That may be true, but it may not be, and in transfiguration, you may recall, you do not care to guess. Harry will take every possible avenue to reduce the amount of magical omnipotence he needs to revive Hermione, and he has utterly no clue how much damage will be done with a straight transfiguration, and he has nobody to ask. I don't believe for a minute that the best he came up with thinking about it for 5-6 hours was to simply transfigure her into a ring/rock.
Harry knows why solids undo internal changes, though - it's because they do. You sit a block of gold down for an hour and random heat vibrations are going to reorganize the atoms. Map that gold block back to a human, and now you have heart-atoms where lung-atoms should be. Wait too long and you'll get a ghoulish soup.
He can avoid this by using a very stable crystal, and keeping the crystal itself cool, but it's still probably a temporary solution.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 94. The previous thread has passed 200 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: