Harry has already upgraded two existing spells: partial transfiguration and Patronus 2.0
In both cases, he achieved the impossible by ignoring what wizards believe and instead concentrating on his own beliefs.
What does Harry believe about Hermione that other wizards do not? He believes she is a purely biological machine, that there are no souls, and that a reductionist viewpoint is correct.
Therefore, in the right frame of mind, perhaps Harry can reparo a dead human (although canon!reparo cannot repair magical items properly, I wonder if it might restore Hermione without her magic, and if she might just be just as awesome without it.)
There's a genetic marker that the Source of Magic recognizes. The gene is still there, but the magic may not be. What wizards believe to be the soul leaving might be the Source of Magic withdrawing its power.
I loved this:
That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.
Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.
I think Harry phrased it poorly, and if he meant it, he was absolutely wrong.
Allocating blame on yourself is a category error. We morally judge to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff - in short, to sort into piles of approach and avoid. You're stuck with you - where ever you go, there you are - so the point of the categorical judgment is simply inapplicable.
The sensible and very valuable part of what he is saying is to look to what you can do, and don't seek to console yourself with "that was his responsibility". Such interpersonal judgments are all about roles
because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.
But you can change your actions more directly and more effectively by changing them. Putting blame on yourself is one of the better paths to depression, which is not an effective state. Blame others where appropriate and useful, but don't blame yourself, only search for actions to improve the situation, and choose them. You blame others because their actions are not yours to choose. Don't blame yourself, choose better.
I went through a situation very similar to Ch90. Same story, different details.
Even got the worse-than-useless attempts at comfort - now I can't even say "I'm sorry" to my uncle for letting his son die. That's one of the few things that still brings me to tears about this whole incident.
My thought process was fairly similar to Harry's, and I've given it a lot of thought, so I might be able to shed some light on the topic.
Any thoughts about how to apply this sort of thinking when you're extremely stressed?
When the pressure was on, there was no room for guilt and it was just do do do with some frantic thinking interpersed - even when it was clear that there was little hope. The feeling that I was to blame didn't come until afterwards, when there was nothing left I could do. At the point where you can still do something, it's not so much the "it's your fault and you should feel bad", but rather "this can't happen. THINK THINK THINK!" which gets in the way.
The main advice I have here is to come to terms with the possibility ahead of time. Get those tears out of the way now, so that should it happen, you just see it for what it is and not what it "...
My issue is that I don't have a good procedure in place for constructive blame: by default, when I blame myself for something mostly what happens is that I rehearse to myself what a terrible person I am without trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future (and then actually making sure that that happens).
Well, being a stoic for such a long time means my reflex is usually, "What is useful here?" And when I run that check on kvetching, it doesn't make the cut. Sometimes I pretend to feel guiltier, since most people read practicality as callousness, but internally, I focus on, "What different action should I take or new data should I look for?"
ETA: Actually, the other check that helps me is asking: "Is there a causal link between my feeling bad and my being helpful?" Usually, no, or if there is, it does the opposite of what I'd like!
Would you guys agree that Harry is being unfair to Minerva regarding his Time-Turner? "But you thought it was your role to shut me down and get in my way."
At the time she had it locked, she was right: he'd been irresponsible with it and needed to stop abusing his new toy every time a minor problem arose, and there's not a hint that even Harry disagreed with that. You can't refrain from such corrective actions on the remote possiblity that limiting your student's options will do harm. Not-limiting an irresponsible student's options in the relevant way can also lead to harm.
Yes, and it's part of a pattern of behavior. HJPEV consistently finds (seeks out?) uncharitable explanations for other peoples' behavior, especially when he's under stress. It's probably the most 11-year-old-like thing about him.
I think this is actually Harry's fault: He should've requested his time turner be unlocked as soon as he could plausibly argue that REALLY IMPORTANT things were happening around and to him. When Mcgonnigall first locked it, he was doing more harm than good with it.
It depends on what other corrective options she had. She might, for example, have password-protected it as a form of probation, and told him the password. She could then check every couple of weeks/months to make sure he hadn't used it, while still leaving him the option in case of emergency. Of course, she probably wouldn't have believed him able to not give in to the temptation, and it's hard to say whether she would have been right at that exact moment in time.
Of course, she probably wouldn't have believed him able to not give in to the temptation, and it's hard to say whether she would have been right at that exact moment in time.
Considering that she was reacting to the signs of time-turner addiction, a phenomena that had been observed in others before, I think it was a safe assumption for McGonagall to make.
At some point, these people have a school to run. They can't spend all day thinking of clever stratagems and obscure contingency plans.
This has only just occurred to me, but if the sole threat to the students was (as far as everyone knew) an ordinary troll, and it was daylight outside, and they were already in the Great Hall, then why didn't the professors just lead the students out of Hogwarts and into the sunny open before assuming defensive formation? It would also have the advantage of giving a group of casters long range on a melee attacker.
For that matter, I wonder if the sky illusion on the Great Hall ceiling counts? It reflects real weather.
Considering McGonagall's first impulse was sending them back to their dormitories, I believe they just didn't think it through.
The fact that there a troll in Hogwarts is a sign that Hogwarts is under attack by someone who thinks that he has something to gain from smuggling a troll into hogwarts.
If you notice that someone breaks into your house, you call the police. It's the right thing to do even if you sit with a bunch of friends and you have a bunch of riffles at home because you are an American who loves the second Amendment. The population of magical Britian is very small so Bones basically heads the local police department.
McGonnegal thinks that it's plausible that the troll is a distraction to an attack on the third corridor where something imported get's stored.
There's fog of war.
Even in the case where Amelie Bones has some other fight to fight at the same time, McGonnegal traveling 6 hours back and time and giving more information to Amelie Bones, helps Amelie Bones to understand that multiple targets in magicial Britian are under attack at the same time.
If Hogwarts staff can't handle that, they're not worthy of their titles.
Evidently they can't handle it and as a result one student died. Even if they were 95% certain that they could handle the troll on their own, it would still be prudent to go back in time and place a call for help.
Don't forget that there are people outside of the Great Hall like the Librarian.
According to the Harry Potter wiki, the Great Hall is located off the Entrance Hall, which suggests that leaving the castle from it should be fairly trivial.
Here's how I would have saved Hermione if I were Harry.
In an accessible but seldom visited hallway of Hogwarts, a rail-way sign reads 6PM to 5PM Express.
At 5:00, a boy materializes under the sign. He is wearing a rail-way conductor's hat. He is holding a trunk. His name is Harry Potter.
Conductor Harry puts down the trunk. He opens the lid. Inside his Trunk of Holding are wooden seats numbered 1 through 1000. All seats appear to be empty.
Conductor Harry yells "Arriving at 5PM! Please add one tally to your forearm now".
Silently, hundreds of people draw a tally mark on their arms.
Conductor Harry steps away from the trunk and the hundreds invisible passengers of the 6PM to 5PM Express disembark.
At 5:10, Conductor Harry closes the trunk lid. He stashes the trunk [EDIT] and Time-Turner in the Great Hall.
At 5:12, Conductor Harry burns his conductor hat. He draws one tally mark on his previously blank arm, and puts on his invisibility cloak. He sighs. He has a long day ahead of him.
...
At 5:30 in the Astronomy Tower, a smelly and disheveled Harry Potter pulls off his invisibility cloak. He is covered with hundreds of tally marks, and looks like he hasn't slept in days...
Just came across this in re-reading chapter 3:
The Killing Curse rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar upon your forehead.
Why a burnt hulk when the Killing Curse does no physical damage whatsoever?
It strikes me that the body doesn't match Voldemort's presumed cause of death, there are no witnesses of said death (since Harry's memory cuts out early), and burning a corpse is a classic way to render it unidentifiable.
Moving from considering evidence to speculation, it strikes me that the prophecy would make it incredibly easy for Voldemort to fake his own death - if he went to the Potters' house, killed the parents, placed a mysterious mark on Harry, and then disappeared, leaving a body behind, there is no way his enemies wouldn't take that as his death and the prophecy's fulfillment.
I suspect Quirrell's closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I'm thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second, that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry's mood by any means necessary.
The trick to the first one is that he hasn't mentioned sealing off a certain other means of discovering arcane secrets at Hogwarts. Admittedly, Quirrell's suggested that it's probably blocked off anyways. But it might not be; even if the basilisk itself is gone, there might still be useful books. So it looks as though Quirrell is trying to push Harry into finding the Chamber of Secrets. There could be any number of reasons why - though the fact that it's a secret, hidden place at least partially exempt from the Hogwarts wards seems like a good place to start.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall's way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry's parents to Hogwarts. Naturally, this opens up a whole world of possibilities for Quirrell; he could use them as hostages, kill them, Imperius them, or do any number of other nasty things if necessary. Or, if he's interested in understanding Harry better, he could use Legilimency to learn all about his background.
Also, limiting Harry's access to knowledge (warning off the other profs, warding the books, etc) makes Quirrell the sole conduit for advanced knowledge for Harry. (Or at least limits the competition). And Quirrell implied to Harry that he was at his nearly-unrestricted service. That gives Quirrell more access to Harry's thought processes (by the questions he asks) and more capacity to steer his choices.
As to what he's steering them toward, he pushed Harry off of new spells, which makes me wonder if he has an old one in mind. There was talk about rituals of sacrifice here (the blood-to-fire) and generally recently (Tracy Davis's invocation). It's possible that there's some ritual that Quirrell would like Harry to perform, not for what it manifests, but for the changes it makes to the caster.
He probably also wants to push Harry away from new spells for safety reasons (presumably he thinks Harry might try to science up a dangerous new spell and that's how he ends the world; he has some experience with Harry attempting to combine magic and science from Azkaban). If he personally steers Harry towards old spells then at least he knows what those spells do.
It's also possible that the Restricted Section contains enough information for someone like Harry to figure out how to create spells from reading it.
It's possible that Quirrell himself intends to be Harry's source of information, but so far he's only been manifestly unhelpful. Basically every response he gave was a brush-off; he didn't even name his spell of cursed fire. When directly given an opportunity to suggest spells or rituals of his own choosing ("There's some magics I mean to learn"), he wasted it. It's possible that he did so out of concern that he was being listened in on, which would also explain his choice not to switch to Parseltongue; still, it certainly doesn't seem like he's trying to point Harry in any particular direction.
In my analysis, I've considered this strong evidence that Quirrell is genuinely worried about what Harry will do. This isn't (just) a plot to get Harry dependent on him so he can feed what he wants into his ear; this is also an actual limitation on Harry's power, denying him information that he doesn't intend to tell him personally, either.
... given the Prophecy, I can't blame him, though we don't know much about the effects of fighting Prophecies.
I think it's more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
"You don't like science," Harry said slowly. "Why not?"
"Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!" Professor Quirrell's voice had grown louder. "They will end it! End all of it!"
- Chapter 20
"HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD."
- Chapter 89
"... If I have to brute-force the problem by acquiring enough power and knowledge to just make it happen, I will."
Another pause.
"And to go about that," the man in the corner said, "you will use your favorite tool, science."
"Of course."
The Defense Professor exhaled, almost like a sigh. "I suppose that makes sense of it."
- Chapter 90
I'm actually impressed with Quirrell's control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He's spent decades desperately trying to...
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that's unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn't any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That's a bit of a special case, though.
Star lifting is not only a thing, it's a thing that has been mentioned in HPMOR... by Harry... in response to Trelawney's prophecy.
Chapter 21, after Trelawney says "HE IS COMING. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY -" and is whisked away:
"Not to mention, tear apart the very what? "
"I thought I heard Trelawney start to say something with an 'S' just before the Headmaster grabbed her."
"Like... soul? Sun?"
"If someone's going to tear apart the Sun we're really in trouble!"
That seemed rather unlikely to Harry, unless the world contained scary things which had heard of David Criswell's ideas about star lifting.
Pointing out the obvious, but
scary things which had heard of David Criswell's ideas about star lifting.
Is long for "Harry James Potter Evans Verres". Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn't refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn't have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
And since the phrase "is a thing" is acknowledged by many people, we could say that "is a thing" is a thing. Unfortunately, ""is a thing" is a thing" is not yet a thing.
Actually, the process in stars is fusion. The same as modern atom bombs, too.
Fission is used in nuclear power plants, and only really used to reach the conditions for fusion in bombs.
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall's way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry's parents to Hogwarts.
Really? That doesn't sound like something I'd expect Dumbledore to do. It sounds transparently tactically dangerous given that someone close to Harry has already just died at Hogwarts, and his parents have no idea how to relate to what he's going through now anyway.
Like I said in another post, I suspect Quirrel simply wants Dumbledore and Minerva to get in Harry's way in order to get him to distrust them. Or perhaps I should say, to maintain the distrust that currently exists. Asking them to cheer Harry up will only have them keep treating Harry's feelings as a problem to be solved, like what he yelled at Fawkes for, and Quirrel knows this.
He's cut him off from Draco, Hermione, and now he's working on Minerva.
I don't think this will drive Minerva from Harry. Despite the unpleasantness, I think this has decreased her loyalty to Dumbledore and increased it to Harry. Dumbledore was complacent about the lapse and didn't think she was worth blaming. Harry gave her a sense that more is possible (even if he doesn't think she can pull it off) and I think she'll surprise him.
Dumbledore and Harry don't actually do anything very different from each other in that scene. They're both blaming themselves instead of McGonagall. What's different is in how they express that. Harry is very clear about who he is blaming, and why; he tells McGonagall exactly what she did wrong when she asks to be blamed, although he still does not in fact blame her. Dumbledore, on the other hand, offers only comfort; he doesn't even tell McGonagall that he's going to blame himself, although she can very well guess.
It's also worth noting that Harry chooses an interesting fault to explain to Professor McGonagall. He doesn't suggest that, like Quirrell, she should have checked on all the high-value targets before leaving the room. Instead, he told her to trust her students more. This is something that McGonagall could actually do; it's much better suited to her than the more complicated, strategic options Harry would suggest for himself or Quirrell. So, although it's definitely not explicitly said this way, it's pretty easy to read Harry as giving advice here, which Dumbledore notably fails to do.
She's a teacher. This is a default state for anyone who spends their life around 11-17 year olds, because about 90% of the time it's true.
Some of those really bad orders match the ones she gave in canon, and Dumbledore doesn't seem to think they're out of ordinary for her.
I suspect Quirrell's closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I'm thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second,
He set up a situation where Harry wants in the restricted section but McGonagall is trying to stop Harry. The result will be that Harry will get annoyed at McGonagall and Dumbledore for forbidden him access to the restricted section.
that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry's mood by any means necessary.
Harry asked Quirrell to tell McGonagall that he shouldn't be disturbt. From Quirrell's perspective McGonagall is likely to do something that annoys Harry when she tries to restore his mood.
"Other people have done huge amounts for me!" Harry said. "My parents took me in when my parents died because they were good people, and to become a Dark Lord is to betray that!"
(...) "So you are held back by the thought of your parents' disapproval? Does that mean that if they died in an accident, there would be nothing left to stop you from -"
"No," Harry said. "Just no. It is their impulse to kindness which sheltered me. That impulse is not only in my parents. And that impulse is what would be betrayed."
Chapter 20. It would seem Harry dodged a truly enormous bullet there.
"So you also don't think it's worth the trouble of holding me responsible..."
This could be interesting depending how she reacts later. I'm mostly expecting despair, but with a small chance of a heroic Minerva.
I'd be pretty shocked if we don't see a heroic Minerva, given how she reacted to Harry's rant and the fact that this incident provided the name for the chapter.
On a side note -
"But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M."
First, I rather appreciate the comic relief, Eliezer.
... But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
Keep in mind that while on the one hand, memory charms are a crazy broken superweapon for anyone with a bit of unrestrained creativity, they also seem to be a standard response for ordinary wizards on the spot dealing with muggles who've caught a slip in the Statute of Secrecy (for instance, a rampaging dragon.)
While they can detect underage spell use, if I remember correctly they canonically cannot detect the type of magic being used. Perhaps it would have been possible to set up spells to detect types of spells in use by adults, perhaps not, but I think wizarding norms on privacy and individual rights probably would make it politically unviable in any case. Remember when Harry offered Minerva his wand when he was going to be staying at home, and she responded that "that isn't done." Wizarding minors aren't allowed to use magic unsupervised, but even muggleborns at home with no adult wizards are still left the use of their wands. That strikes me as a society which has some very strong norms about autonomy.
... But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
Or Quirrell, who has declared his intention to visit the restricted section, is planning to plant the book for Harry's 'benefit.'
Doubtful. That's not a lie Quirrell can sustain: Harry can ask anyone else what the status of memory charms is in the Hogwarts curriculum.
Wizards in general need memory charms to deal with muggles, so that's a plausible reason they aren't seen as Dark by the wizarding community. There are probably strong cultural taboos against using them on other wizards (as opposed to muggles), in the same way there are strong cultural taboos against using cars to run over pedestrians even though that's a power that many teenagers acquire here in the real world.
Last chapter I complained about EY having hermione Stuffed Into The Fridge, i.e. unceremoniously killed offscreen to provide motivation for the main character. Today I find that he is literally refrigerating her!
"Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."
The first time this sentence appears in HPMoR is in the italic text that begins Chapter 2:
"Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."
I'll assume the difference between "it's" and "it was" isn't significant. I'm inclined to refocus my attention now on the italic text that begins Chapter 1:
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.
I didn't know what to make of this when I first read it, and I still don't. Does this describe an event that has already happened? It's not Hermione's death, since that didn't happen in the moonlight.
Does this describe an event that has already happened?
It's been debated constantly since the start because it's highlighted as important. The best guess was that it might have been when Voldemort attacked the Potters, but there's obvious problems with that (what's the silver? and as far as we know, no blood was shed by Voldemort since he favored AKs). Given that ch90 brings up blood as a powerful sacrificial element, it's looking more like it's about a future event and maybe a ritual by Harry - pursuant to bringing back Hermione being the obvious goal.
When you said AKs, I immediately thought you meant AK-47s. That put a very amusing picture in my head.
I might play too many videogames.
"Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line..."
This sounds like an alchemy circle, which has to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair." I guess it involves the creation of a philosopher's stone.
here. Format is ugly, but simple.
Number of chapter with epigraph - "epigraph" number of chapter with line in text - "original quote"
All are copy pastes.
1 - "Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line... (black robes, falling) ...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word." Not yet appeard
2 - ""Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."" - 90 -""Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything.""
3 - ""But then the question is - who?"" 3 - ""Am I - could I be - maybe - you never know - if I'm not - but then the question is - who? ""
4 - ""World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."" 6 - "World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
5 - ""It would've required a supernatural intervention for him to have your morality given his environment."" 87 - "It would've required a supernatural intervention for him to have your mo...
Actually, it's not a drop of blood, it's a drop of blood for the rest of your life. But under a reasonable interpretation, Quirrel is perhaps being a little paranoid in avoiding use of that spell.
If we interpret the requirement as it frustrates one drop of blood from coming into creation, well, blood lasts ~120 days; if one drop is 0.05 ml and Quirrel is middle-aged and can expect another 40 years of life (the question about wizard lifespans is relevant here, though), then that's 0.05 * (365/120) * 40 = 6.1 milliliters total loss.
Or if we interpret it as reducing the total capacity of one's blood, well, adults have ~5 liters or 5000 milliliters, so you could use that spell hundreds of times before appreciably reducing your blood content (200 * 0.05ml = 10ml, so you'd go from 5000 to 4990...).
Multiple FF.net reviews suggest getting Harry's parents to try and cheer him up. But what about this, before the beginning of chapter 1:
Petunia married a biochemist
I predict Harry might realise his father can help him and find a way to ask/make him help. All the PCs and powerful NPCs around him want Hermione to be dead (either through action or inaction). If she can be revived, a professor of biochemistry might just have relevant knowledge, equipment, and the will to act. Come to think of it, even more so might Hermione's parents.
The biggest problem I see with this is that in the past, Harry felt his father did not take him seriously. However, he now has power his father knows not, and he has resolved to do anything to bring her back - he could credibly threaten his father's career, for example.
The second problem is that Harry may be too wrapped up with being responsible and needing to fix this himself to think of asking anyone else for help, but signalling him via Patronus is at least worth a try and costs little - "We are in a war situation, my best friend was just killed by a double traumatic leg amputation, but I've cooled her to 5 degrees and trying to work out what to do next. Ideas? I am deadly serious."
Professor Evans-Veres is at Oxford, so he's probably a well-above-average biochemist.
Bear in mind that the question isn't "can top biochemistry professors help stop/undo death" -- it's "can a high-end biochemist be of help, if you can do magic and rearrange matter at the molecular level." And that seems relatively plausible.
you're uh, assigning just a tad too much power to the well above average biochemist.
More seriously, I think Harry's path here is much more magic than bio focused. He's seen memories removed and copied. If he can figure out how to remove ALL the memories from a body, and if he knows the obliviate charm, and if dead cells work for poly juice (which they should since hair is dead) then he has a decent path using only minor variants to known magic.
Does anyone else here use dictionary of numbers (recommended on the xkcd blag)?
Hermione's body should now be at almost exactly five degrees Celsius [≈ recommended for keeping food cool].
Not only do I use that, it means that your comment renders as:
Hermione's body should now be at almost exactly five degrees Celsius [≈ recommended for keeping food cool] [≈ recommended for keeping food cool].
to me.
I wouldn't have believed you, but I actually laughed out loud at this. Empirical evidence = it's funny, to me at least.
I wonder if resurrection via transfiguration is possible? It's probably too simple a solution narrative-wise, but it seems like something a reductionist should at least try.
Harry and Hermione's failed attempt to transfigure a lost book is evidence against this working, since that also involved transfiguring something specific that contains information. But magic has enough strange rules that there are plausible reasons why that could fail but transfiguring a specific person could succeed - maybe you can't transfigure a specific thing while the original still exists, or something like that.
Harry would probably want to start with some less ethically risky experiments, to avoid making a doomed conscious that doesn't want to die. He could check whether transfiguring a copy of a brain works by having someone else train an animal to do something unusual, and then trying to transfigure an object into that animal. He'd know it worked if the trainer observed the animal doing the thing it was trained to do. (The person doing the transfiguration shouldn't know what knowledge the animal has that makes it unusual, so that they have to transfigure that specific animal, not just an animal with th...
An idea I read on the HPMoR subreddit that I don't remember finding here is that "the very stars in heaven" could refer to the Blacks (Every last one of them that we know of has star, constellation or galaxy-related names, including Draco). Hermione also offered "the skeleton is a key" as a hypothetical for what a prophecy that means "Susan Bones has to be there" might sound like, and Hermione did study prophecy on Harry's urging, and we know that Hermione retains book knowledge much better than Harry, though this is still rather weak evidence for a stars -> Blacks style riddle. It did seem pretty unlikely that Belatrix/Sirius would have a reasonable way to reenter the story in the time that remains, but that particular interpretation of the prophecy does point that way--and they are unclosed plot parentheses in the story's final stretch.
Side note: Narcissa was a Black by birth (Belatrix's sister, in fact), and "stars in heaven" is, as other readers have pointed out, an odd phrasing for what would normally be called "the heavens", but not particularly odd if heaven = happy afterlife or wireheading.
After reading 91 and 92, I'm almost certain that we weren't told something very important about what Harry did from the death of Hermione to the end of chapter 92. I just can't believe Harry Potter, the one who would raze Azkaban at the cost of his life before seeing Hermione send to it would just accept her death and not try to do the impossible again and again to save her. He even swore to "torn apart the fabric of reality" if it's required to help her.
And yet, there are dozens of things he could have tried but apparently didn't try. He didn't try to replace the "oxygenation potion" with a different potion, and when he faced Snape, he didn't even ask Snape if there would be any potion that could be useful. When he met his father, a skilled biochemist, he didn't ask him anything about how to preserve brains. He didn't ask Quirrell if there was a ritual that could freeze Hermione (either cryonics-like, or a kind of temporal stasis) until he discovers a way of resurrecting her. He didn't ask McGonagall if there would be a way to transmute her brain into a diamond-like or whatever substance that would keep the configuration of her brain stable in time. He didn't t...
Prediction : Harry has stolen a march on Quirrelmort. I predict that between the time Professor Mcgonagall unlocked his time turner and Quirrelmort entered the room, he already used the device to visit the library's restricted section.
At least, I hope so : I really want to learn how "spell creation" is done, per EY's interpretation. That will tell us a lot about what magic actually is and what can be done to achieve Real Ultimate Power.
Furthermore, this would be fully rational. Harry's analysis of what to do next should have already made it abundantly clear that he needs to obtain more information, and the restricted section obviously has stuff that might be helpful. And why start on a task now when you can start on it 6 hours ago?
Is there a page that lists all of the unresolved hints/clues in MoR? For example, Remembrall-like-a-sun, Bacon's diary, etc.
I decided to enumerate all the map errors I could think of.
Name errors: any error in which someone's name is persistently not what you'd expect.
Map errors: any error in which the map itself is drawn incorrectly, or in a way you wouldn't expect.
Name persistence errors: any error in which someone changes names.
Multipl...
What's up with Quirrell's twitching lips in Chapter 90?
"That spell of cursed fire. I don't suppose it's a sacrificial ritual that even a child could use, if he dared?"
The Defense Professor's lips twitched.
And then moments later after being deflected from the spell (which, though not named, is probably Fiendfyre?)
"Pity," the boy said. "It would've been nice to see the look on the enemy's face the next time they tried using a troll."
The Defense Professor inclined his head, his lips twitching again.
At the time I read it I just assumed that Quirrell's plans to turn Harry dark were advancing by leaps and bounds and getting such decisive confirmation was causing him to be happy about what he had wrought. After thinking about it some more I'm now wondering if "THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN" is someone who should be playing with fiendfyre? Maybe Quirrell's twitches were a sign of fear or worry based on having private knowledge of the prophesy in Chapter 89, in which case a prophetically ironic strategy adjustment may be in the offing?
I wish I could promise you that I would obtain one of those highly guarded tomes from the Department of Mysteries, and pass it to you beneath a disguised cover.
Estimate of the probability Quirrell is talking about Roger Bacon's diary?
Slightly higher probability given that canon Harry (OOtP) has a known propensity for ignoring gifts that could have averted disaster until too late.
Er, I think he means that it looks like Bacon's Diary but is actually something more precious.
No comment on the shout out to all the Sith Lords in the audience?
and magics that some might consider to be unnatural?"
I think the previous chapter was already bringing back a lot of Anakin flashbacks.
He had vanished from where he was standing over the Weasley twins and come into existence beside Harry; George Weasley had discontinously teleported from where he was sitting to be kneeling next to his brother's side
What's going on here? Is it just that Harry isn't paying attention to what's happening around him?
No, the abruptly-ended and grammatically-incorrect sentence preceding this passage indicates actual discontinuity:
"Dumbledore wasn't being very cooperative, and in any case this was several minutes after the critical location within Time"
Notice the lack of punctuation. The end of this sentence has been lopped off, and deliberately. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not make careless punctuation errors.
To throw on the pile of random maybe-foreshadowing:
I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter.
-McGonagall, Chapter 17.
This did get me thinking, however. Firing Quirrell would presumably include removing his registration as "Defense Professor" from the Hogwarts wards. What did adding him to said wards do in the first place? T...
Came up with an idea of a method to ressurrect Hermione.
Brute force method:
Discover secrets of Atlantis, hack time travel, etc.
The problem with this is that time can adjust to avoid the paradox at any point in the timeline, which means that if you are a person who would try to exploit this, the sperm that would have created you was outraced by another one. So perhaps existing depends on not using this. (Parfit's Hitchhiker)
Or, if you try to use this and commit to be really serious about it, you get struck by a meteorite before completing the paradox. Or slip on a banana peel and bash your head. Or a get mauled by a troll. Some external cause comes in and prevents you from fulfilling your paradox.
Curious; when I read Professor Quirrel going into "protect the information from Harry Potter" mode for Macgonnagle, I almost immediately thought this was deeper than "I've changed my mind and it is no longer a good day and holyshit he's going to kill us". The overwhelming majority of readers assume he is being sincerely cautious in an effort to save the universe. I was assuming that there was obviously a slightly deeper plot involved, though I hadn't gotten far in thinking about what before I read the suggestions about alternative sourc...
To me it seemed obvious that Quirrel was just taking the opportunity to isolate Harry from Dumbledore-and-co. He's always tried to make Harry distrust Dumbledore. Now Harry will find them even more obstructionist to his goals, so he will only have Quirrel to go to with his ideas and plans.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing we see is Quirrel supplying Restricted books to Harry.
Given the chapter title, the first thought that leapt into my mind is "he's being exactly what Harry wants/expects to see, then being exactly what Minerva wants/expects to see, leaving no-one including us aware of what he actually wants or is actually going to do". Malus points to Minerva for the fact that he told her straight out what he was doing to Harry, but it didn't occur to her whether he might be doing the same to her.
What's wrong with assuming that Quirrell wants to keep the universe intact? Quote:
I have no great fondness for the universe, but I do live there.
Note that warding books A, B, and C leaks more bits of information than warding all restricted books.
The narration in chapters 88 and 89 have left quite a bit of room for Weasley Twin shenanigans. They are referred to as "the twins" and "Fred or George" up until one gets beat up by the troll. Additionally, the twins gave a respectful nod to McGonagall's demand that they stay in the Great Hall; they could have stayed there the entire time. Harry might have been accompanied by, say, Future Fred and Further Future Fred during his broom flight. I am not sure what the use of this would be, but it might involve them being a hive mind.
This has got me quite convinced that Fred and Fred is going to happen. They are probably connected magically, rather than acoustically, so they might be able to communicate across time. This setup might create the time beacon Harry was wanting.
Or, maybe their connection does not link through time. Send a pair of Weasleys back in time. You now have 4 Weasleys. Wait not-quite-an-hour, and then send 4 Weasleys back in time… 4 Weasleys is twice the number of Weasleys. Are N Weasleys N/2 times as smart as 2 Weasleys? No. It is much more interesting if it is the connections that matter. HE is the Weasley hivemind.
There was an off-the-cuff line back in Ch25:
Back in the old days, whenever magical identical twins were born, it had been the custom to kill one of them after birth.
I wonder if there is something more to a magical twin connection, that may have even caused problems (confusing the source of magic?), or if this was just a comment on how dark/backwards things were in the old days.
So, uh, why isn't Harry trying to save Neville?
I have experiments to run
There is research to be done
On the people who are still alive
Neville is neither dead, nor in immediate danger. In light of what happened to Hermione, in particular how all their precautions were bypassed, they will want to up Neville's security level, and I think it likely that this will come up before the arc is over, but I would not say that it has immediate level urgency.
Since no one here has mentioned it (as far as I see), note that Harry spends a significant portion of chapter 91 checking his watch every two minutes. Also note the sentence beginning,
From the outside you would've just seen . . .
Given the frequency and the aforementioned sentence, I think it's not likely that he's just counting down the time till dinner. He could be distracting himself, but he keeps it up during the conversation with his parents. Also, HPJEV is presumably familiar with such a common method of distracting oneself when thinking painful t...
Chapter 90 now ends with a note that says:
There are no Author's Notes for this chapter. I will quickly remark that this chapter (and further ones up to Ch. 96) were written in advance and did not change in response to any reader speculations.
I did not notice this note when I first looked at the chapter. Does anyone know if this went up with the first posting or was edited in later? If it was edited in later, maybe we should take the random speculations more seriously. If it went up with the first post, then the same point may hold, but with regards to 88-89.
"In any case," said the man, "if there is anyone who can be said to be responsible for Miss Granger's death, it is myself, not you. It is I, not you, who should have -"
"I perceive that you have spoken to Professor McGonagall and that she has given you a script to follow." The boy did not bother keeping the bitterness from his voice. "If you have something to say to me, Professor, say it without the masks."
My confidence that Quirrel did it just shot up from 90% to 99%.
This chapter showed that, if it appears that a Time Turner wasn't used, they don't try to use it. Presumably, the reverse is also true. If it appears that it is used, they use it.
I've always figured that the rules deciding which stable time loop were something along the lines of the more likely it is for an event to cause itself, the more likely it is that one happens. If you want a specific time loop to happen, such as giving yourself a paper that factors a given semiprime, you'd make it so that happening causes itself, by copying down the factors if they...
Back in the story's early days I predicted that prime factoring wouldn't work, because then the story wouldn't be about rationality any more... it would be about time travel. If my theory and your theory are syncretized then "the force" here is simply "Eliezer's plot generation efforts which will output a story consistent with his broader authorial intent".
In this model, the way the characters might be able to choice-fully manipulate "the force that chooses time loops" to give them what they want is by being genre savvy enough to have their planning process be the one that functions as a positive example of science informed x-rationality leading to good outcomes, and the stable time loops that come into existence won't be super dramatic, but they will helpfully nudge them closer to x-rationality-demonstrating victories. Harry's unlocked time turner (as of Chapter 90) becomes more interesting in this light.
However, it seems like there's an element of irony in this framing, because there is almost no scientific evidence that I'm aware of in the heuristics and biases literature (nor inspirational essays in Eliezer's sequences) that the skill of genre-sa...
The most obvious reason for Quirrel's actions at the end of this chapter is to prevent the prophecy from coming true. The next most obvious, and what I think is correct, is that he's taking those precautions because he wants to make sure Harry doesn't die before he makes the prophecy come true.
I've been wondering about how the Hogwarts wards work. It seems quite contradictory to me that they need a complex setup with a spell killing Draco very slowly to not trigger them, but they aren't triggered when Hermione is critically wounded by having her two legs eaten. If there is a ward warning Dumbledore or the teacher staff when a student is in danger, then Hermione would have been saved, by Dumbledore phoenix-travelling to her before her death (or McGonagall sending a Patronus to Dumbledore so he phoenix-travels if only the teachers within Hogwarts are warned).
The workaround used on Draco could credibly be the work of a hogwarts student. That was needed because it was intended to be blamed on Hermione. The hit on Hermione did not have that constraint -it is blatantly, obviously, undeniably, the work of a master wizard. The fact that the wards were fucked with is just one stone in the pile of evidence that this was not the work of a fellow student with a grudge, but the work of someone like Bellatrix, Lucius,Voldemort, or a highly competent wand-for-hire.
It seems to me that Harry was a bit too quick to dismiss the Resurrection Stone option. Certainly if it functions according to his current conceptions of it it won't bring Hermione back in the sense he finds meaningful. However the experience of that soul/magic explosion at Hermione's death gives at least some evidence of a soul actually existing, even if still not enough to make it the most probable explanation for the stone's function, and there are other non-soul requiring ways that the stone could function such as looking back in time for the most rece...
I asked the Headmaster to go back and save Hermione and then fake everything, fake the dead body, edit everyone's memories, but Dumbledore said that he tried something like that once and it didn't work and he lost another friend instead.
This sentence is interesting - not least because I had previously assigned a high probability to this being his method of resurrection, but also because it potentially tells us interesting things about time and death in the MoR-verse.
... I'm not entirely sure what, though. That last bit, in particular, that someone else died too when he tried...
I think that large rocks transfigured into something small are in general useful, and Dumbledore knew this.
There's a mention of him being one of the few people who have used transfiguration in combat and lived, I imagine he has a set of techniques like this of which carrying a transfigured rock is the simplest.
It'd been one of the spells he and Hermione had experimented on, a lifetime ago, so he was able to control it precisely, though it had taken a lot of power to affect that much mass. Hermione's body should now be at almost exactly five degrees Celsius.
I feel like this comes off as a bit of an ass pull. It's the suspicious specificity that does it, I think.
It would be easy to prevent that feeling, if you care to and if it's not just me, with a throwaway line in an earlier chapter.
I'd say mention in five previous chapters demonstrates that Harry is pretty comfortable with this spell. (I'm highly confident this was intentional on Eliezer's part.)
More specifically, in chapter 56:
Kill her and then bring her back, came the next suggestion. Use Frigideiro to cool Bellatrix down to the point where her brain activity stops, then warm her up afterward using Thermos, just like people who fall into very cold water can be successfully revived half-an-hour later without noticeable brain damage. Harry considered this. Bellatrix might not survive in her debilitated state. And it might not stop Death from seeing her. And he'd have trouble carrying a cold unconscious Bellatrix very far. And Harry couldn't remember the research on which exact body temperature was supposed to be nonfatal but temporarily-brain-halting.
He forgot to get his time-turner unlocked, but he remembered to look this up, evidently.
I wonder if Eliezer is just being cautious, trying to steer the story away from anything that people would dismiss as blatant cryonics propaganda, and instead just plant enough of a hint to get the normals reading HPMoR, how should I say it, emotionally interested in the idea that a freshly dead person might be preserved, and revived later when we know more.
What I'm surprised Harry didn't think of was bringing her to a muggle hospital. A combination of muggle and wizard medicine should be able to overcome some plain old shock and blood loss, no?
In canon, after several failed attempts at using magical treatments, Arthur Weasely tried stitches on his Nagini bite, but the venom dissolved them. It wouldn't be surprising if the troll's bite, either naturally or due to the mastermind's buffings, would have similar properties interfering with muggle treatments. Actually, now that I think about it, that's not a bad explanation for why Harry's first aid attempt didn't work. Canon Voldemort does not like making a kill strike that can be easily treated (Rowling even intended for Arthur's bite to be fatal, according to interviews, but changed it while writing, presumably because Harry's link to Voldemort meant this would have broken him more than because it meant he could call for help in a timely fashion, not to mention the effects on his relationships with the Weaseleys.).
Meaning to post this for a while not because it is a novel idea but just so it is recorded somewhere.
I think that there is a good chance that the story finishes with A SuperIntelligence of sorts. Furthermore, I think that if a SI is actually brought in the story, there is at least 50% chance that it will be a SI built/cast with good intentions which nonetheless destroys (in a way) humanity and/or the universe.
I guess by "too transparently" I mean the following. The worst kind of author tract is when an author shoehorns in some point they want to make in a way that has nothing to do with and distracts from the rest of the story. We already know that HPMoR is about rationality and whatnot - it's exactly what it says on the tin in that respect - but nothing in the story so far suggests the later appearance of a superintelligence, and if one were to appear it would feel shoehorned in.
Is there any way that tearing the stars apart could plausibly be related to trying to save Hermione?
A star would make a great sacrificial component for a spell. This chapter talks about both sacrificial magic and inventing new spells.
"When a certain ancient device in my possession informed me that Miss Granger was on the verge of death" -Defense Professor
Might Quirrell have stolen the Marauder's Map from the Weasley twins?
Theory: Harry learns how to make a horcrux, goes back 6 hours, takes the marauder's map to find Hermione causing him to have to oblviate Fred and George, Makes Hermione a horcrux before she dies.
Perhaps he even gets around the sacrifice requirement by letting Hermione's own death be the sacrifice.
The plan to resurrect Hermonine might be:
(1) Take her body back in time via the time turner and replace her.
(2) Kill another student that Dumbledore gets the feeling that a student died.
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 90. The previous thread has passed 750 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.
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: