Harry Potter and the Way of Reason

Anyone who could Rowling will Rowling. [1]

Again, there is no doubt that the views of Severus Snape do not necessarily represent those of the author.

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"Okay," Harry said, swallowing, "Okay, Hermione, that's enough, you can stop now."

Even with Hermione's level of concentration that Harry had never seen, neither the color nor the shape of the white sugar tablet in front of her changed at all.Her eyes were closed, sweat was beading on her brow, her hand was trembling as she clutched her wand—

"Hermione, stop! It's useless, Hermione, I don't think we'll be able to create something that doesn't exist yet!"

Slowly, Hermione's grip on her wand loosened.

"I think I feel it," her voice was inaudible, "I think I felt it begin to deform, just now."

Harry felt a lump in his throat. "Maybe it's just you imagining. Your desire is too strong."

"That may be true," she said.She looked like she wanted to cry.

Slowly, Harry picked up the mechanical pencil and reached for a piece of paper, on which all the items recorded were crossed out.Then he drew a line on "Alzheimer's cure."

They cannot feed the transformed pills to others.But Polymorph, at least the kind they can do, can't make a target magical--can't turn an ordinary broom into a broomstick.So if Hermione could really conjure a pill, it would have to be a non-magic pill, whose effects come entirely from ordinary ingredients.They could secretly make pills for muggle science labs, have them study those pills, and try to reverse engineer[2] how to make them before Transfiguration fails...no one in either world needs to know With magic involved, it's just another scientific breakthrough...

It's not the kind of thing a wizard would think of either.They don't respect the atomic lattice so much, and they don't think that the non-magical substance itself is the carrier of power.If there is no magic, it is of little importance.

A little earlier, Harry very secretly - he didn't even tell Hermione - tried to shapeshift into an Eric Dexler-like[3] nanotech machine. (He's trying to build a tabletop nanofactory, of course, not a small self-replicating self-assembler, Harry's not crazy.) If he can succeed, he'll be on his way.

"That's all for today, right?" said Hermione.She nestled in the chair, leaning her head against the back of the chair, looking tired.This was unusual for Hermione.She liked to pretend she had boundless energy, at least when Harry was around.

"There's one more," Harry said cautiously, "that's a little thing, and it might really work. I'm putting this last because I want us to end on a positive note. It's the same as the phaser gun." [4] It is different, it is real; it is different from the special drug for Alzheimer's disease, it has been manufactured in the laboratory; it is different from the lost book manuscript you are trying to transform, it is a kind of substance. I made a Here's a diagram of the molecular structure. We just wanted to make it longer than any we've ever made, with all the tubes parallel, with diamonds embedded at the ends." Harry produced a blueprint.

Hermione sat up straight, brought the blueprint over to study, and frowned. "These are carbon atoms? Harry, what's the name? If I don't know what it's called, I can't deform it."

Harry made a disgusted look.It's still hard for him to accept this.It shouldn't matter what it's called if you know what it is. "It's called a buckytube, or carbon nanotube, and it's a type of fullerene [5] that was just discovered this year. It's about a hundred times stronger than steel and one-sixth the weight."

Hermione looked up from the drawing in surprise. "is that true?"

"Yeah," said Harry, "it's just that it's hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of this thing, we could use it to make a space right into geosynchronous orbit and beyond." Elevators, that's halfway to the end of the solar system in ?V[6]. And we'll be launching solar-powered satellites as easy as throwing confetti."

Hermione frowned again. "Is this thing safe?"

"I don't see anything unsafe about it," said Harry. "Essentially, a bucky tube is just a thin layer of graphite bent into a tube, and graphite is the same material used in pencils—"

"I know what graphite is, Harry," said Hermione.She brushed her hair absently.He frowned as he stared at the paper.

Harry reached into his robe pocket and pulled out a white thread with a gray plastic ring tied at each end.He applied super glue where the thread touched the ring to make it a whole so that it could be deformed as a whole.If Harry remembered correctly, the cyanoacrylates were covalently bonded.In a world that is ultimately made up of tiny atoms, this is the closest thing to a "whole body." "When you're ready," said Harry, "try deforming this into a set of parallel buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings."

"Okay..." said Hermione slowly, "Harry, I think I've forgotten something."

Harry shrugged helplessly.Maybe you're just tired.But he knew he'd better not say it.

Hermione put her wand on the plastic ring and stared at it for a moment.

Two sparkling rings of small diamonds lay on the table, connected by a long black thread.

"It's changed," said Hermione.She sounded like she wanted to cheer about it, but lacked the energy. "What now?"

Harry was a little discouraged by his research partner's lack of enthusiasm, but he did his best not to show it; maybe he could cheer Hermione up a bit in turn. "Now I'll test it out and see how it holds up."

Earlier, Harry had rigged an A-frame for an experiment involving diamond rods - Polymorphing solid diamonds was easy, just not sustainable.An earlier experiment tested whether shortening a long diamond rod could lift a weight hanging from its bottom, in other words, whether Transfiguration could defy tension.It turned out to be possible.

Harry carefully slipped a gleaming diamond hoop onto the thick metal hook at the top of the frame, hung a thick metal frame from the hoop at the bottom, and began adding weights to the hook.

(Harry had asked the Weasley twins to help him transform the whole thing, and the Weasley twins had given him an incredulous look, as if they couldn't figure out what shenanigans might be possible with it, but still didn't ask. According to the twins, their Transfiguration lasts around three hours, so Harry and Hermione still have a while.)

"One hundred kilograms," Harry said after a minute, "I don't think such a thin wire can carry so much weight. It should carry much more weight, but this is all my weight .”

There was another silence.

Harry straightened up, went back to the table, sat down in the chair, and put a serious check next to Bucky Tube. "Look," said Harry, "this worked."

"But it's useless, Harry, isn't it?" said Hermione, sitting with her head on her hands. "I mean, even if we gave it to the scientists, they wouldn't be able to study our deformed bucky tubes and Learn how to mass produce bucky tubes."

"They might learn something," said Harry, "Look at it, Hermione, such a thin thread carrying its full weight, we've just made something that no Muggle lab could ever make— —”

"But any witch can make it," said Hermione, her voice beginning to grow weary. "Harry, I don't think we can."

"You mean our romantic relationship?" said Harry. "Great! Let's break up."

It made her smile slightly. "I mean our research."

"Oh, Hermione, how could you do this?"

"You're cute when you're mean," she said, "but Harry, it's insane, I'm 12, you're 11, it's a stupid idea that we can discover something that hasn't been done before."

"Are you really saying that we should give up on uncovering the secrets of magic after trying for less than a month?" Harry said, trying to sound a challenge in his voice.To be honest, he was starting to feel the same exhaustion as Hermione.None of those good ideas worked.He had only one discovery worth mentioning, the laws of Mendelian inheritance, but he couldn't tell Hermione without breaking his promise to Draco.

"No," said Hermione.Her young face looked very serious, like an adult. "I'm saying that now we should learn the magic that wizards already know, so that when we graduate from Hogwarts, we can study it again."

"Hmm..." said Harry, "Hermione, I hate to say it, but imagine we decide to put research on hold, and then after we graduate, the first thing we experiment with is a cure for Alzheimer's Pills, and we make it. We feel... I don’t think the word stupid is the right word to describe how we feel. What if something else like that works out?”

"It's not fair, Harry!" said Hermione.Her voice trembled as if she was about to cry. "You can't impose it on people! It's not our responsibility to do this kind of thing, we are children!"

For a moment, Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione that she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, and if she would turn into the whiny, whiny person Harry saw in a book and couldn't read it. A self-pitying protagonist.

"Anyway," said Hermione tremblingly. "I don't want to go on. I don't believe that children can do things that adults can't do. It only happens in stories."

The classroom was quiet.

Hermione looked frightened, and Harry knew his own expression was turning grim.

If Harry hadn't thought the same way, this sentence probably wouldn't have hurt him so much - while 30 might be a bit old for a scientific revolution, 20 might be just right, someone gets a Ph. D. at 17, and 14-year-old heirs have become great kings or generals, but really few people have done things that claim to be in the history books at the age of 11.

"Okay," said Harry, "figure out how to do things that adults can't. Is that your challenge?"

"That's not what I meant," Hermione whispered in a frightened voice.

Harry tried to take his eyes off Hermione. "I'm not mad at you," Harry said.Despite his best efforts, his voice was still cold. "I'm angry because of - I don't know - everything. But I don't want to throw in the towel, Hermione. It's not always the right thing to do. I'll find a way to do something that grown-up wizards can't do matter, and I'll answer you. How?"

More silence.

"Okay," said Hermione, her voice wavering.She got up from her chair and walked to the door of the abandoned classroom where they had been working.Her hand was on the doorknob. "We're still friends, right? If you can't figure out anything—"

Her voice faltered.

"Then we'll study together," said Harry.His voice was colder now.

"Well, then, let's do this," said Hermione, leaving the room quickly, closing the door behind her.

Sometimes, even though Harry was in the dark side, he hated himself for having the dark side.

And the part of him that thought the same thing as Hermione, which was "No, kids can't do things adults can't do," was saying things that Hermione was too scared to say, like, "You just Made myself a damn hard challenge", and "Boy, you're going to have a rotten face this time", and "At least this way you'll know you've failed".

And the part of him that didn't like failure replied in a very cold voice, well, you can just shut up and watch.

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It was almost lunch time, but Harry didn't care one bit.He didn't even bother to take a cereal cake out of his moke bag.His stomach can be hungry for a while first.

The world of wizards is very small, they don't think like scientists, they don't understand science, they don't question the world they grew up in, they don't shield time machines, they play Quidditch, the whole British wizarding world is bigger than one Muggle towns are small, the greatest wizarding schools only teach until 17, it's not stupid to challenge at 11, it's stupid to think that wizards know what they're doing and have already stripped a science erudite All the fruits at your fingertips that you can see.

The first step was to make a list of all the magical limitations Harry could remember, all the things considered impossible.

In the second step, write down the constraints that are the most scientifically unreasonable.

In the third step, prioritizing the restrictions that are least likely to be questioned by wizards who do not understand science.

Step four, figure out how to break through those constraints.

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Hermione was still trembling as she sat down next to Mandy at the Ravenclaw table.Hermione's lunch consists of two types of fruit (sliced ​​tomatoes and peeled oranges), three types of vegetables (carrots, carrots, and more carrots), one type of meat (fried balls of bird legs[7], which she carefully removes the outer unhealthy crust), and a morsel of chocolate cake that she rewards herself for eating the rest.

This time it wasn't as bad as the one in Potions: she still had the same nightmare to this day.But this time it was Hermione who had called it out, and felt like a target.Just for a moment, and then that grim darkness turned and said it wasn't mad at her because it didn't want to scare her.

She still felt as if she had forgotten something earlier, something particularly important.

But they didn't break a single Transfiguration law... did they?They didn't produce any liquid, or gas, and they didn't accept the order of the professor of defense...

pill!Pills are things that can be eaten!

...well, no, no one would just take a pill that was thrown around, and the Transfiguration didn't work either.If it worked, they could simply spell stop.But she was going to tell Harry about it anyway, and make sure they didn't mention it in front of Professor McGonagall, lest they never be allowed to learn Transfiguration again...

Hermione felt her stomach really getting sick.She pushed the plate back on the table, she couldn't just eat lunch like this.

She closed her eyes and began to recite the rules of Transfiguration silently.

"I would never transform anything into a liquid or a gas."

"I would never morph into anything that looked like food or anything else that could enter the body."

No, they really shouldn't have tried to transfigure the pills, or they should have at least realized that... she had been pushed too far by Harry's brilliant ideas, she hadn't expected...

The sick feeling intensified in Hermione's stomach.There was a feeling in her mind that something was lingering on the edge of consciousness, a premonition that was about to be revealed, a young woman was about to turn into an old woman, a vase was about to turn into two faces[8]...

She continued to chant the Laws of Transfiguration silently.

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When Harry stopped trying to turn the air in front of his wand into a paper clip, his knuckles turned white from his grip on the wand.Of course, it wasn't safe to transform a paper clip into gas, but Harry didn't have any reason to think the reverse wasn't safe either.It's just that everyone thinks it's impossible.But why not?Air is a real substance like everything else...

Well, maybe this limitation does make sense.The air is messy, and all the molecules are constantly changing their relationship to each other.Maybe matter stays still long enough that you can fully grasp it and give it new form, but the atoms in solids are also vibrating...

The more Harry failed, the colder he felt, and everything seemed to become clearer.

good.Next on the list.

Polymorph can only be performed on entire objects.You can't deform half a match into a needle, you have to deform the whole thing.When Harry was trapped in the classroom by Draco, that's why Harry couldn't convert a thin cylindrical section wall into a sponge and punch a hole in the stone big enough for him to pass through.Just to change that one small cross-section, he had to impose a new form on an entire wall or even a whole wing of Hogwarts.

This is ridiculous.

Matter is made of atoms.Many very small dots.There's no continuity, no solidity, just the electromagnetic force that holds the dots together...

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Mandy Brockhurst's fork stops en route to her mouth. "Uh," she said to Sue Lee on the opposite side.Now the seat next to her is empty, "What's the matter with Hermione?"

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Harry wanted to kill his eraser.

He tried to turn a single point of the pink cuboid into steel while the rest remained rubber, but the eraser wouldn't cooperate.

This must be a conceptual limitation, not a real one.definitely is.

Matter is made up of atoms, and each atom is a tiny individual thing.In the case of covalent bonds, what binds the atoms is a quantized shared electron cloud; in the case of ionic bonds or van der Waals forces, it is only the close-range electromagnetic force that binds the atoms.

The protons and neutrons inside an atomic nucleus are tiny, independent things, if you really want to put it that way.The quarks inside protons and neutrons are also tiny independent things!In the real world, in reality, there is nothing at all that corresponds to the human illusion of this notion of a solid.Everything is just small.

And in Polymorph, it all starts with thought, doesn't it?No words, no gestures.The Free Transformation Curse only relies on a simple concept, a conception of the composition of matter, which completely separates the concept of the structure of matter from the matter itself, and in turn forces the structure of matter to change accordingly.Just this and a wand, and something that makes you a wizard.

A wizard cannot deform a part of an object, only what they perceive as a whole in their minds, because they don't know in their bones that, to put it bluntly, everything is just atoms.

Harry tried his best to focus on the knowledge that the real truth was that the eraser was just a collection of atoms, everything was just a collection of atoms, and the atoms in the little piece he was trying to deform were unlike anything else he could think of. Collections are also collections.

While Harry still hadn't been able to change the eraser part, Transfiguration had no effect.

this.too.Ridiculous.

Harry's knuckles turned white from pinching his wand again.The unreasonable experimental results made him want to vomit.

Maybe some part of him was still thinking about the object, and that kept the Transfiguration from working.He thought of the union of atoms as an eraser.He also thought about a small collection.

Time to move up another level.

Harry pressed his wand harder on the small piece of the eraser, trying to break the illusion that non-scientists believed to be reality, the world that consisted of desks, chairs, air, erasers, and humans.

When you walk through a park, the immersive world around you is just a pattern of neuron firing in your brain.The perceived bright blue sky is not something high up there, but something that exists in the visual cortex in the back of your brain.All the feeling of the bright world actually takes place in that quiet cave of bones you call the skull, the place you live in and can never, ever leave.If you really want to say hello to someone, a real person, you don't shake their hand, you tap on their head and say, "How are you doing in there?" It's the essence of being human, that's what they really are.And the image you think you're walking through the park is an image your brain generates as it processes signals from your eyes and retina.

All this is not a void, as the Buddhists think, nor is it some terrible, mysterious and unpredictable thing behind the veil of Maya, the real park behind the illusion of the park, but it is nonetheless Totally hallucinatory.

Harry wasn't sitting in the classroom.

He wasn't looking at the eraser.

Harry is in Harry's skull.

He was experiencing an image that his brain had processed after decoding the signals from the retina.

The real eraser is somewhere else than this picture.

The real eraser bears no resemblance to the image in Harry's head.The idea that the eraser is a solid whole exists only in his own brain, in the parietal cortex, which he processes shape and space.A true eraser is a collection of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces and shared covalent electrons.At the same time, nearby air molecules collide with each other and with the eraser molecules, before bouncing off.

The real eraser was far away, and Harry in his skull could never actually touch it, only imagine the concept of it.But his wand has power, it can actually change objects in the outside world, only Harry's own preconceived consciousness is limiting it.Somewhere, behind Maya's veil, in reality, "my wand" in Harry's conception is touching the collection of atoms that Harry's mind thinks is "a little bit of an eraser" .If the wand could change the collection of atoms in what Harry remembered as "the whole eraser", there was absolutely no reason why it couldn't change other collections...

Transfiguration was still unsuccessful.

Harry gritted his teeth, and he went up another level.

The notion that the eraser in Harry's mind was a separate object was obvious nonsense.

It was a map that never and could not match the actual terrain.

Humans model the world in a hierarchical way, and they have different ideas about how countries work, how people behave, how organs work, how cells work, how molecules work, or how quarks behave.

When Harry's brain needs to think about the eraser, it imagines rules for the eraser, such as "the eraser can erase pencil marks."It was only when Harry's brain needed to predict what would happen at lower chemical levels that Harry's brain started thinking about the rubber molecule -- as if it were a different fact.

But, it's all in the head.

Harry may have had different ideas about the rules of the eraser in his head, but there are no separate laws of physics specific to the eraser.

Harry's mind models reality organized in layers, with different ideas for each layer.But all of this exists only on the map, not in reality, reality itself exists at a single level, the quark, a unified, low-level process that obeys simple mathematical laws.

Or, at least that's what Harry believed before discovering that magic existed, but erasers were not magical items.

Even if the eraser is indeed magical, the idea that there really is a solid eraser whole is absurd.An object like an eraser cannot possibly be a fundamental element of reality.They are too large and too complex to be atoms.They could only be built from smaller parts.There can't be something that is still complicated to break down.Buried in Harry's brain, the belief that the eraser exists as a separate object is not only false, but confuses the map with the actual terrain.The eraser exists only as a separate concept in Harry's multi-level modeling of the world, not as a separate element of a single-level reality.

...Transfiguration still unsuccessful.

Harry gasped. A failed Transfiguration was almost as exhausting as a successful Transfiguration, but he'd be damned if he gave up now.

Well, let this nineteenth-century garbage die.

The reality is not atoms, a set of little billiard balls bumping around [10].That's just another lie.The notion of atoms as tiny dots is just another convenient illusion that people cling to because they don't want to confront the subterranean reality that is inhuman, eerie, and terrifying.No wonder the Transfiguration he attempted on this basis was unsuccessful.If he wants power, he'll have to give up his humanity and force his thoughts to fit the true equations of quantum mechanics.

There are no small particles, only clouds of probability amplitudes in the multi-particle configuration space [11].In his naive imagination, the existence of the eraser is just a huge factor in the wave function that can happen to be decomposed. To say that it exists independently is like saying that there is a physical factor 6 in the number 3.Since his wand could change one factor of the wave function that was approximately decomposed, there was no reason why it couldn't change a smaller factor, which happened to be understood by his brain as a small piece on the top of an eraser—

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Hermione sprinted down the corridor, her shoes thumping on the stones, gasping for breath, adrenaline still racing through her blood.

It is as if a young woman becomes a picture of an old woman, or a vase becomes two faces.

What are they doing?

What are they doing?

When she came to the door of the classroom, her hands were sweating too much and slipped on the doorknob. She grabbed the doorknob even harder and opened the door——

--she saw Harry staring at a small pink rectangle on the table in front of him-

—A few steps away, the thin black line, barely visible from this distance, is bearing all the weight—

"Harry, get out of the classroom!"

Shock was written all over Harry's face, and he got up so quickly that he nearly fell over.He paused, just to grab the little pink rectangle on the table and run out the door immediately.By this time, she had stepped back, wand in hand, pointing at the thread—

"The spell stops!?"

Hermione slammed the door again, and there was a loud crash of a hundred kilograms of metal falling to the ground.

Panting, gasping for air, she ran all the way here without stopping, sweating profusely, and her calves and thighs ached like they were being burned by flames.Even if she could get all the Galleons in the world by answering Harry's question now, she couldn't do it.

Hermione blinked, realizing she had started to slide, and Harry grabbed her, helping her sit softly on the floor.

"...Comfortable..." She finally whispered. "What??" She had never seen Harry so pale before.

"...You, feel, comfortable, are you..."

Harry looked even more terrified when he understood the question. "I, I don't think I have any symptoms—"

Hermione closed her eyes momentarily. "Okay," she whispered, "take a break, breathe."

After a while.Harry still looked terrified.That's good too, and maybe teaches him a lesson.

Hermione reached into the bag Harry had bought for her, whispered "water" through her thirsty throat, took out the bottle, and gulped.

It took a while before she could speak again.

"We broke the rules, Harry," she said hoarsely, "we broke the rules."

"I..." Harry swallowed, "I still don't understand what's going on, I've been thinking about it, but—"

"I asked, is shapeshifting safe, and you answered me!?"

A moment of silence.

"That's it?" Harry asked.

She should have screamed.

"Harry, don't you understand?" she said, "it's made of tiny fibers and who knows what could go wrong if it unraveled, and we didn't ask Professor McGonagall! You didn't realize we were What? We're experimenting with Transfiguration. We're experimenting with Transfiguration!?"

Another pause.

"Yeah..." said Harry slowly, "it's probably one of those things they don't even bother to tell you not to do because it's so obvious. Don't do it in an unused in my classroom, experimenting with my bright new ideas for Transfiguration."

"You might kill us, Harry!" Hermione knew it wasn't fair, she had made mistakes, but she was mad at him anyway, and he always sounded so confident that she followed him without thinking. road ahead. "We may destroy Professor McGonagall's perfect record!?"

"Yeah," said Harry, "let's not tell her about it, shall we?"

"We've got to stop," said Hermione, "we've got to stop, or we'll get hurt. We're too young, Harry, and we can't do it yet, not now."

A faint smile flashed across Harry's face. "Well, you're kind of wrong about that."

He held up the little pink rectangle with a tiny fleck of bright metal on the eraser.

Hermione stared at it puzzled.

"Quantum mechanics is not enough," said Harry, "I had to go all the way to timeless physics[12] to succeed. Think of the wand as a force that enforces a relationship between the past that separates it and the future of reality, Not to change anything in time - but I did, Hermione, I saw through the illusion of matter, and I bet no other wizard in the world could. Even if some Muggle-born wizards knew that there was no time The equations of quantum mechanics, to them, would be just an idea of ​​strange and distant quantum things, they would not recognize this as reality, nor would they admit that the world as they knew it was an illusion. I will Part of the eraser is deformed without deforming the whole object."

Hermione raised her wand again, pointing at the eraser.

For a moment, anger flashed across Harry's face, but he didn't do anything to stop her.

"Curse Stop," said Hermione, "consult Professor McGonagall before trying again."

Harry nodded, though his face was still a little tense.

"We still have to stop," said Hermione.

"Why??" said Harry, "don't you see what that means, Hermione? Wizards don't know everything! There are so few of them, and even fewer of them know even a little science, and they haven't done it yet." Low-hanging fruit—"

"It's not safe," said Hermione, "and it's not safe if we can discover new things! We're too small! We've made a big mistake, and next time, we might die!?"

Then Hermione flinched.

Harry looked away from her and began to breathe slowly and deeply.

"Please don't try to do it alone, Harry," said Hermione, her voice trembling, "please."

Please don't make me have to decide whether to tell Professor Flitwick about this.

Silence lasted for a long time.

"So, you want us to study," said Harry.She could see that he was trying not to sound angry. "Just learning."

Hermione didn't know if she should say something, but... "It's like you study, uh, timeless physics, right?"

Harry looked back at her.

"You can do this," said Hermione tentatively, "not because of our experiments, can you? You can do it because you read a lot of books."

Harry opened his mouth, then closed it again.He looked defeated.

"Well," said Harry, "this