How Magic Works, Some Facts, Inferences, Conclusions, and Speculations

The Facts:

• Wizards did not have clocks before muggles did.
• Time turners are limited to 6 solar hours.
• Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.
• The Aurors are planning a jinx to stop opposite reaction effect rockets, but they don't understand rockets.
• There was a significant flux in children's spells, but children did not seem to use more or fewer spells in the past.
• Brooms work via Aristotelian physics.
• It's easier to put together spells to make a broom than to make a new spell to make a broom.
• You can create semi-intelligent objects without understanding what you're doing or creating a copy of yourself or breeding.
• Mass production of magical effect-bound objects is easier than individual crafting of individual spells for each item.
• Objects and animals can be made to understand and respond to speech.
• Magical animals and plants exist and contain magical power and but are all sized more or less a few orders of magnitude around the human norm. No magical ticks or ants seem to exist.
• Created animals and object are not aware by default.
• The Interdict of Merlin seems to be blocking the creation of new powerful spells but allow old powerful spells to be rediscovered.
• The Interdict of Merlin does not block the creation of new spells, only new powerful spells
• Random unwanted effects seem to seep into the creation of new spells.
• New spell creation does not seem correlated with magical power or skill.
• New spells are created, but not all the time- it is either random, requires effort, or requires time.
• Nobody was as good as Merlin, and then nobody was as good as the four founders.
• Children have unconscious magic, but not to the extent that OT Harry did.
• Wizards seem to spend most of their time in pocket universes, otherwise you'd spot dragons and hogwarts trains on satellite imagery.

The Speculations:

• The source of magic has a certain limited number of permitted Spell to Effect associations on each power level. These associations are susceptible for expiration when no-one knows the spell anymore. High level associations were frozen in place by the Interdict of Merlin, but low level slots are still expiring, and whatever ritual the wizards use to create spells is merely triggering a garbage collect and conditional new spell insert.

• Upon reception of the insert ritual, the Source of Magic scans the Wizard's mind, and performs an optimization algorithm on a set of existing spells to make a new spell which is close enough in some set of dimensions to what it thinks the Wizard wants, after which it associates the spell and effect. Therefore it would use thousands of years of existing infrastructure for making intelligent object effects.

• In this scenario a wizard might be trying to create a spell for years, until a slot opens up that he will get to first, competing with everyone else trying to make spells.

• Wizards, of course, not willing to accept the apparent randomness of this, have additional learned behaviors about creating spells, things they believe are required, most of which are not required and boil down to daydreaming about the effect you want and practice with the spell string and wand wave.