Eneasz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Unnamed 14 January 2011 06:49AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 25 January 2011 09:50:44AM *  5 points [-]

A question on transfiguration, timeless physics and what HJPEV could have known:

Harry's first year at Hogwarts is 1991. He transfigurates materials outside the confines of forms by thinking in terms of timeless quantum physics.

What was the state of timeless physics in 1991? Barbour's book was not published until 1999, for example, though presumably to have a book there was work leading up to it. What knowledge on the subject could Harry have had at that time, in a world without the Web as we know it, without even arXiv?

Edit: Barbour started publishing papers on the subject in 1982. How did Harry find out about these, and understand them sufficiently to think of the universe as really timeless?

Comment author: Eneasz 25 January 2011 10:26:40PM 11 points [-]

Let the man have some licence for pedagogy! The story wouldn't be worth much if it only taught lessons of things learned up to 1991.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2011 08:50:47PM 9 points [-]

Yup. Harry is allowed to know about cognitive psychology from arbitrary time periods, too, and have read anachronistic science books, etcetera. Science is Timeless.

Comment author: TobyBartels 29 January 2011 01:57:35AM 3 points [-]

I don't think that this is a good idea. If Harry talks about, say, ice volcanoes on Titan, that will seem wrong to me.

On the other hand, Harry doesn't seem to have said anything on physics that requires having read Barbour. Or have I missed it?

Comment author: ata 29 January 2011 02:41:55AM 2 points [-]

On the other hand, Harry doesn't seem to have said anything on physics that requires having read Barbour. Or have I missed it?

Chapter 28:

"Quantum mechanics wasn't enough," Harry said. "I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time - but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there's not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn't see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing."

Comment author: TobyBartels 29 January 2011 03:04:32AM *  6 points [-]

Other than the buzzword "timeless physics", this doesn't go beyond anything that I knew about in 1991 (when I was older than Harry but still in high school and had never heard of Julian Barbour). This is implicit in Minkowski's formulation of special relativity (1908) and Heisenberg's formulation of quantum mechanics (1925); I don't know who made it explicit, but I probably read about it in popular science books.

ETA: The buzzword that I knew then (or perhaps learnt later and immediately connected to what I knew then, I'm no longer sure) is "block universe".

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