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cousin_it comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong
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Yes. Note this part:
He was putting the ring on, because he was afraid of wearing it while asleep, because the transfiguration might fail. Waking up with a dead girl is better than waking up without a finger and with a dead girl.
Why wouldn't he be using partial transfiguration here?
Transfigure only part of Hermione into a ring?
The brain, presumably.
That would be worse, as he would physically rend the brain when it popped into existence. He could have it somewhere else, though.
We don't know that the brain would be 'rended'. McGonagall is not torn in half as she transfigures into a cat, and we don't see a transfigured rock exploding into rock dust when it untransfigures. And even if they did, well, Harry could've transmuted the brain into diamond of the same volume or something.
Animagus is not FREE transfiguration. it is a million times safer, but also more limited.
Yes, but one could create a non-free transfiguration just for that (e.g., transform anything into ring such that the de-transfigured object is still viable). I’m not 100% sure but I think the main part of the process for inventing partial transfiguration took less than 6 hours, so another insight is plausible.
hm... That requires inventing a spell. which harry asked Quirrel about and received what looks to us like an unhelpful reply. (But since Quirrel knows interdict-protected secrets, and we don't, I cannot rule out the possibility that what he told harry somehow IS the secret...)
Plus, If Harry manages to start inventing spells...he's pretty much won.
so, yeah, ringmione IS a bit risky, but less so than letting someone shove her body into the ground and letting bacteria go to work.
I don’t mean inventing something completely new, just modifying transfiguration. He already did that with partial transfiguration, he might be able to modify it differently, e.g., by inventing a version that returns everything to where it was when dispelled, regardless of how the transfigured object changed.
Since magic—and transfiguration in particular—doesn’t seem to care much about conservation of entropy, it’s not obvious why that should be impossible. In fact, it’s actually surprising that transfiguration does work the way it does. I think most people would not expect the dangers of transfiguration—McGonagall spends a lot of time on that, and since the shape of the original does not affect the transfigured shape, it seems intuitive that the transfigured shape shouldn’t affect the original—and magic seems to care about what users expect—note how nobody had to warn the students about physics when they learn riding brooms.
I mean, untransfiguring the brain while it overlaps with a solid object.
Transfigure Hermione into part of a ring, and a marshmallow into the rest of it. That might not even require partial transfiguration, if you make them fit together like puzzle pieces.