Dumbledore doesn’t give a straight answer when Harry asks if more than one time turner can be used to get more than 30 hours.
There was another slight pause, during which Harry went on smiling. He was a little apprehensive, actually a lot apprehensive, but once it had become clear that Dumbledore was deliberately messing with him, something within him absolutely refused to sit and take it like a defenseless lump.
“I’m afraid Time doesn’t like being stretched out too much,” said Dumbledore after the slight pause, “and yet we ourselves seem to be a little too large for it, and so it’s a constant struggle to fit our lives into Time.”
On the other hand, we may infer that thirty hours is the limit from e.g. Amelia Bones’ behavior in the Azkaban arc:
“I’ll check if we have anything from six hours forward,” said the voice of Madam Bones, “if so they wouldn’t have told me, but I’ll have them tell you. Do you have anything you want to tell me, Albus? Which of those two possibilities is it looking like?”
That’s just the usual limit on information not traveling more than six wall-clock hours back in time, total. It doesn’t say or imply that you can’t loop yourself more than six times within a small stretch of wall-time.
Actually, if you can loop yourself more than six times at any small stretch of wall-time then you can get more than 30 subjective hours in one 24 wall-time day.
But it’s implied you can’t actually do that, which is why I think no more than 6 copies at any given time.
Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.
At any rate, the general limiting principle is that information cannot travel more than 6 hours backwards, Which I think means that when you draw a graph of a person using time-turners where you represent her using an arrow (going right for positive time, and left in 1h jumps for time-turner use), Then you can’t have more than 6 hours of left-arrow in any given 24h wall-time section.
Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.
There was another pause, and then Madam Bones’s voice said, “I have information which I learned four hours into the future, Albus. Do you still want it?”
Albus paused -
(weighing, Minerva knew, the possibility that he might want to go back more than two hours from this instant; for you couldn’t send information further back in time than six hours, not through any chain of Time-Turners)
Didn’t Harry ask Dumbledore if it’s possible to get more than 30 hours in a day using multiple time-turners and getting a negative answer?
I’m not sure he got a plainly stated negative answer. Can someone look that up?
Dumbledore doesn’t give a straight answer when Harry asks if more than one time turner can be used to get more than 30 hours.
On the other hand, we may infer that thirty hours is the limit from e.g. Amelia Bones’ behavior in the Azkaban arc:
That’s just the usual limit on information not traveling more than six wall-clock hours back in time, total. It doesn’t say or imply that you can’t loop yourself more than six times within a small stretch of wall-time.
Actually, if you can loop yourself more than six times at any small stretch of wall-time then you can get more than 30 subjective hours in one 24 wall-time day.
But it’s implied you can’t actually do that, which is why I think no more than 6 copies at any given time. Plus, if it were possible you could basically use any one day as a stopping point groundhog-day style in which you can (for example) brute-force read the entire Hogwarts library.
At any rate, the general limiting principle is that information cannot travel more than 6 hours backwards, Which I think means that when you draw a graph of a person using time-turners where you represent her using an arrow (going right for positive time, and left in 1h jumps for time-turner use), Then you can’t have more than 6 hours of left-arrow in any given 24h wall-time section.
That would get rather crowded.
McGonagall thinks so, at least: