transfigured air has been incorporated into the bodies of bystanders (and pigs do breathe out oxygen, or at least humans do, because our lungs aren't terribly efficient), then we might have a problem.
That doesn't seem like a sufficient degree of caution, considering how McGonagall behaves with respect to other potentially dangerous Transfigurations. She doesn't say to only Transfigure things briefly into liquids because of evaporation, she says not to do it at all.
And she especially wouldn't do a potentially dangerous Transfiguration as the introduction to a Transfiguration safety lecture without making a big deal out of all the precautions she had to take to do it. In fact, she specifically says that the students could guess the direction of the Transfiguration based on safety principles, and based on safety principles, it should have been pig to desk, not desk to pig.
Well, if the pig "is" actually a desk, then perhaps it would only look like it's breathing. It would be a magically animated simulation of a pig crafted from the matter of the desk. Even if it's sucking air in and exhaling it back out, it wouldn't be actually metabolizing oxygen, at least not any more than its "actual" desk-self does. Since Transfiguration is based on Platonic metaphysics, the desk would be a pig "in substance" but still a desk "in essence" (which is why it turns back to a desk when the spell wears off--its true Form remains the same).
Also, the fact that (IIRC) it remains still, quiet, and non-disruptive instead of acting like an un-trained farm animal suddenly finding itself in a room full of humans would imply that it's a magically-animated pseudo-pig, more like a really awesome claymation than a real biological creature. Its pig attributes are only surface appearances, rather than its true nature (in Platonic terms), so it doesn't come loaded with a full array of animal instincts, an empty stomach and GI tract (unless McG transfigured some of the desk into partly-digested pig fodder, other parts of the desk into symbiotic GI tract bacteria, etc.).
Since McG is stunned by the idea of Transfiguration on a level below grossly-perceivable Form, I'm guessing that if someone cut up the pig it would turn out to be minimally simple on the inside--no internal organs, differentiated tissues, etc. beyond what is necessary to make it look and appear to function like a pig from the outside. This would also be consistent with her "Don't Transfigure anything into something that might be eaten!" rule, since a Transfigured "pig" would not look like fresh pork if it were butchered.
OTOH, Harry seems to have bypassed the Platonic aspect by Transfiguring on the sub-quantum level, so if he were able to do the same with a desk-to-pig (necessarily including the microbiology, molecular biology, metabolic sequences, etc.), he might be able to transfigure a Desk-Pig of Doom whose presence would subtly poison a nearby victim with Transfigured respiration products. But then, concretely visualizing a living creature on the level of its constituent quarks should be pretty much impossible unless he can magically give himself vastly superhuman mental-modeling capacity.
This model isn't consistent with the specific reasons McGonagall gives for the prohibitions she does specify. She talks about liquids evaporating, recolored hair falling out, inanimate objects undergoing tiny internal changes that affect the original form.
Even if McGonagall knew how to safely do what she did, she shouldn't have used that example in a safety lecture. A student might try Transfiguring something into an animal, and might include the fact that animals breathe in their visualization of the target form.
There was an Author's Note about this. Do we still have it anywhere?
It's been linked below by AdeleneDawner. Relevant parts:
Several reviewers have asked why dangerous!Transfiguration allows Professor McGonagall to Transfigure her desk into a pig that breathes in oxygen and breathes out a snort of carbon dioxide.
So the first answer is that I wrote that in because it was in canon, and didn't realize it was a problem until some reviewers pointed it out. Congratulations, you win.
With that said, the obvious retroactive rationalizations are as follows: (1) Professor McGonagall used a specialized Charm rather than free Transfiguration. This is the generic explanation I left open for anything in canon that doesn't fit the rules. (2) For the same reason organisms don't eat their own waste products, pigs don't breathe out anything that'll end up incorporated when another mammal breathes it in. Plants might be in trouble, but not people. (I have no idea whether this is actually true.) (3) Once magic is in the mix, things don't work by reductionist chemistry any more, they work by Forms like the ancient Greeks believed in. Just because the desk has been Transfigured into the Form of a pig doesn't mean that the carbon dioxide breathed out has an actively Transfigured Form; the carbon dioxide has had its own Form permanently transformed by something that was Transfigured, rather than having any change maintained by active magic. Contradicted to some extent by what I had McGonagall say about a constant loss of the body's matter to the atmosphere, but I could always go back and delete that. (4) The first wizards to experiment with Transfiguration didn't realize that there ought to be a problem, so there isn't one. (5) It's an emergent phenomenon
Other possibilities: (6) It was a non-breathing imitation of a pig. (7) It was inside an invisible box isolating it from the surrounding air.
Perhaps trust in entropy is enough--in a life only long enough for 10^2 exhales, a pig would exhale 4g of CO2. Even if it were oxygen, and the classroom's inhabitants managed to inhale all of that before it untransfigures, that's .1g apiece among 40 students, and guaranteed to be well-mixed in molecule-sized pieces in the blood stream. So each student would lose thousands of red blood cells and have some extra load on their blood filtration organs, but not enough that anybody would be likely to notice a problem.
I think it was way less than 100 exhales, and the breaths may not have had time to travel away from the pig, especially if she could guarantee there'd be no wind. So maybe she knows how long something can safely be transfigured into a pig or a liquid, but has a simpler rule for the students on their first class.
Or maybe she could create a magical barrier around the pig so it was as safe as if it were in a glass box.
2 and 3 don't seem to work - even if the carbon dioxide isn't a problem, pigs evaporate! And, now that I think of it, so does wood unless it's completely desiccated.
OK, let's take (1). Does McGonogall's lesson still make sense?
Mostly. If she used an incantation (which I was under the impression was necessary for non-free Transfiguration) then the narration didn't mention it. Also, she should have pointed out explicitly to the class that the desk-to-pig transformation was non-free and should never be attempted using free Transfiguration. Other than that, no objections.
I don't think she said whether it was a desk-to-pig or pig-to-desk transformation, she'd told people not to guess and she asked Harry to wait until after class about his speculation.
But she should have also warned against using free Transfiguration to convert something into an animal. It's kind of covered under not transforming things into liquids which can evaporate but you'd expect her to be explicit.
She might also have pointed out that guessing whether it was a pig-to-desk or desk-to-pig free transformation would have got the wrong answer either way. Sure it's a trick question, but so was asking whether Harry cared to guess in the first place.
That's actually rather disappointing. This is supposed to be a story where the rules are consistent.
Sadly, being not logically omniscient, I am not capable of always perfectly living up to my endeavor to write a story with perfectly consistent rules. There are these things called mistakes.
Well, yeah, but... you could have tried to fix it, rather than just saying "whoops, guess I messed up".
ETA: I realize that could have sounded petty. The reason I'm making a big deal out of this is that the presence of inconsistencies pretty much shoots to hell our ability as fans to speculate meaningfully about the fic.
I feel reluctant to directly contradict canon in this case by having McGonagall not transform the pig, never mind the havoc it wreaks on all neighboring paragraphs. Do you have a different suggested fix?
I'm partial to adding an incantation and a stern warning.
Edit: It occurs to me that the Animagus transformation doesn't require an incantation either, so that's not a general rule about free vs. non-free Transfiguration, and it's hard to imagine that an incantation like Crystferrium ("Furniporcis"?) wouldn't give away the direction. Just the warning, then.
Yes, the big thing that's missing is the warning not to try to copy her example. Anything else can be chalked up to the Professor's leet transformation skillz.
Pavitra and Caspian's suggestions above seem good.
"She's McGonagall" is a perfectly acceptable explanation. I had assumed that McGonagall gained the ability to maintain safe transfigurations to living creatures through years of hard work in controlled conditions of the type we gain just a glimpse of when Harry is showing off his new trick. It doesn't seem all that much harder than, say, flying.
I'm definitely in favor of a wizard did it. Word of God might be enough on this one, though a don't try this at home could still be called for.
ETA: TVTropes warning
A witch did it, silly.
Please don't link to known memetic hazards without appropriate warnings.
fine