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.
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