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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92 - Less Wrong Discussion
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So, what did Harry do in that minute and a half he had with Hermione's body?
My best guess is that he transfigured her body into something, then transfigured something else into a copy of her body. Either that or he just used partial transfiguration on her brain and left the rest of the body behind as unimportant.
It's just not like Harry to just abandon his efforts to preserve her body, especially after he took care to keep it cold. If he has her brain transfigured into a coin or something, that should suffice as a preservation method.
Would it make more sense to just save her brain instead of saving her whole body?
Figuring out how to resurrect the dead will be hard enough. Figuring out the way the brain connects to the body and reconnecting all the individual nerve connections makes the challenge much harder. I'm not sure we know all the connections even now with much better technology and decades of additional scholarship. Saving just the brain makes the problem much harder. Keep in mind that the reasons actual cryo sites offer brain only options has a lot to to with cost, storage, transport, etc and not due to thinking its a fundamentally better option.
But it is fundamentally better: the smaller the volume you are trying to vitrify, the better the process works because the greater surface area is compared to volume, and so you get faster and more even cooling (and in humans, you get problems with circulation getting blocked off after a certain point). Go read through http://chronopause.com/ . This is why you can drop small things into LN2 and they recover fine, or why Fahy could do a kidney and bring it back, but why we can't do larger things.
Those are instrumentally better reasons, not fundamentally better.
I study neuroscience. You may know something I don't, but I think body transplants would be a lot easier than resurrecting the dead, as long as you save the first few sections of the spinal chord as well - repairing broken spinal chords, albeit imperfectly, is somewhat in the realm of current technology. If we're talking magic, I don't think spinal chord injuries would even be a big deal.
Edit: never mind everything written below about the freezing
I was quite disappointed when Harry just froze her like that. The rapidly expanding ice will destroy much of her data - in real cryonics you pump 'em full of antifreeze to prevent this. Even if he revives her, she might not quite be the same now. He should have transfigured her head into a small crystalline structure and later found some way to securely maintain the spell (and if no one knows he did it, the pesky authorities won't try to take off the spell).
Harry didn't freeze her. He cooled her to 5° Celsius, equivalent to 41° Fahrenheit and well above the freezing point.
Oops...somehow my imagination inserted freezing! In that case, he really aught to contact a team of muggle and wizard doctors and have them swap knowledge immediately...(might be too risky for other reasons, of course)
Or your mind read Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. I originally thought that he froze her until I read more carefully. (This is presumably a risk primarily for American readers.)
Definitely. There's been some news around this: HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI.
I don't think think I know anything you don't. It's possible I just have a dated conception of how hard it is to repair severed nerves.
Yeah, on reflection that branch of my theory looks more likely.