I never finished the series. Gave up after The [del]Bloody Neverending[/del] Goblet of [del]Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ and all the Saints how the fuck long is this sonofabitch?[/del] Fire. Seriously, nearly 700 pages, and basically nothing happens for like 500 of them? I’ve read War and Peace, hated it, and it still felt shorter than Goblet of Fire.
Her best was one of the shortest, Prisoner of Azkaban. Editor was on his game for that one.
Anyway, with the caveat that I’m not the biggest fan of hers, the way magic works in the Potterverse seems to be that anything can be made up in quo and the results are derived ex culo. I remember hearing people raving about “how deep” the world was, and how “interesting” the magic system was, before I actually read any of them.
I read the first couple of books and was like, “Really? She’s already contradicting herself and obviously making shit up as she goes.” NTTAWWT, if you like reading stuff like that, but the straight-up acid-trippy “rules” of Xanth, written by the beloved perennial pervert and hack Piers Anthony are more consistent. You don’t usually hear people gushing about his magic system.
The oddest thing is the part about declaring, out loud, the spell you’re casting before you cast it, and then the other person, politely, failing to react . It’d be like a gunfighter yelling, “I’m going to shoot at you now!” before drawing and firing. Somewhere around “going to” the other guy’s just going to shoot him.
Seriously, this. There’s a youtube series, How it Should Have Ended, and they do a treatment of Harry Potter. Basically, Snape rewinds that time machine thingy until he can go and kill Tom Riddle when he’s a little kid.
Apparently witches and wizards have the innate ability to generate raw magic- minors doing magic inadvertedly for example. But getting magic to do precisely what you want it to is the problem. The dependency on wands for example, to focus and direct magical ability. Practical magic isn’t so much a science in the HP universe as it’s an art, combined with some stuff people stumbled across by luck. I would guess that most magical technique is simply a large list of stuff people tried that didn’t blow up in their face
At one point, they’re taught how to do non-verbal spells, which are harder, so obviously it can be done. They just have to learn them verbally first.
There’s actually a law (a law of physics, not just someone made a law) that the further you go back in time, the more likely it will be that you age yourself, etc etc. And then people who’ve tryed it often end up causing the Butterfly Effect. Rowling herself said she actually introducing the Time Turners, so she had them all destroyed in Book 5.
Although it would have to be someone well before the founders of Hogwarts.
But someone, back in the distant past, invented “magic.”
The real magic must be orders of magnitude more powerful, and more complex. Utterly out of reach for virtually everyone, in the same way that writing machine code is utterly out of reach for virtually every computer user.
So someone came along and used this fundamental, base magic to write a huge “listener” magic spell. Whenever someone moves their wand in the right way and says the words “Wingardium leviosa,” the listener spell triggers the fundamental magic to apply force to the object , and it levitates.
In much the same way that a computer listens for events like a mouse click, or a mouseover, and triggers certain events as a result.
Basically, I argue that the only way Pottermagic makes sense is if it represents a designed, intentional abstraction layer between the user and “real” magic. In the distant past, a wizard, or group of wizards of immense power, sat down and designed the extant magical system…wrote spells, etc… and ‘cast’ them into permanency.
Anyone trying to suss out why ‘leviosa’ works and ‘leviosuh’ does not by reasoning that a direct physical law is in play will be thus stymied. You may as well ask why DataExtensionObject has some effect in C# but DataExpansionObject does not. One works and one doesn’t because that’s how it’s designed.
That’s the way magic works for wizards in Dungeons & Dragons. Before a wizard can wave their hands and say the magic words to cast a spell, he has to first prepare the spell in his mind by studying the magical writing in his spellbook. It’s canonical that magical writing was discovered, not invented; it also requires costly material components to create. You couldn’t just put a spellbook page on a Xerox machine and use the copy to prepare spells, for instance.
So, the way I figure it, magical writing in D&D is, in fact, a kind of magical computer code. Higher-level spells require the wizard to have more intelligence to be able to cast them, just as a more demanding program needs more RAM and CPU speed to run.
But why does magical writing require costly inks to create? Why couldn’t you Xerox a spellbook? I figure it’s not simple two-dimensional characters, but is rather a complex series of three-dimensional patterns that serve as a kind of magical circuit. When a wizard prepares a spell, he creates a resonance between his own magic and the patterns in the spellbook, sort of like sending out a radio signal to an RFID tag.
Since Harry Potter wizards have none of this, Bricker’s theory of HP magic makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard about it. It even explains the “Sectumsempra problem”, where Harry can cast the Sectumsempra spell without even knowing what it does.
I wonder what would happen if Harry pointed his wand at Voldemort and said, “Confutatis maledictis flammis acribus addictis!”
I don’t know if it will ever actually show up in Methods of Rationality, but what you describe is pretty much Harry’s theory, too.
There’s even a cynical fanfic of the HPMOR fanfic called “Hacking the Source of Magic” that has Harry find the source of all magic and “root” it like a computer. Unfortunately, the device is a “literal genie.”
Note, as it says, it spoils up to chapter 101 of HPMOR, including a major, major plot point. In fact, it is Harry’s attempt to fix that plot point that causes the ending. The author claims it won’t make sense without reading the fanfic, but I think you could put it together pretty well. The only thing that you might not figure out until you read past the first few chapters of HtSoM is the aforementioned major plot point spoiler that
Hermione is dead at this point in the story, and Harry has very likely cast a freezing spell and transfigured her body into some item on his person to try and preserve it long enough to restore her to life.
This theory is particularly interesting if you think of the Rick Cook series of books starting with Wizard’s Bane, in which a programmer is called to another dimension where magic is real. He figures out that he can “code” magic, thereby doing things other wizards can’t, and also making is possible for non-magical people to execute magical scripts.
So… Harry Potter just lives 10,000 years after Wiz Zumwalt coded a world-wide abstraction layer that simultaneously makes magic easier and safer. The abstraction layer makes it easier to cast some spells and can put safety limits on magic so that people can’t create fresh-water seas and the like.
Slight hijack: am I the only who one just could not get into Methods of Rationality? I found it incredibly pretentious, boring, and agenda-driven. Everyone keeps raving about it, but I’m like, tl,dr. I felt like I was reading Ayn Rand again.
If all you needed was a wand, then anyone could do magic. But magic ability seems to be genetic. So clearly there’s some genetic marker that allows you to use the interface, and the wand is an extra bit that just gives you better control.
I’d also guess that the interface is mentally controlled rather than vocally controlled. Too often mental components, such as emotion, desire, or willpower are needed to cast spells. Actually speaking the words and doing the actions just makes the mental signal stronger, since it’s being reinforced by external senses.
You know, the same way saying something out loud occupies your mind more than just thinking it.
Corollary: If your working time machine has potentially deadly side effects that make you afraid to ever use it, don’t be afraid to give it to a minor child.
