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David_Gerard comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A question on transfiguration, timeless physics and what HJPEV could have known:
Harry's first year at Hogwarts is 1991. He transfigurates materials outside the confines of forms by thinking in terms of timeless quantum physics.
What was the state of timeless physics in 1991? Barbour's book was not published until 1999, for example, though presumably to have a book there was work leading up to it. What knowledge on the subject could Harry have had at that time, in a world without the Web as we know it, without even arXiv?
Edit: Barbour started publishing papers on the subject in 1982. How did Harry find out about these, and understand them sufficiently to think of the universe as really timeless?
Slightly offtopic: Is Barbour becoming the "public face of timeless physics"? All right. But let's not believe it is because of scientific priority. The Wheeler–DeWitt equation is from 1967. Huw Price's book was published in 1996.
Certainly the LessWrong face of it, per the QM sequence.
Let the man have some licence for pedagogy! The story wouldn't be worth much if it only taught lessons of things learned up to 1991.
Yup. Harry is allowed to know about cognitive psychology from arbitrary time periods, too, and have read anachronistic science books, etcetera. Science is Timeless.
I don't think that this is a good idea. If Harry talks about, say, ice volcanoes on Titan, that will seem wrong to me.
On the other hand, Harry doesn't seem to have said anything on physics that requires having read Barbour. Or have I missed it?
Chapter 28:
Other than the buzzword "timeless physics", this doesn't go beyond anything that I knew about in 1991 (when I was older than Harry but still in high school and had never heard of Julian Barbour). This is implicit in Minkowski's formulation of special relativity (1908) and Heisenberg's formulation of quantum mechanics (1925); I don't know who made it explicit, but I probably read about it in popular science books.
ETA: The buzzword that I knew then (or perhaps learnt later and immediately connected to what I knew then, I'm no longer sure) is "block universe".
Harry's universe diverges somewhat from ours in a variety of respects. He'd have a lot of trouble knowing about carbon nanotubes also. It seems that accelerating some specific areas of science is within poetic licence.