I only like the first three Harry Potter books, when Scabbers goes, so does the book having any credibility it seems.
People don’t like Harry Potter for the story, so when it tries too be serious it falls apart. The part of Harry Potter people enjoy is the whimsy of the wizarding world, that’s it.
For me it’s always the unexplained power nerfing that authors do just to advance the plot.
Harry Potter in the first 3 books was fearless, he literally took on voldemort with his bare hands.
Then when the dumbass plan with the port key cup happens, he just stands there like an idiot as the rat dude kills Cedric and revives Voldemort as if both he and Cedric don’t have wands that allow them to cast spells.
I mean they could have maybe had like 20 wizards camping the graveyard to make escaping impossible, but nah they really tried to make the coward rat guy seem like he was now somehow more capable than all of voldemort’s previously defeated plans combined.
Book 4 is great, but honestly, what is there to like about book 5? Nothing fucking happens in the entire thing. In my opinion it has always been the absolute worst of the series.
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
To cover up magic on all “fronts” would be impossible by today’s standards. Harry Potter would never be as successful nower days as it was. Simply because the smartphone enters the life’s of humans as essential device very early in life.
If some wizards of quantum mechanics can write math for… whatever quantum mechanics is… I think there could be a way or two, to manipulate magic by science.
Easiest explanation is: there is no electricity in hogwarts and wizards don’t have electricians nor electricity generation, so “electricity doesn’t work in hogwarts”.
If magic was electromagnetic or at least can be measured by effects that it has wizards would have been found during 20th century by general populace.
There is nothing in the books that says that people without magic can’t understand it?
I think there was a plot point in 4 or 5 book where harry is on trial for using some spell to scare away dementors, and his neighboor testifies that he really did it and people don’t believe her cause she doesn’t have magic. But that’s only seeing magical creatures, what stops anyone from understanding it exactly? They do repeatable things that return repeatable results, pretty understandable.
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic. So that is a new physical law in disguise. An especially interesting one that interacts with certain intelligence (like mind reading of the user, by the user of other users, memory extraction and manifestation in sentient beings).
Or that can be a bullshit by uninformed wizards with superiority complex, they have like 5 years of mandatory education. And most don’t interact with anyone but magical people in their enclaves.
Magic could operate differently from electromagnetism, but still interfere, such as with quantum effects. Inference doesn’t need to go both ways.
I thought about writing a magic setting with fairly hard justification for magic, and in my world, you’d control individual atoms and combine them to get the effects you want. You’d do this by gaining the respect of or instilling fear into atoms so they’d do your bidding. Spoken spells are more like tricks taught to dogs than having any power of their own, and the power derives from the respect or fear the atoms have for the caster. This explains why some wizards/witches are more powerful than others, and why learning isn’t necessarily the best way to get more powerful. The strongest magic users in my world spend a lot of time meditating, meaning communing with the target group of atoms.
The inner workings of atoms is poorly understood, so I think there’s room to insert some form of sentience.
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic.
I don’t think there’s actually any such mention. There’s several mentions about how “muggle technology doesn’t work in the Hogwarts grounds”, but there’s no mention of electronics going haywire when someone is doing magic outside of hogwarts, imo?
Please do correct me if I just remember wrong.
And even just turning out lights is something that is apparently not that simple to do. Aside from Peruvian instant darkness powder — which doesn’t exactly snuff out lights, but covers them in darkness — the only thing to affect lights is Dumbledore’s deluminator. And he’s a magical genius.
My point being even turning off the lights is challenging. Muggle tech may not work in Hogwarts but I don’t recall any mention of magic fucking up tech unless it’s magic specifically meant to fuck up tech. Hogwarts is just like such a protracted and magical place that “muggle tech doesn’t work” but even that’s kind of a silly overarching statement that’s easy to challenge. Plumbing is technically muggle tech. It works. Wouldn’t ball point pens work as well? I imagine those would be pretty highly valued commodities. I think muggle borns could easily flog biros for at least a galleon a piece. Which the muggleborn could then go and exchange for the value of the gold, getting probably hundreds of pound for a galleon.
Endless money glitch.
But yeah at least pens would work I’d argue. Something like calculators is easy to see being fucked by some ambient magic fields, but pens? Nah.
Oh youre going by quotes from movies yeah I don’t remember those as well as the books but I think my argument stands and the first comments there seem to corroborate
That’s not given. Many magic systems are inherently unexplainable. Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow. A bunch of stories use a similar explanation (replace monotheistic god with primal forces/strands of fate/eldritch gods).
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study. Is there a correlation between particular prayers and miracles? Are particular mental states helpful? Do various traits make someone more or less likely to produce a miracle? Are there drugs that affect it? What are the limits to a miracle? Are there patterns in the time intervals between miracles? And so on, and so forth. A world with such a magic system, if you want it to be realistic, should have had an entire history of people studying these and many other things.
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study.
It might be technically studiable in the way you describe, but there’s no requirement for consistency of any kind. My statement was extra-universal, so you can’t assume that it’s discoverable intra-universally. If the result of your study is “this is behaving in completely inconsistent and random ways”, you have technically studied it, but you haven’t measured or analyzed it in any way.
You can just apply your approach to our universe. People have spent centuries attempting to measure and analyze miracles. Would you say that we have analyzed and studied the magic system by which the christian god works?
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
You’re still making assumptions about the magic system. Take for example the Solphons from “The Dark Forest” - super-smart subatomic machines that change the laws of physics to prevent advances in fundamental physics. Now imagine that they weren’t designed by an alien race, but instead by an extra-universal god, and there was no way to ever arrive at this knowledge (since no instruments for measuring etc. can ever be developed).
Suddenly you have a magic system that is fundamentally unstudiable, no matter the amount of humans with “common sense or intelligence”. No matter what idea you come up with to study the system, I’ll be able to come up with a way to make it fundamentally unstudiable. That’s what’s great about fiction - we’re not limited by the assumptions we have to make in real science.
It also Gary Stu’s the hell out of Harry, like even more so. The only thing I love about that book, and it’s spiritual sequal, is the fact that Hermione is, correctly, in Ravenclaw.
Asset prices reflect all the information that everyone knows about the asset. So wands are not efficiently priced because the wand chooses the owner, but robes are generally fungible so should be priced efficiently
I only saw the first and it already made me wonder “How do they tell which animals are magical and should be hidden from the muggles?”, like how would muggles knowing about the blast-ended skrewts or that platipus-like think lead them to know about the wizarding world?
I only like the first three Harry Potter books, when Scabbers goes, so does the book having any credibility it seems.
People don’t like Harry Potter for the story, so when it tries too be serious it falls apart. The part of Harry Potter people enjoy is the whimsy of the wizarding world, that’s it.
For me it’s always the unexplained power nerfing that authors do just to advance the plot.
Harry Potter in the first 3 books was fearless, he literally took on voldemort with his bare hands.
Then when the dumbass plan with the port key cup happens, he just stands there like an idiot as the rat dude kills Cedric and revives Voldemort as if both he and Cedric don’t have wands that allow them to cast spells.
I mean they could have maybe had like 20 wizards camping the graveyard to make escaping impossible, but nah they really tried to make the coward rat guy seem like he was now somehow more capable than all of voldemort’s previously defeated plans combined.
Flashes back to Tails being scared of Chaos Zero despite having defeated Chaos 4 before
You don’t speak for all people. No doubt what you said is true for some. My favorite books were 4 and 5.
Book 4 is great, but honestly, what is there to like about book 5? Nothing fucking happens in the entire thing. In my opinion it has always been the absolute worst of the series.
I bailed on the series halfway through book 5. That was a slog.
100% agree. It’s just a huge slog of everything being terrible for Harry for the whole book. Absolutely the worst in the series.
6 and 7 for me. It got dark in a good way
Half blood prince was my favorite
same
If magic interferes and influences electricity, which means it can be measured, analyzed and manipulated as a new form of energy.
To cover up magic on all “fronts” would be impossible by today’s standards. Harry Potter would never be as successful nower days as it was. Simply because the smartphone enters the life’s of humans as essential device very early in life.
Kind of hard to switch off all those thoughts.
Nowadays* one word.
Disagree. My kids love Harry Potter.
Unless it does so unpredictably / always exactly the way you don’t want it to. It’s magic after all.
If some wizards of quantum mechanics can write math for… whatever quantum mechanics is… I think there could be a way or two, to manipulate magic by science.
Easiest explanation is: there is no electricity in hogwarts and wizards don’t have electricians nor electricity generation, so “electricity doesn’t work in hogwarts”.
If magic was electromagnetic or at least can be measured by effects that it has wizards would have been found during 20th century by general populace.
The easiest explanation is that it’s magic and we’re all muggles and therefore incapable of understanding it.
Something, something, magi-chlorians
There is nothing in the books that says that people without magic can’t understand it? I think there was a plot point in 4 or 5 book where harry is on trial for using some spell to scare away dementors, and his neighboor testifies that he really did it and people don’t believe her cause she doesn’t have magic. But that’s only seeing magical creatures, what stops anyone from understanding it exactly? They do repeatable things that return repeatable results, pretty understandable.
the neighbor is a squib, not a muggle
What’s the difference? There is no half magical state, you either can do magic or can’t.
There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic. So that is a new physical law in disguise. An especially interesting one that interacts with certain intelligence (like mind reading of the user, by the user of other users, memory extraction and manifestation in sentient beings).
Sentient Electromagimagnetic field confirmed?
Or that can be a bullshit by uninformed wizards with superiority complex, they have like 5 years of mandatory education. And most don’t interact with anyone but magical people in their enclaves.
And are getting mamed and inbred out of tradition in a school designed to teach them survival skills in a world the muggles already made their own.
Significant Digits is an HPMOR sequel-fanfic that toys with these kinds of ideas.
Magic could operate differently from electromagnetism, but still interfere, such as with quantum effects. Inference doesn’t need to go both ways.
I thought about writing a magic setting with fairly hard justification for magic, and in my world, you’d control individual atoms and combine them to get the effects you want. You’d do this by gaining the respect of or instilling fear into atoms so they’d do your bidding. Spoken spells are more like tricks taught to dogs than having any power of their own, and the power derives from the respect or fear the atoms have for the caster. This explains why some wizards/witches are more powerful than others, and why learning isn’t necessarily the best way to get more powerful. The strongest magic users in my world spend a lot of time meditating, meaning communing with the target group of atoms.
The inner workings of atoms is poorly understood, so I think there’s room to insert some form of sentience.
Getting your magical SI units right could help you balance the powers. I like the idea of “Respecto Atomum”
How much respect is needed for no more movement at all (0°K) in 1m^3?
I don’t think there’s actually any such mention. There’s several mentions about how “muggle technology doesn’t work in the Hogwarts grounds”, but there’s no mention of electronics going haywire when someone is doing magic outside of hogwarts, imo?
Please do correct me if I just remember wrong.
And even just turning out lights is something that is apparently not that simple to do. Aside from Peruvian instant darkness powder — which doesn’t exactly snuff out lights, but covers them in darkness — the only thing to affect lights is Dumbledore’s deluminator. And he’s a magical genius.
My point being even turning off the lights is challenging. Muggle tech may not work in Hogwarts but I don’t recall any mention of magic fucking up tech unless it’s magic specifically meant to fuck up tech. Hogwarts is just like such a protracted and magical place that “muggle tech doesn’t work” but even that’s kind of a silly overarching statement that’s easy to challenge. Plumbing is technically muggle tech. It works. Wouldn’t ball point pens work as well? I imagine those would be pretty highly valued commodities. I think muggle borns could easily flog biros for at least a galleon a piece. Which the muggleborn could then go and exchange for the value of the gold, getting probably hundreds of pound for a galleon.
Endless money glitch.
But yeah at least pens would work I’d argue. Something like calculators is easy to see being fucked by some ambient magic fields, but pens? Nah.
Afaik the camera used in the first movie is analogue… Holy Shit, I have to read this before I can answer.
Oh youre going by quotes from movies yeah I don’t remember those as well as the books but I think my argument stands and the first comments there seem to corroborate
Sounds like someone needs to read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”.
…that would also be true if it didn’t interact with electricity.
That’s not given. Many magic systems are inherently unexplainable. Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow. A bunch of stories use a similar explanation (replace monotheistic god with primal forces/strands of fate/eldritch gods).
And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.
That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study. Is there a correlation between particular prayers and miracles? Are particular mental states helpful? Do various traits make someone more or less likely to produce a miracle? Are there drugs that affect it? What are the limits to a miracle? Are there patterns in the time intervals between miracles? And so on, and so forth. A world with such a magic system, if you want it to be realistic, should have had an entire history of people studying these and many other things.
Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.
It might be technically studiable in the way you describe, but there’s no requirement for consistency of any kind. My statement was extra-universal, so you can’t assume that it’s discoverable intra-universally. If the result of your study is “this is behaving in completely inconsistent and random ways”, you have technically studied it, but you haven’t measured or analyzed it in any way.
You can just apply your approach to our universe. People have spent centuries attempting to measure and analyze miracles. Would you say that we have analyzed and studied the magic system by which the christian god works?
You’re still making assumptions about the magic system. Take for example the Solphons from “The Dark Forest” - super-smart subatomic machines that change the laws of physics to prevent advances in fundamental physics. Now imagine that they weren’t designed by an alien race, but instead by an extra-universal god, and there was no way to ever arrive at this knowledge (since no instruments for measuring etc. can ever be developed).
Suddenly you have a magic system that is fundamentally unstudiable, no matter the amount of humans with “common sense or intelligence”. No matter what idea you come up with to study the system, I’ll be able to come up with a way to make it fundamentally unstudiable. That’s what’s great about fiction - we’re not limited by the assumptions we have to make in real science.
HPMOR does a great job of making Harry Potter’s world rational and believable
http://hpmor.com/
It also Gary Stu’s the hell out of Harry, like even more so. The only thing I love about that book, and it’s spiritual sequal, is the fact that Hermione is, correctly, in Ravenclaw.
From a quick search, what I understand from your comment is that the book makes Harry flawless, is that right ?
Exactly. Basically a male “Mary Sue” character.
With Ayn Rand overtones
I don’t know this reference either, but will look it up. From the context though I think I understand the gist of it. Thanks
This is why we invented the Internet
I was sold at Efficient Market Hypothesis
I’m sorry I don’t understand
Asset prices reflect all the information that everyone knows about the asset. So wands are not efficiently priced because the wand chooses the owner, but robes are generally fungible so should be priced efficiently
Same with Fantastic Beasts, first one was just a whimsical adventure of Newt, second one tried to be serious and was a steaming pile of 💩
I only saw the first and it already made me wonder “How do they tell which animals are magical and should be hidden from the muggles?”, like how would muggles knowing about the blast-ended skrewts or that platipus-like think lead them to know about the wizarding world?
Eh, the first one also tried to have a serious subplot, and that subplot also sucked enough ass to make the climax of the film flop.