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. He yells “Screw this, I’m done!”, collapses on the floor, and falls asleep.
...
At 5:40, the original Harry goes to his room. He has done no time traveling today, and has no tally marks on his arm.
Original Harry locates his trunk and his conductor’s hat.
At 5:45, Original Harry brings his trunk and hat to the hallway with a 6PM to 5PM Express sign.
At 5:50, Original Harry puts on his conductor’s hat. Harry—now Conductor Harry—opens the trunk, steps aside, and yells “All aboard the 6PM to 5PM Express!. Please go to your assigned seat.”
Hundreds of invisible Harrys silently climb into the trunk. Each Harry counts the tallies on his arm and sits in the corresponding seat.
At 5:59, conductor Harry yells “Last Call for the 6PM to 5PM Express!”
At 6:00, conductor Harry closes his trunk. He picks up his trunk, and flips his time-turner.
Using this method, Harry can get as much time as he wants to study obliviation, transfigure large objects, or anything else, all with a single twist of his time turner. That’s more than enough time to learn to obliviate yourself (and maybe the Weasley) and fake Hermione’s death.
Somewhat-credible conjecture: It is not possible for one Time-Turner to transport another through time. So when conductor Harry, carrying his trunk supposedly full of passenger Harries (Harrys?), flips his Time-Turner … something bad happens. Maybe the others get left behind somehow, or the Time-Turner just doesn’t work, or the universe ends, or something. Consequence: at least in any consistent branch of the universe, Harry fails to get his army of copies.
Can’t this be solved by having conductor Harry pass his Time-Turner to smelly Harry around 5:30 PM? Then none of the in-between Potters actually have Time-Turners.
I don’t think so; he needs to use it himself at 6pm to transport everyone back, and smelly Harry mustn’t go back himself. [EDITED to add: oops, I’m a twit; it looks like this works. So if this hack isn’t viable in the MoRverse, it must be for some other reason, perhaps one of the ones below.]
My brain’s fuzzy enough that I’m not confident there isn’t some patch along those lines, though; if it turns out that there is, an alternative (which I can’t rule out being already refuted by something in canon or HPMOR that I’ve forgotten) would be that a Time-Turner can transport at most one living person.
[EDITED to add: Actually there’s an obviously better one, which is pretty clearly canonical and MoRonical (er, maybe that’s not the best term): the 6-hour restriction is not per Time-Turner but per person. If that’s “no more than 6 hours of time travel in any subjective 24 hours” rather than, or in addition to, “no further back than 6 hours”, then as soon as Harry has a sixth-generation copy in his trunk, something bad happens, hence there is no consistent universe in which he gets a time-travelling army of size bigger than that.]
Of course another possibility is that (in the MoRverse and/or the Rowlingverse) this sort of hack is very much possible, but it seems like the sort of thing that would have been exploited to hell and back by ingenious folks like Voldemort and Dumbledore, so you probably get a more coherent fictional universe if there’s some simple principle that prevents it.
The loop works because the conductor Harry that uses the Time-Turner at 6 PM is a younger version of the conductor Harry at 5 PM. Conductor Harry at 5:30 PM is going to go sit in the trunk at 6 PM, so he has no further need of the Time-Turner.
I think the most elegant formulation of a restriction that would prevent this (as well as all the things explicitly prevented in HPMoR) is that no path along which information or matter travels can stretch more than 30 hours per 24 hours.
I’d say yes (until the 24 hours run out and the pebble stops being time-stretched).
Similarly, if you go back 6 hours in time and, say, cast a spell that creates fireworks visible from a large distance, you’ve just prevented everyone within that radius from using a Time-Turner.
Finally, I’m mostly sure that the incredibly-small-scale changes caused by simply going back in time 6 hours propagate quickly enough that only one person on Earth can use a Time-Turner on any given day.
So yeah, there’s a bit of a problem here. Presumably this is one of those “it works how Merlin would have expected it to work” things.
Whether this method works or not is up to the GM; the as-stated rule is that “information cannot go back more than six hours in time, using any combination of Time-Turners”, which would allow this, but it’s possible that anything which results in someone having more than 30 hours to a day is also bad. Granted, the hypothesis that 6 hours is the universe simulator’s buffer size would suggest that this works.
It’s a bit scary that if this scheme fails, there’s no clean way for it to fail. In the very simplest case—you go back in time 6 hours and then try to go back in time 1 more hour—presumably the Time-Turner just doesn’t work and nothing happens. Here, that outcome is not self-consistent: there’s only one spin of the Time-Turner, and if it fails then there are no multiple Harry Potters so there is no reason for it to fail.
So if this scheme goes against the Time-Turner constraints, the only consistent outcome is that something unspecified happens to one of the first 6 Harry Potters to prevent them from getting back into the trunk. And summoning unspecified obstacles by the power of Time-Turner consistency seems like a really bad idea.
To fix this, we could have each Harry Potter toss a 100-sided die and leave the loop on a 1 being rolled; then run this algorithm several times. It’s likely that spontaneous catastrophic failure has a probability much less than 1%, so the most likely consistent loop assuming this scheme doesn’t work is one in which Harry rolls a 1 early on, which is very unlikely to happen assuming this scheme does work. So if several trials of this algorithm consistently keep ending after 1-6 repetitions, then it’s almost certain that the universe doesn’t like it.
Well, he can get as much time as he wants in 40 minute intervals with no breaks in between. Smelly Harry must have been awake at least 1 hour per mark on his arm, unless he has at some point mastered Polyphasic sleep (which is completely contrary to his aberrant sleep cycles as mentioned previously) he is going to be significantly diminished in terms of mental acuity after a mere 24 or so cycles. He would need to spend a few cycles eating. After subjective days without sleep he should be moving into hallucination territory, barring some kind of magical aid. His “useful time” is only between 5:10-5:50 on each cycle, at other times he will be boarding or leaving the express.
It’s a moderately good hack, but it isn’t of infinite versatility, barring the addition of a bit more cheating to get around the sleep/food problems.
It’s a moderately good hack, but it isn’t of infinite versatility, barring the addition of a bit more cheating to get around the sleep/food problems.
I think we can let Harry sleep. For example
Instead of drawing a tally mark on his arm, Harry punches a hole in a ticket.
Original Harry doesn’t set up chairs in seats 11-20. Instead, he puts a rolling hospital stretcher where chair 11 would go, and leaves 9 empty spots where chairs 12-20 would go. The rolling stretcher has pillows, an empty sleeping bag, and a slot into which you can place a ticket.
When Original Harry moves the trunk to the hallway, he finds 9 stretchers lined up against the wall. Every stretcher has a ticket, and the tickets have 12, 13, 14… 20 hole punches. The stretcher are heavy, like a person is sleeping inside the sleeping bag. Original Harry moves these 9 stretchers into the 9 empty spots he blocked out earlier.
Original Harry puts on his conductors hat and waits for passengers. One of the passengers is Tired Harry, whose ticket has 11 punches. Tired Harry places his ticket into the slot on empty stretcher, climbs into the empty sleeping bag, and goes to sleep. Now all 10 stretchers have ticketed Sleeping Harrys.
On arrival at 5:00, Conductor Harry adds a punch to the ticket of all 10 stretchers. He removes the 10 stretchers from the trunk, and lines the first 9 up against the wall. The last stretcher, with 21 holes punched in its ticket, Conductor Harry stashes in the Great Hall.
At 5:30ish, in the Great Hall, a newly Refreshed Harry wakes up. He gets out of his sleeping bag, picks up his ticket, and continues the day.
The method above might not work if we maintain a fixed past.
You see it can be compared to another similar situation.
Harry an hour (6 to 5 pm) in past and finds 4 time tuners with 4, 3, 2, 1 hours left.
Now harry has used all the five time tuners (but not all of their remaining hours) , done his work in the past and the time move to 5 again. here harry will have to leave 4 time tuners for another future harry to pick up. If we are preserving the past then the four time tuners should have the time left that the original time tuners had i.e.. 4, 3, 2, 1.
So you see even when harry uses these 4 extra time tuner he still will be unable to use it them to get back more than 6 hours in past.
Now this can be scaled to 1000 time tuners or 1000 harries with time tuners it would make no difference in the amount of time that can be transversed in past by using time tuner.
Summary :- Even if you find “n” more time turners once you go in the past, you would not be able to use them to go more then 6 hours in past because to preserve past you will have to leave “n” time tuners (after their use), thus have to leave as much time in them as you potentially gained earlier.
Sorry for grammar, spelling mistake, complicated language etc. I am bad at languages.
The method above might not work if we maintain a fixed past.
You see it can be compared to another similar situation.
Harry an hour (6 to 5 pm) in past and finds there 4 time tuners with 4, 3, 2, 1 hours left.
Now harry has used all the five time tuners (but not all of their remaining hours) , done his work in the past and the time move to 5 again. here harry will have to leave 4 time tuners for another future harry to pick up. If we are preserving the past then the four time tuners should have the time left that the original time tuners had i.e.. 4, 3, 2, 1.
So you see even when harry uses these 4 extra time tuner he still will be unable to use it them to get back more than 6 hours in past.
Now this can be scaled to 1000 time tuners or 1000 harries with time tuners it would make no difference in the amount of time that can be transversed in past by using time tuner.
Summary :- Even if you find “n” more time turners once you go in the past, you would not be able to use them to go more then 6 hours in past because to preserve past you will have to leave “n” time tuners (after their use), thus have to leave as much time in them as you potentially gained earlier.
Sorry for grammar, spelling mistake, complicated language etc. I am bad at languages.
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. He yells “Screw this, I’m done!”, collapses on the floor, and falls asleep.
...
At 5:40, the original Harry goes to his room. He has done no time traveling today, and has no tally marks on his arm.
Original Harry locates his trunk and his conductor’s hat.
At 5:45, Original Harry brings his trunk and hat to the hallway with a 6PM to 5PM Express sign.
At 5:50, Original Harry puts on his conductor’s hat. Harry—now Conductor Harry—opens the trunk, steps aside, and yells “All aboard the 6PM to 5PM Express!. Please go to your assigned seat.”
Hundreds of invisible Harrys silently climb into the trunk. Each Harry counts the tallies on his arm and sits in the corresponding seat.
At 5:59, conductor Harry yells “Last Call for the 6PM to 5PM Express!”
At 6:00, conductor Harry closes his trunk. He picks up his trunk, and flips his time-turner.
Using this method, Harry can get as much time as he wants to study obliviation, transfigure large objects, or anything else, all with a single twist of his time turner. That’s more than enough time to learn to obliviate yourself (and maybe the Weasley) and fake Hermione’s death.
Somewhat-credible conjecture: It is not possible for one Time-Turner to transport another through time. So when conductor Harry, carrying his trunk supposedly full of passenger Harries (Harrys?), flips his Time-Turner … something bad happens. Maybe the others get left behind somehow, or the Time-Turner just doesn’t work, or the universe ends, or something. Consequence: at least in any consistent branch of the universe, Harry fails to get his army of copies.
Can’t this be solved by having conductor Harry pass his Time-Turner to smelly Harry around 5:30 PM? Then none of the in-between Potters actually have Time-Turners.
I don’t think so; he needs to use it himself at 6pm to transport everyone back, and smelly Harry mustn’t go back himself. [EDITED to add: oops, I’m a twit; it looks like this works. So if this hack isn’t viable in the MoRverse, it must be for some other reason, perhaps one of the ones below.]
My brain’s fuzzy enough that I’m not confident there isn’t some patch along those lines, though; if it turns out that there is, an alternative (which I can’t rule out being already refuted by something in canon or HPMOR that I’ve forgotten) would be that a Time-Turner can transport at most one living person.
[EDITED to add: Actually there’s an obviously better one, which is pretty clearly canonical and MoRonical (er, maybe that’s not the best term): the 6-hour restriction is not per Time-Turner but per person. If that’s “no more than 6 hours of time travel in any subjective 24 hours” rather than, or in addition to, “no further back than 6 hours”, then as soon as Harry has a sixth-generation copy in his trunk, something bad happens, hence there is no consistent universe in which he gets a time-travelling army of size bigger than that.]
Of course another possibility is that (in the MoRverse and/or the Rowlingverse) this sort of hack is very much possible, but it seems like the sort of thing that would have been exploited to hell and back by ingenious folks like Voldemort and Dumbledore, so you probably get a more coherent fictional universe if there’s some simple principle that prevents it.
The loop works because the conductor Harry that uses the Time-Turner at 6 PM is a younger version of the conductor Harry at 5 PM. Conductor Harry at 5:30 PM is going to go sit in the trunk at 6 PM, so he has no further need of the Time-Turner.
I think the most elegant formulation of a restriction that would prevent this (as well as all the things explicitly prevented in HPMoR) is that no path along which information or matter travels can stretch more than 30 hours per 24 hours.
So, you could put a 6-hour stretched pebble in someone’s pocket, and they wouldn’t be able to use a Time-Turner?
I’d say yes (until the 24 hours run out and the pebble stops being time-stretched).
Similarly, if you go back 6 hours in time and, say, cast a spell that creates fireworks visible from a large distance, you’ve just prevented everyone within that radius from using a Time-Turner.
Finally, I’m mostly sure that the incredibly-small-scale changes caused by simply going back in time 6 hours propagate quickly enough that only one person on Earth can use a Time-Turner on any given day.
So yeah, there’s a bit of a problem here. Presumably this is one of those “it works how Merlin would have expected it to work” things.
hey
Edited for objection: Harry stashes the Time-turner in the Great Hall (for expository reasons).
Whether this method works or not is up to the GM; the as-stated rule is that “information cannot go back more than six hours in time, using any combination of Time-Turners”, which would allow this, but it’s possible that anything which results in someone having more than 30 hours to a day is also bad. Granted, the hypothesis that 6 hours is the universe simulator’s buffer size would suggest that this works.
It’s a bit scary that if this scheme fails, there’s no clean way for it to fail. In the very simplest case—you go back in time 6 hours and then try to go back in time 1 more hour—presumably the Time-Turner just doesn’t work and nothing happens. Here, that outcome is not self-consistent: there’s only one spin of the Time-Turner, and if it fails then there are no multiple Harry Potters so there is no reason for it to fail.
So if this scheme goes against the Time-Turner constraints, the only consistent outcome is that something unspecified happens to one of the first 6 Harry Potters to prevent them from getting back into the trunk. And summoning unspecified obstacles by the power of Time-Turner consistency seems like a really bad idea.
To fix this, we could have each Harry Potter toss a 100-sided die and leave the loop on a 1 being rolled; then run this algorithm several times. It’s likely that spontaneous catastrophic failure has a probability much less than 1%, so the most likely consistent loop assuming this scheme doesn’t work is one in which Harry rolls a 1 early on, which is very unlikely to happen assuming this scheme does work. So if several trials of this algorithm consistently keep ending after 1-6 repetitions, then it’s almost certain that the universe doesn’t like it.
Well, he can get as much time as he wants in 40 minute intervals with no breaks in between. Smelly Harry must have been awake at least 1 hour per mark on his arm, unless he has at some point mastered Polyphasic sleep (which is completely contrary to his aberrant sleep cycles as mentioned previously) he is going to be significantly diminished in terms of mental acuity after a mere 24 or so cycles. He would need to spend a few cycles eating. After subjective days without sleep he should be moving into hallucination territory, barring some kind of magical aid. His “useful time” is only between 5:10-5:50 on each cycle, at other times he will be boarding or leaving the express.
It’s a moderately good hack, but it isn’t of infinite versatility, barring the addition of a bit more cheating to get around the sleep/food problems.
I think we can let Harry sleep. For example
Instead of drawing a tally mark on his arm, Harry punches a hole in a ticket.
Original Harry doesn’t set up chairs in seats 11-20. Instead, he puts a rolling hospital stretcher where chair 11 would go, and leaves 9 empty spots where chairs 12-20 would go. The rolling stretcher has pillows, an empty sleeping bag, and a slot into which you can place a ticket.
When Original Harry moves the trunk to the hallway, he finds 9 stretchers lined up against the wall. Every stretcher has a ticket, and the tickets have 12, 13, 14… 20 hole punches. The stretcher are heavy, like a person is sleeping inside the sleeping bag. Original Harry moves these 9 stretchers into the 9 empty spots he blocked out earlier.
Original Harry puts on his conductors hat and waits for passengers. One of the passengers is Tired Harry, whose ticket has 11 punches. Tired Harry places his ticket into the slot on empty stretcher, climbs into the empty sleeping bag, and goes to sleep. Now all 10 stretchers have ticketed Sleeping Harrys.
On arrival at 5:00, Conductor Harry adds a punch to the ticket of all 10 stretchers. He removes the 10 stretchers from the trunk, and lines the first 9 up against the wall. The last stretcher, with 21 holes punched in its ticket, Conductor Harry stashes in the Great Hall.
At 5:30ish, in the Great Hall, a newly Refreshed Harry wakes up. He gets out of his sleeping bag, picks up his ticket, and continues the day.
The method above might not work if we maintain a fixed past.
You see it can be compared to another similar situation.
Harry an hour (6 to 5 pm) in past and finds 4 time tuners with 4, 3, 2, 1 hours left.
Now harry has used all the five time tuners (but not all of their remaining hours) , done his work in the past and the time move to 5 again. here harry will have to leave 4 time tuners for another future harry to pick up. If we are preserving the past then the four time tuners should have the time left that the original time tuners had i.e.. 4, 3, 2, 1.
So you see even when harry uses these 4 extra time tuner he still will be unable to use it them to get back more than 6 hours in past.
Now this can be scaled to 1000 time tuners or 1000 harries with time tuners it would make no difference in the amount of time that can be transversed in past by using time tuner.
Summary :- Even if you find “n” more time turners once you go in the past, you would not be able to use them to go more then 6 hours in past because to preserve past you will have to leave “n” time tuners (after their use), thus have to leave as much time in them as you potentially gained earlier.
Sorry for grammar, spelling mistake, complicated language etc. I am bad at languages.
The method above might not work if we maintain a fixed past.
You see it can be compared to another similar situation.
Harry an hour (6 to 5 pm) in past and finds there 4 time tuners with 4, 3, 2, 1 hours left.
Now harry has used all the five time tuners (but not all of their remaining hours) , done his work in the past and the time move to 5 again. here harry will have to leave 4 time tuners for another future harry to pick up. If we are preserving the past then the four time tuners should have the time left that the original time tuners had i.e.. 4, 3, 2, 1.
So you see even when harry uses these 4 extra time tuner he still will be unable to use it them to get back more than 6 hours in past.
Now this can be scaled to 1000 time tuners or 1000 harries with time tuners it would make no difference in the amount of time that can be transversed in past by using time tuner.
Summary :- Even if you find “n” more time turners once you go in the past, you would not be able to use them to go more then 6 hours in past because to preserve past you will have to leave “n” time tuners (after their use), thus have to leave as much time in them as you potentially gained earlier.
Sorry for grammar, spelling mistake, complicated language etc. I am bad at languages.