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Strilanc comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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Harry should be screaming at Dumbledore to use his time-turner. There are a lot of options, constrained mostly by the necessity of seeing a Hermione-looking-thing die.
"I've already used it six times today, Harry..."
In HPMOR, time travel obeys the Novikov self-consistency principle (with the exception of liberal use of deus ex machina to keep it from being over-powered). If it were possible for Harry to use a time-turner to save Hermione, she wouldn't have died in the first place.
I'd wondered why no one used a time-turner the moment they knew a troll was loose. Even if Dumbledore had already used up his hours, another professor could've used some form of priority magical communication to call for aurors to travel six hours into the past, swiftly prepare to deal with a Hogwarts-attacking troll, and teleport to the site. Then I realized that Quirrell could prevent all attempts to stop the troll using time travel by exploiting the restriction against information traveling back more than six hours, i.e. by waiting until six hours after he wanted the attack to start, traveling back six hours, and initiating the attack.
Why wait for Dumbledore? Isn't Harry still inexplicably allowed to carry his with a completely ineffectual device preventing him from using it unauthorized?
Ineffectual only if Quirrell helps, right?
Harry can do partial transfiguration.
Ahh. That does seem like it might work.
For that matter, if Harry thought to try it in violation of most of the safety lecture, he might have better treated her. It depends on how much accurate biochemistry Harry knows- and what happens when CO2 transfigured into oxygen which burns more carbon refigures in the bloodstream. Although Harry has demonstrated the ability to sustain long transfigurations, I would say that it's reasonable that he thinks his medical supplies are more likely to work than experimental medical magic.
My guess: Oodles of carbon monoxide. Not good.
EDIT Gah, I can't believe I got this wrong what with all the yeast metabolism I've been working with lately. All the oxygen you consume goes into making water, the CO2 you breathe out comes entirely from a combination of whatever carbon source you are burning and a little tiny bit of your water, with your mitochondria ripping electrons from the latter and adding it to the former. So somehow the water would wind up with carbon in it... CH2O? Formaldehyde? And that's not even considering what'll happen to all the molecules that have had OH groups tacked on taken from water over the intervening time period...
I was going to suggest monatomic carbon in solution...
Oh dear gods, a quadruple radical with empty orbitals... that's even worse.
A better thing than sulfuric acid to transmute your enemy's head into?