cafesofie comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 07 March 2012 04:46PM

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Comment author: cafesofie 16 March 2012 03:47:11AM *  -2 points [-]

Harry is stated to only have access to about half of the easier parts of the sequences.

I assume the timeless physics sequence is one of the parts he doesn't have access to...

I can no longer conceive that there might really be a universal time, which is somehow "moving" from the past to the future. This now seems like nonsense.

Something like Barbour's timeless physics has to be true, or I'm in trouble: I have forgotten how to imagine a universe that has "real genuine time" in it.

From this I read that Harry's mistake is the notion that there are things that "[haven't] happened yet".

http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/

Comment author: pedanterrific 16 March 2012 04:36:07AM *  5 points [-]

Nope:

"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."

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