You can make copies of books and of software CDs very cheaply. Given a law of conservation, it can’t be the case that destroying (sacrificing) a cheap copy would gain you powerful results, or else you could generate infinite resources very quickly (and wizards would realize this).
Maybe destroying the last extant copy of a software would achieve the effect. One wonders what great magic was fueled by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
True, using copies to achieve that kind of power doesn’t seem to make much sense—the law even says that you can get as much… let’s call it “work” out of the ingredient as was “invested”. It’s true that there isn’t much of an investment of resources in copies.
So, forget the copies, let’s use the originals.
For example, could you take Einstein’s original notes/notebooks(copying them beforehand, of course, so that you don’t lose information), liquefy them into a Scientific Breakthrough Potion and use that Potion to quickly figure another brilliant breakthrough? That’s the kind of thing I’m wondering about.
If this were the case, could Hermione sacrifice the paper marked 42 for a Potion of Humanism?
Or if Harry wrote down his thesis on Partial Transfiguration, Hermione could make a potion from that (without reading it), and write down whatever discovery she made under the influence of the Breaking the Laws of Magic Potion, which Harry could then use to make a potion...
No, because the notebooks do not “contain” the work Einstein did, Einstein’s brain contains it. So you’d need the living brain of a scientist as brilliant as Einstein. Which may not be that difficult; Einstein was good but he was also lucky—he glommed onto exactly the right Big Problem at exactly the right time. It’s quite possible that there are any number of equally-brilliant scientists alive today who just happened never to find their Big Problem. The point remains, however, that paper and notebooks are not sufficient, you need the brain which actually contains the comprehension.
Moreover, since magic works by sensible-to-humans laws in the MoRverse, even if you copied the brain you’d have to use the original in the potion, and you only have one of those. The reason being, the copy hasn’t “done the work” even though it contains the comprehension; and you can only get back out the work that was put in. This of course makes no sense, information should be information, but the laws of magic were apparently designed by a human.
So you’d need the living brain of a scientist as brilliant as Einstein.
Not necessary living. And Einstein’s brain just happens to be preserved.
In fact, it sounds very much like people quarreled over magical ingridients:
Harvey then removed, weighted and dissected into several pieces Einstein’s brain; some of the pieces he kept to himself while others were given to leading pathologists. [....] Harvey also removed Einstein’s eyes, and gave them to Henry Abrams.[2] He was fired from his position at Princeton Hospital shortly thereafter for refusing to relinquish the organs.
Well, “invested” seems to be interpreted weirdly by magic. Sunlight is stored in acorns in the form of chemical energy, and the light you could get from a few acorns is about the same amount you’d get by burning them thoroughly (say, in oxygen flux). The effects of Harry’s potion seemed to be much more powerful than that, I’d say of the level of the light absorbed by the entire oak for a year or more.
So it seems like you can get something like “the entire effort” spent to produce something (grow a tree for a year) from just some of the results (nothing indicates they got all or even most acorns from a single tree).
Actually, I don’t find the amount of light released to be far from the mark. Burning several pounds of acorns and converting all the released energy into light would be ridiculous—consider that even at a MJ per kilo, you’re looking at a million watts worth of incandescent bulbs for 50-100 seconds (incandescents are only 1-2% efficient IIRC.)
Actually, you might be right. I was thinking in terms of a pound or so of gasoline deflagrating, which would be bright if it happened really quickly but doesn’t seem blinding when stretched over more than ten seconds (intuitions based on fires and movie explosions being much brighter than the real stuff). But I was ignoring the spectral focus and the lack of kinetic energy released.
Lets’s see: Wikipedia gives wood (red oak!) 14.89 MJ per kilogram. Spent over 60 seconds (the Chaos-Dragon battle is said to have lasted “a lot longer” than “very quickly”) that would generate 248 kW.
Direct sunlight is quoted at reaching 130,000 lux, but even with an albedo near 1 (conservativ, snow reaches .9) that’s not bright enough to make you unable to see by shielding your eyes with an arm (based on recent experience of noon sun while skiing). So I’d guess the cauldrons would have to generate more than 1M lux for the effects described (maybe significantly more, brightness is nonlinear).
Assuming conservatively that the illuminated surfaces in a battle to be a square at least twenty meters on the side, that’s 400 square meters and 400M lumens. With pure green light (the brightest kind) you get 683 lumens/W. But the cauldrons gave everything except green, so let’s say 400 lumens per W.
So you’d need about 1MW of power to light a square of snow 20m on the side to ten times brightest daylight during one minute, or about four kilograms of red oak.
Given that the illuminated area is probably much larger (including light lost to the sky), it’s surface has much lower albedo (grass: .25, bare soil: .17, deciduous trees: .15 to .18), acorns probably take more than a gallon per four kilos (and I doubt they had time to gather ten kilos of acorns for both cauldrons), and that the quoted figures for oak involve burning with oxygen, I’d say that the energy in the acorns themselves falls short by at least an order of magnitude.
But then again my errors are likely more than an order of magnitude, and we’re talking magic here, so it’s surprisingly close.
You can make copies of books and of software CDs very cheaply. Given a law of conservation, it can’t be the case that destroying (sacrificing) a cheap copy would gain you powerful results, or else you could generate infinite resources very quickly (and wizards would realize this).
Maybe destroying the last extant copy of a software would achieve the effect. One wonders what great magic was fueled by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
True, using copies to achieve that kind of power doesn’t seem to make much sense—the law even says that you can get as much… let’s call it “work” out of the ingredient as was “invested”. It’s true that there isn’t much of an investment of resources in copies.
So, forget the copies, let’s use the originals.
For example, could you take Einstein’s original notes/notebooks(copying them beforehand, of course, so that you don’t lose information), liquefy them into a Scientific Breakthrough Potion and use that Potion to quickly figure another brilliant breakthrough? That’s the kind of thing I’m wondering about.
If this were the case, could Hermione sacrifice the paper marked 42 for a Potion of Humanism?
Or if Harry wrote down his thesis on Partial Transfiguration, Hermione could make a potion from that (without reading it), and write down whatever discovery she made under the influence of the Breaking the Laws of Magic Potion, which Harry could then use to make a potion...
No, because the notebooks do not “contain” the work Einstein did, Einstein’s brain contains it. So you’d need the living brain of a scientist as brilliant as Einstein. Which may not be that difficult; Einstein was good but he was also lucky—he glommed onto exactly the right Big Problem at exactly the right time. It’s quite possible that there are any number of equally-brilliant scientists alive today who just happened never to find their Big Problem. The point remains, however, that paper and notebooks are not sufficient, you need the brain which actually contains the comprehension.
Moreover, since magic works by sensible-to-humans laws in the MoRverse, even if you copied the brain you’d have to use the original in the potion, and you only have one of those. The reason being, the copy hasn’t “done the work” even though it contains the comprehension; and you can only get back out the work that was put in. This of course makes no sense, information should be information, but the laws of magic were apparently designed by a human.
Not necessary living. And Einstein’s brain just happens to be preserved.
In fact, it sounds very much like people quarreled over magical ingridients:
Or the same entity (not Azatoth) designed or modified both humans and the laws of magic.
Or perhaps the original diary of Sir Francis Bacon?
For it to be “fair” destruction of General Relativity you’ll need the information to be destroyed, not container.
So everybody everywhere in the universe would need to forget it AND you need to destroy every physic book with it, and wikipedia, etc, etc.
Well, “invested” seems to be interpreted weirdly by magic. Sunlight is stored in acorns in the form of chemical energy, and the light you could get from a few acorns is about the same amount you’d get by burning them thoroughly (say, in oxygen flux). The effects of Harry’s potion seemed to be much more powerful than that, I’d say of the level of the light absorbed by the entire oak for a year or more.
So it seems like you can get something like “the entire effort” spent to produce something (grow a tree for a year) from just some of the results (nothing indicates they got all or even most acorns from a single tree).
Actually, I don’t find the amount of light released to be far from the mark. Burning several pounds of acorns and converting all the released energy into light would be ridiculous—consider that even at a MJ per kilo, you’re looking at a million watts worth of incandescent bulbs for 50-100 seconds (incandescents are only 1-2% efficient IIRC.)
Actually, you might be right. I was thinking in terms of a pound or so of gasoline deflagrating, which would be bright if it happened really quickly but doesn’t seem blinding when stretched over more than ten seconds (intuitions based on fires and movie explosions being much brighter than the real stuff). But I was ignoring the spectral focus and the lack of kinetic energy released.
Lets’s see: Wikipedia gives wood (red oak!) 14.89 MJ per kilogram. Spent over 60 seconds (the Chaos-Dragon battle is said to have lasted “a lot longer” than “very quickly”) that would generate 248 kW.
Direct sunlight is quoted at reaching 130,000 lux, but even with an albedo near 1 (conservativ, snow reaches .9) that’s not bright enough to make you unable to see by shielding your eyes with an arm (based on recent experience of noon sun while skiing). So I’d guess the cauldrons would have to generate more than 1M lux for the effects described (maybe significantly more, brightness is nonlinear).
Assuming conservatively that the illuminated surfaces in a battle to be a square at least twenty meters on the side, that’s 400 square meters and 400M lumens. With pure green light (the brightest kind) you get 683 lumens/W. But the cauldrons gave everything except green, so let’s say 400 lumens per W.
So you’d need about 1MW of power to light a square of snow 20m on the side to ten times brightest daylight during one minute, or about four kilograms of red oak.
Given that the illuminated area is probably much larger (including light lost to the sky), it’s surface has much lower albedo (grass: .25, bare soil: .17, deciduous trees: .15 to .18), acorns probably take more than a gallon per four kilos (and I doubt they had time to gather ten kilos of acorns for both cauldrons), and that the quoted figures for oak involve burning with oxygen, I’d say that the energy in the acorns themselves falls short by at least an order of magnitude.
But then again my errors are likely more than an order of magnitude, and we’re talking magic here, so it’s surprisingly close.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_fuel#Energy_content http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo for the numbers.)
Damn, I think I just killed a catgirl.
Obviously it powered first Julius Caesar’s conquest of the Mediterranean, and then Islam’s conquest of North Africa.