the user does not vanish ... appears to do nothing.
How is that consistent with "transports the wearer to that branch" from your description?
the story line ... only traces the path where time-turners work.
Huh? That's like presenting a story in which one character has a magic pair of dice that always roll 12, and then explaining that how they "work" is that they make the universe branch 36 ways, and in one branch they roll 12 -- and the story "only traces the path where they always rolled 12".
In fact, it's worse. No one who talks about time turners in the story (either canon or HPMOR) says anything like "for some reason, other people's time turners often fail, but you'll never find your own doing so"; there is no suggestion that any such thing has been observed. So is the story "only tracing the path" where nearly all past time-turner use happens to have gone down the "good" branch?
How is that consistent with "transports the wearer to that branch" from your description?
Oh, I guess I was unclear. Time-turner does not delete a person from a timeline, this is expensive, unnecessary and violates General Relativity. A new copy of the wearer is inserted in the branched timeline where none was before.
In fact, this insertion is the only part of the time-turner's description that is questionable under any known physical laws: It takes either energy momentum non-conservation or both FTL matter transmission and Lorentz invariance breaking to create something from nothing.
The next discussion thread is here.
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 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
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.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: