NihilCredo comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: NihilCredo 02 November 2010 06:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (648)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: NihilCredo 09 November 2010 04:53:47PM 2 points [-]

Which reminds me - now that Harry has mastered partial Transfiguration, couldn't he just start transfiguring stuff out of bubbles of air, thus making such stuff safe for any use short of injecting them in your arteries?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 November 2010 07:43:09PM 5 points [-]

Harry already tried this in Ch. 28, failed, and concluded that it wasn't possible to Transfigure things out of moving molecules. It's safe to assume that he tried it again after (1) figuring out partial Transfiguration and (2) asking McGonagall, and found that it was still impossible; otherwise he wouldn't have bothered touching his wand to the metal stairs to get his mirror.

Comment author: NihilCredo 10 November 2010 01:37:51AM 5 points [-]

Good enough as Word of God. (As a reader, I am reluctant to make "he would have thought about it" assumptions about a Harry who after five months still hasn't shown curiosity or even confusion about his unique Quirrell-generated sense of doom).

Comment author: JoshuaZ 25 November 2010 11:35:21PM 1 point [-]

The moving molecules thing doesn't really make sense. Molecules are always moving. Is it more than a certain amount of average kinetic energy? If so temperature should matter more than state.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 November 2010 01:26:22AM 0 points [-]

Molecules constantly significantly changing their spatial orientation relative to each other.

Comment author: TobyBartels 26 November 2010 06:00:10AM *  1 point [-]

Molecules within a hot solid do that too. But rather than a maximum kinetic energy or temperature as JoshuaZ proposed, you can use a maximum relative displacement.

Edit: On second thought, maybe that's already in what you said, in the word ‘significantly’. And now I notice that you wrote ‘orientation’ instead of ‘position’, so that actually changes the meaning entirely. Lesson: read carefully!

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 09 November 2010 05:17:47PM 4 points [-]

Since neither of us is McGonaggal the correct answer is "I do not know." :-)