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RolfAndreassen comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am very interested in what the effect of magics to nullify "opposite reaction science" will be. Biochemistry cannot work in such a regime, and unless the witch actively puts in something to account for this, you're going to get a lot of dead Aurors and prisoners; although I suppose they'll learn this as they experiment with the jinx. Even if it does work in the sense of not instantly killing everyone in the area of effect, there will be much weirdness; whatever humans expect when they start to consciously think about physics, our reflexes have to be tuned for Newtonian mechanics. I will look forward to seeing how plausibly weird this can get.
On another note, I wonder if we can create a repository of links to other Internet discussion of the fic? I'll start with this thread on Orson Scott Card's discussion site.
My take on this is that it's just an illustration that wizards really don't understand science, and they'll be unsuccessful at implementing their anti-physics charm.
Who knows, free Transfiguration works but seems to conserve mass, broomsticks work, but have effects similar to the standard reactionless drive+inertial dampener (and you can make a "reactionless" drive if you can shake masses about fast enough in curved spacetime paper)
Isn't the normal force dependent on/related to this? My mental image is of people falling through the floor because the normal force doesn't automatically balance their weight.
I'm not sure but I don't think so. Thinking out loud: We do not fall through floors because the normal force is equal to the force of gravity. However this is not a consequence of Newton's laws as such, it happens because our weight compresses the atoms of the floor so that the repulsive forces between them become stronger, as they are closer together, and thus the topmost ones push harder on the soles of our feet. We can use Newton's laws to analyse this situation, but they don't seem to be immediately causal, as it were.
That said, I could easily be missing something more fundamental that causes both the opposite-reaction effect and the equilibrium I described above. I have zero intuition for how things would work in a physics so non-Newtonian as all that!
You may well be right. I was just thinking that that's how the opposite reaction manifests. I don't really know which law is more fundamental, they're all the same deep laws anyway.
This.
XKCD forum discussion http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=62115