Ch 78
You know, of all the things in the chapter, the law of Potion-Making seems the most important, by far—if I understand it correctly, it has staggering implications.
It’s clear that you can extract more than purely physical processes from ingredients—since we have potions that bestow even entirely abstract concepts like luck(and canon!Snape claimed to be capable of brewing fame and glory, I’m unsure if MoR!Snape claimed the same).
So, could you, say, take a CD with some software on it and use it as a Potions ingredient in order to extract the mental work that went into programming that software, creating a Potion of Excellent Programming or something? Or, even better—could you take a copy of some brilliant scientific research paper, extract the brilliant scientific genius out of it and use the resulting Potion in order to create an even more brilliant scientific breakthrough? That’s godhood in one shot right there.
I also have to wonder how Potion-Making interacts with the Mind Projection Fallacy. If you use a video game as an ingredient, can you create a Potion of Fun out of the video game or no? Fun isn’t an inherent property of video games, it’s in the minds of the players.
Might explain all those Nazi book-burnings. Grindelwald’s human allies weren’t just providing human sacrifices.
My intuition, my sense of fairness, says that you can’t get back the work required to create information without sacrificing an appreciable fraction of the number of extant copies of that information.
I would guess that Magic and the Mind Projection Fallacy are sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
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.
Another thought: write down a description of a complex magical principle that you understand, but that the interdict of merlin would prevent someone else who was reading it from understanding. Use the parchment you wrote on as an ingredient in a potion to make a potion with the mental work needed to discover/comprehend that principle.
Poof, Interdict of Merlin loses its teeth entirely. :)
Another thought that occurred to me: Felix Felicis. No wonder it’s hard to brew. Only way you could brew it is if you literally got lucky in the process of brewing it, by chance, so that you can take that “chance” and put it into the potion.
(hrm… might be able to automate the process of making Felix: Have a machine that keeps mixing the ingredients many times in parallel, ie, many “potential potions”, and in the process does something like for each potential potion, has a coin (or some random bit source which can then be physically placed in the potion) which it flips a 100 times. It also tracks the results, and when one of the coins comes up all heads, it drops it into the candidate potion then calls up the wizard to complete the potion.)
Oh, and MoR!Snape did claim you could brew fame and stuff. That was one of the things MoR!Harry challenged him on, saying something like “How does that work anyways? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?”
Or, wait, an even more recursive version of your science power potion:
Make a clever potion. Use that potion as an ingredient in a potion to extract the mental work of creating a clever potion.
Hee hee. But no, I didn’t mean a “potion of cleverness”, I simply mean “be clever and invent a potion. Then use that potion as an ingredient to place the quality of the mental work of inventing a potion into a potion… then use that potion as an ingredient, etc..”
And actually, we know Harry meant to investigate mental magic, but we’re not sure if he ever got around to it. (And, of course, there is Rowena’s Diadem, which would seem to be an intelligence augmentation device. If that’s in MoR, Harry’s got to do something with it at some point. (But then, harry hasn’t yet really jumped onto the existence of the Philosopher’s Stone, so… well, I guess everyone here’s already waiting for when he notices that and Epic Rages at the wizarding world along the lines of “you mean you already know how… you… ARGH!”)
And we’d expect Ravenclaw members to already be using any clever potions or at least have rules against them (either imposed by the school or by themselves as ‘cheating’). In canon, they all know about the Ravenclaw diadem which is supposed to make you more clever. So it’s reasonable if there were any such thing, Harry would have been told about it (everyone knowing his interest in self-improvement or being more clever), heard of it, or read about it by now.
Who says he didn’t? I notice that Draco is unusually bright, as are Crabbe and Goyle. It would certainly be convenient for the Malfoys if the youngest sons of all three families were significantly above average....
On the topic of potion invention, what ever happened to the cloak from the dementor Harry killed? Based on the rules of potions given so far, that could probably make a nice Potion of the True Patronus™.
I’d imagine that would be determined by the other ingredients and stirring patterns. It could also be used to make someone invisible to dementors, immune to the effects of dementors, temporarily unkillable, give off their own dementor-like aura, or just look like a dementor. Depending on what the other rules are, that cloak could be very valuable.
Testing which potion we got by such and such stirring pattern would be fun.
You give it to your hero and he is instantly dead. Or you give it to some criminal sentenced to death/Azkaban and he becomes unkillable for a month, or invisible to Dementors :)
Or you give it to rat and nothing happens—you try to kill the rat and he’s killed—maybe that was potion that makes you invisible to dementors?
I think you would need a remnant of the destroyed dementor itself, not just a cloak a dementor happened to be wearing when you killed it, and I don’t think dementors leave anything behind when you kill them.
I guess Harry’s got another reason to destroy more dementors. Also, I suspect the cloaks will have more than one use. Dragons blood apparently has twelve uses, after all.
Um. It’s not like Dementors come with cloaks, you know. If cloaks-that-have-been-worn-by-Dementors were really valuable potions ingredients, there’s lots of easier ways to get them than by destroying Dementors. The Aurors manage to get the things to put them on in the first place, after all.
Dementors are implied to cause their cloaks to rapidly deteriorate, so they probably don’t last long. Maybe “living” dementors accept new cloaks, but don’t let the people take the ones they’re wearing any more than you’d let a stranger make off with your shirt.
Yes, but the magic that was used to acquire that particular cloak was capable of blinding/destroying dementors, so it should be possible to get that magic back out using the newly revealed rule of potions.
It’s already established that obtaining a crushed ingredient will let you access the strength involved in crushing it. So obtaining an ingredient that had to be taken by invoking extreme powerful magic might let you access that...
Regarding possible ingredients of Felix Felicis, Malaclaw Venom bestows upon the victim an unnatural misfortune; maybe this effect can be reversed and exponentiated by the process of brewing, and thats the hard part? (EY knows about this; second flask in case you ever wondered what that did.)
This thread is a little silly, even by local standards. First of all, the fact that a potion can be no stronger than its ingredients doesn’t imply that a potion will always be as strong as its ingredients—there are probably all kinds of other restrictions on what can be effectively brewed. By way of analogy, most Volvo engines don’t run at Carnot efficiencies and most split pea soups don’t run at more than 0.01 efficiency.
Second, all of the canon/fanon magical ingredients are non-copiable...a feather or a squished animal is not like a CD or a video game or a piece of parchment. Perhaps you could use the original of a piece of parchment if you didn’t keep a spare copy, but EV drops lots of clues—potion conservation was apparently designed by someone who thought the universe was fair, potion brewing is a substitute for a small, safe sacrifice, etc. -- everyone who’s trying to figure out how to make a potion out of costless intellectual property is playing a different game than the one Harry’s playing.
Third, advanced electronics tend to malfunction in proximity to strong magical auras—so far the most advanced Muggle artifact that’s been successfully used to interact with wizards are a car battery and a solid-fuel rocket—both of which basically just discharged their stored energy, without any controls more subtle than an “on” button.
Fourth, would it really be fun if Harry put Science into a cauldron and took out a flask full of Win? A major theme in the fanon so far is the importance of working together in teams and coalitions. Harry already has enough power to singlehandedly overcome most casual bands of students. He destroys Dementors, outwits Headmasters, is fabulously wealthy, incredibly famous, has above-average magical strength, bloody single-minded discipline & determination, and of course an excellent background in basic cognitive science. If he suddenly became an expert programmer, researcher, etc. and broke Merlin’s Interdict, he’d have enough power to singlehandedly overwhelm adult powerhouses like Lucius or Flitwick...I don’t buy it. I predict that Harry will be prompted to learn how to play politics on a national scale, just as Harry has recently learned how to lead teams on a school-wide scale.
As I interpreted it, potions are doubly bound. The ingredients only ‘remember’ as much of an affect (light, luck, heat, strength) as was put into them, but they’re also constrained by magic. Everything is bound by Magic In, Magic Out. Hence the talk of potions requiring magical ingredients.
Under this interpretation, it means that potions act only as a coiled spring or temporary battery. Sacrificing software would only be useful if you needed intelligence right then and couldn’t afford the magic at the time; if you just wanted to be generally smarter, you would just continually cast intellect charms on yourself (or perform a ritual). This also fits in cannonically, with many of the most powerful potions (Polyjuice, Felix Felicis, Veritaserum) taking months to brew and providing short duration benefits.
As I interpreted it, potions are doubly bound. The ingredients only ‘remember’ as much of an affect (light, luck, heat, strength) as was put into them, but they’re also constrained by magic. Everything is bound by Magic In, Magic Out. Hence the talk of potions requiring magical ingredients.
So, I guess I missed something. What was the magical ingredient in Harry’s potion of light?
Just because every potion in the two textbooks Harry looked at involved magical ingredients doesn’t mean all potions require a magical ingredient. As I read it, Harry found the potion he used in a more obscure book suggested by Prof. McGonnagal or Flitwick, probably something like a wilderness survival guide. Converting acorns into a beacon would be pretty helpful for getting found by search parties.
...and the whole time it had been right in front of him in every Potions class. Potions-Making didn’t create magic, it preserved magic, that was why every potion needed at least one magical ingredient. And by following instructions like ‘stir four times counterclockwise and once clockwise’ - Harry had hypothesized—you were doing something like casting a small spell that reshaped the magic in the ingredients. (And unbound the physical form so that ingredients like porcupine quills dissolved smoothly into a drinkable liquid; Harry strongly suspected that a Muggle following exactly the same recipe would end up with nothing but a spiny mess.) That was what Potions-Making really was, the art of transforming existing magical essences. So you were a little tired after Potions class, but not much, because you weren’t empowering the potions yourself, you were just reshaping magic that was already there. And that was why a second-year witch could brew Polyjuice, or at least get close.
[snip] Harry had stared at the recipes and their warnings, forming a second and stranger hypothesis. [snip] A potion spends that which is invested in the creation of its ingredients.
This leaves me with two possibilities:
1) Harry invested the energy himself in the potion. Instead of just using his magic to release the ingredients’ potential, he poured in the required magic from his own cores.
2) Harry can now create potions from any non-magical substance as if it were a magical substance.
I believe option 1 is the correct one. First, Harry didn’t play a part in the battle, probably because he was magically depleted. He’s learned just as much dueling as Neville, and yet contributed nothing and died offscreen. Second, Harry wasn’t rejoicing the next day and testing out a dozen different types of potions. He didn’t act like someone who just uncovered a global victory condition or new branch of magic. Third, wizards would have discovered this if you could simply make potions without investing in magic of some kind. As the name of the chapter implies, Harry discovered a tradeoff, not a loophole.
The fact that the light was impossible to Finite suggests that Harry did tap the energy of the acorns. It’s implied that the magical cost to the creator of making a potion is a minor cost to reshape the components. So, the potion taps the light stored in the acorns, and Harry’s magic is tapped only to do the reshaping. Probably most magical potions use the magic of the magical ingredient to do most of the reshaping work, so the user only has to invest a tiny bit of magic, while a potion not involving any magical ingredients might require much more input from the creator for the reshaping. That would explain why Harry is drained, but also why the light can’t easily be dispelled.
The other critical limitation on potions is that you must known the stirring pattern and the recipe in general. Figuring out the stirring pattern is the sort of thing that gets you permanently turned into a cat. So, Harry does not have god-mode because he doesn’t have the time or expertise to do all the potion experimentation necessary to invent new potions without blowing himself up; he’s limited to potions with known (but possibly obscure) recipes.
The Finite charm was trained to be used en masse by an entire army. It’s a brute force spell requiring lots of power to dispel it’s opposing spell. The usefulness of the sunlight potion wasn’t in it’s raw magical strength, but how quickly it disabled it’s opponents.
So Harry had retrieved his copy of Magical Drafts and Potions, and begun looking for a safe but useful potion he could brew in the minutes before the battle started—a potion which would win the battle too fast for counterspells, or produce spell effects too strong for first-years to Finite.
He entertains either option, but he chose the more risky one that immediately finishes the battle. It merely needed to stand up to a handful of Finite spells, rather than a massed and coordinated dispel. I say it is the more risky one because he did in fact lose by choosing this option instead of brewing an invulnerability to sleep potion. If he could have chosen to make potions of any potency, he would have obviously chosen a certainly victorious spell of a risky spell.
The other critical limitation on potions is that you must known the stirring pattern and the recipe in general. Figuring out the stirring pattern is the sort of thing that gets you permanently turned into a cat.
This is evidence towards him putting in the magic himself. In order to deduce the stirring pattern, he looked up a potion with the similar ingredients and the same spell function from a preexisting recipe. If potionmakers could make the same potion using non-magical ingredients, then why wouldn’t any of them have already invented a potion with nonmagical ingredients unless there was a significant drawback?
I think this is almost certainly what harry actually discovered.The other option is simply too powerful. He can use the essence of acorns to lead his own magic to a place he does not know how to take it, but he still uses his own power to get there.
Not quite, I think it actually makes (well, regains) fire breathing, not just fire, just as Ashwinder eggs need fire breathing, not just fire or heat AFAIK. If only heat or fire was needed, a copper coin has lots of it (see the other example) and isn’t magical in itself.
The copper coin example is arguably a magical ingredient: the text emphasizes that it stores the heat of the goblin forges, and I imagine that those are somehow magical in nature.
As I understand it, there was no magical ingredient. Other potions stored and released the magical energy of their reagents, but Harry’s potion stored and released the light energy that went into making the acorns.
I’m guessing he used some kind of magical plant, possibly even a magical oak tree, since the text does specifically say it’s lucky that the battle takes place in the Forbidden Forest, where actually magical plants grow, as opposed to the regular non-forbidden forests surrounding the grounds which have only mundane plants.
Every recipe in Magical Drafts and Potions used at least one ingredient from a magical plant or animal. Which was unfortunate, because all the magical plants and animals were in the Forbidden Forest, not the safer and lesser woods where battles were held.
Ch 78 You know, of all the things in the chapter, the law of Potion-Making seems the most important, by far—if I understand it correctly, it has staggering implications.
It’s clear that you can extract more than purely physical processes from ingredients—since we have potions that bestow even entirely abstract concepts like luck(and canon!Snape claimed to be capable of brewing fame and glory, I’m unsure if MoR!Snape claimed the same).
So, could you, say, take a CD with some software on it and use it as a Potions ingredient in order to extract the mental work that went into programming that software, creating a Potion of Excellent Programming or something? Or, even better—could you take a copy of some brilliant scientific research paper, extract the brilliant scientific genius out of it and use the resulting Potion in order to create an even more brilliant scientific breakthrough? That’s godhood in one shot right there.
I also have to wonder how Potion-Making interacts with the Mind Projection Fallacy. If you use a video game as an ingredient, can you create a Potion of Fun out of the video game or no? Fun isn’t an inherent property of video games, it’s in the minds of the players.
Might explain all those Nazi book-burnings. Grindelwald’s human allies weren’t just providing human sacrifices.
My intuition, my sense of fairness, says that you can’t get back the work required to create information without sacrificing an appreciable fraction of the number of extant copies of that information.
I would guess that Magic and the Mind Projection Fallacy are sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
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.
Another thought: write down a description of a complex magical principle that you understand, but that the interdict of merlin would prevent someone else who was reading it from understanding. Use the parchment you wrote on as an ingredient in a potion to make a potion with the mental work needed to discover/comprehend that principle.
Poof, Interdict of Merlin loses its teeth entirely. :)
Another thought that occurred to me: Felix Felicis. No wonder it’s hard to brew. Only way you could brew it is if you literally got lucky in the process of brewing it, by chance, so that you can take that “chance” and put it into the potion.
(hrm… might be able to automate the process of making Felix: Have a machine that keeps mixing the ingredients many times in parallel, ie, many “potential potions”, and in the process does something like for each potential potion, has a coin (or some random bit source which can then be physically placed in the potion) which it flips a 100 times. It also tracks the results, and when one of the coins comes up all heads, it drops it into the candidate potion then calls up the wizard to complete the potion.)
Oh, and MoR!Snape did claim you could brew fame and stuff. That was one of the things MoR!Harry challenged him on, saying something like “How does that work anyways? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?”
Or, wait, an even more recursive version of your science power potion:
Make a clever potion. Use that potion as an ingredient in a potion to extract the mental work of creating a clever potion.
Use that potion as an ingredient… repeat. :)
Hee hee. But no, I didn’t mean a “potion of cleverness”, I simply mean “be clever and invent a potion. Then use that potion as an ingredient to place the quality of the mental work of inventing a potion into a potion… then use that potion as an ingredient, etc..”
And actually, we know Harry meant to investigate mental magic, but we’re not sure if he ever got around to it. (And, of course, there is Rowena’s Diadem, which would seem to be an intelligence augmentation device. If that’s in MoR, Harry’s got to do something with it at some point. (But then, harry hasn’t yet really jumped onto the existence of the Philosopher’s Stone, so… well, I guess everyone here’s already waiting for when he notices that and Epic Rages at the wizarding world along the lines of “you mean you already know how… you… ARGH!”)
And we’d expect Ravenclaw members to already be using any clever potions or at least have rules against them (either imposed by the school or by themselves as ‘cheating’). In canon, they all know about the Ravenclaw diadem which is supposed to make you more clever. So it’s reasonable if there were any such thing, Harry would have been told about it (everyone knowing his interest in self-improvement or being more clever), heard of it, or read about it by now.
Yes, because people want Harry Potter to be smarter than he is.
If it existed and was semi-public knowledge, then Lucius would have made a priority of acquiring some for Draco.
Who says he didn’t? I notice that Draco is unusually bright, as are Crabbe and Goyle. It would certainly be convenient for the Malfoys if the youngest sons of all three families were significantly above average....
Draco doesn’t even need to know about this.
^ Truth.
On the topic of potion invention, what ever happened to the cloak from the dementor Harry killed? Based on the rules of potions given so far, that could probably make a nice Potion of the True Patronus™.
Or a potion of instant death if it instead stored the decay effect from the dementor.
That’s so easy to do you don’t even need magic.
I’d imagine that would be determined by the other ingredients and stirring patterns. It could also be used to make someone invisible to dementors, immune to the effects of dementors, temporarily unkillable, give off their own dementor-like aura, or just look like a dementor. Depending on what the other rules are, that cloak could be very valuable.
Testing which potion we got by such and such stirring pattern would be fun.
You give it to your hero and he is instantly dead. Or you give it to some criminal sentenced to death/Azkaban and he becomes unkillable for a month, or invisible to Dementors :)
Or you give it to rat and nothing happens—you try to kill the rat and he’s killed—maybe that was potion that makes you invisible to dementors?
That sounds a lot like modern drug testing, actually...
I think you would need a remnant of the destroyed dementor itself, not just a cloak a dementor happened to be wearing when you killed it, and I don’t think dementors leave anything behind when you kill them.
Either Dumbledore or Quirrel took it, or it’s long since locked away in the Department of Mysteries.
But yeah, as JoshuaZ points out, just as easily could be a Potion-of-Death. (Or heck, “potion-of-anthropomorphic-personification”)
I guess Harry’s got another reason to destroy more dementors. Also, I suspect the cloaks will have more than one use. Dragons blood apparently has twelve uses, after all.
Um. It’s not like Dementors come with cloaks, you know. If cloaks-that-have-been-worn-by-Dementors were really valuable potions ingredients, there’s lots of easier ways to get them than by destroying Dementors. The Aurors manage to get the things to put them on in the first place, after all.
Dementors are implied to cause their cloaks to rapidly deteriorate, so they probably don’t last long. Maybe “living” dementors accept new cloaks, but don’t let the people take the ones they’re wearing any more than you’d let a stranger make off with your shirt.
Yes, but the magic that was used to acquire that particular cloak was capable of blinding/destroying dementors, so it should be possible to get that magic back out using the newly revealed rule of potions.
I’m not so sure obtaining an object is the same as creating it. Using Accio on a potion-ingredient will not allow you to make a summoning Potion.
It’s already established that obtaining a crushed ingredient will let you access the strength involved in crushing it. So obtaining an ingredient that had to be taken by invoking extreme powerful magic might let you access that...
Regarding possible ingredients of Felix Felicis, Malaclaw Venom bestows upon the victim an unnatural misfortune; maybe this effect can be reversed and exponentiated by the process of brewing, and thats the hard part? (EY knows about this; second flask in case you ever wondered what that did.)
This thread is a little silly, even by local standards. First of all, the fact that a potion can be no stronger than its ingredients doesn’t imply that a potion will always be as strong as its ingredients—there are probably all kinds of other restrictions on what can be effectively brewed. By way of analogy, most Volvo engines don’t run at Carnot efficiencies and most split pea soups don’t run at more than 0.01 efficiency.
Second, all of the canon/fanon magical ingredients are non-copiable...a feather or a squished animal is not like a CD or a video game or a piece of parchment. Perhaps you could use the original of a piece of parchment if you didn’t keep a spare copy, but EV drops lots of clues—potion conservation was apparently designed by someone who thought the universe was fair, potion brewing is a substitute for a small, safe sacrifice, etc. -- everyone who’s trying to figure out how to make a potion out of costless intellectual property is playing a different game than the one Harry’s playing.
Third, advanced electronics tend to malfunction in proximity to strong magical auras—so far the most advanced Muggle artifact that’s been successfully used to interact with wizards are a car battery and a solid-fuel rocket—both of which basically just discharged their stored energy, without any controls more subtle than an “on” button.
Fourth, would it really be fun if Harry put Science into a cauldron and took out a flask full of Win? A major theme in the fanon so far is the importance of working together in teams and coalitions. Harry already has enough power to singlehandedly overcome most casual bands of students. He destroys Dementors, outwits Headmasters, is fabulously wealthy, incredibly famous, has above-average magical strength, bloody single-minded discipline & determination, and of course an excellent background in basic cognitive science. If he suddenly became an expert programmer, researcher, etc. and broke Merlin’s Interdict, he’d have enough power to singlehandedly overwhelm adult powerhouses like Lucius or Flitwick...I don’t buy it. I predict that Harry will be prompted to learn how to play politics on a national scale, just as Harry has recently learned how to lead teams on a school-wide scale.
Wait, someone’s calculated this?
As I interpreted it, potions are doubly bound. The ingredients only ‘remember’ as much of an affect (light, luck, heat, strength) as was put into them, but they’re also constrained by magic. Everything is bound by Magic In, Magic Out. Hence the talk of potions requiring magical ingredients.
Under this interpretation, it means that potions act only as a coiled spring or temporary battery. Sacrificing software would only be useful if you needed intelligence right then and couldn’t afford the magic at the time; if you just wanted to be generally smarter, you would just continually cast intellect charms on yourself (or perform a ritual). This also fits in cannonically, with many of the most powerful potions (Polyjuice, Felix Felicis, Veritaserum) taking months to brew and providing short duration benefits.
So, I guess I missed something. What was the magical ingredient in Harry’s potion of light?
Just because every potion in the two textbooks Harry looked at involved magical ingredients doesn’t mean all potions require a magical ingredient. As I read it, Harry found the potion he used in a more obscure book suggested by Prof. McGonnagal or Flitwick, probably something like a wilderness survival guide. Converting acorns into a beacon would be pretty helpful for getting found by search parties.
It turns out the common Oak is actually a magical plant.
That’s what the Druids thought, anyway, right?
From the story:
This leaves me with two possibilities:
1) Harry invested the energy himself in the potion. Instead of just using his magic to release the ingredients’ potential, he poured in the required magic from his own cores.
2) Harry can now create potions from any non-magical substance as if it were a magical substance.
I believe option 1 is the correct one. First, Harry didn’t play a part in the battle, probably because he was magically depleted. He’s learned just as much dueling as Neville, and yet contributed nothing and died offscreen. Second, Harry wasn’t rejoicing the next day and testing out a dozen different types of potions. He didn’t act like someone who just uncovered a global victory condition or new branch of magic. Third, wizards would have discovered this if you could simply make potions without investing in magic of some kind. As the name of the chapter implies, Harry discovered a tradeoff, not a loophole.
The fact that the light was impossible to Finite suggests that Harry did tap the energy of the acorns. It’s implied that the magical cost to the creator of making a potion is a minor cost to reshape the components. So, the potion taps the light stored in the acorns, and Harry’s magic is tapped only to do the reshaping. Probably most magical potions use the magic of the magical ingredient to do most of the reshaping work, so the user only has to invest a tiny bit of magic, while a potion not involving any magical ingredients might require much more input from the creator for the reshaping. That would explain why Harry is drained, but also why the light can’t easily be dispelled.
The other critical limitation on potions is that you must known the stirring pattern and the recipe in general. Figuring out the stirring pattern is the sort of thing that gets you permanently turned into a cat. So, Harry does not have god-mode because he doesn’t have the time or expertise to do all the potion experimentation necessary to invent new potions without blowing himself up; he’s limited to potions with known (but possibly obscure) recipes.
The Finite charm was trained to be used en masse by an entire army. It’s a brute force spell requiring lots of power to dispel it’s opposing spell. The usefulness of the sunlight potion wasn’t in it’s raw magical strength, but how quickly it disabled it’s opponents.
He entertains either option, but he chose the more risky one that immediately finishes the battle. It merely needed to stand up to a handful of Finite spells, rather than a massed and coordinated dispel. I say it is the more risky one because he did in fact lose by choosing this option instead of brewing an invulnerability to sleep potion. If he could have chosen to make potions of any potency, he would have obviously chosen a certainly victorious spell of a risky spell.
This is evidence towards him putting in the magic himself. In order to deduce the stirring pattern, he looked up a potion with the similar ingredients and the same spell function from a preexisting recipe. If potionmakers could make the same potion using non-magical ingredients, then why wouldn’t any of them have already invented a potion with nonmagical ingredients unless there was a significant drawback?
I think this is almost certainly what harry actually discovered.The other option is simply too powerful. He can use the essence of acorns to lead his own magic to a place he does not know how to take it, but he still uses his own power to get there.
There wasn’t one, as he wasn’t making something magical. He was making sunlight.
Sure. And the potion of fire breathing doesn’t make anything magical, it just makes fire. It still requires Ashwinder eggs.
Not quite, I think it actually makes (well, regains) fire breathing, not just fire, just as Ashwinder eggs need fire breathing, not just fire or heat AFAIK. If only heat or fire was needed, a copper coin has lots of it (see the other example) and isn’t magical in itself.
The copper coin example is arguably a magical ingredient: the text emphasizes that it stores the heat of the goblin forges, and I imagine that those are somehow magical in nature.
The sun features prominently in so many mythologies that I would be mildly surprised if sunlight didn’t count as magical in some way.
As I understand it, there was no magical ingredient. Other potions stored and released the magical energy of their reagents, but Harry’s potion stored and released the light energy that went into making the acorns.
I’m guessing he used some kind of magical plant, possibly even a magical oak tree, since the text does specifically say it’s lucky that the battle takes place in the Forbidden Forest, where actually magical plants grow, as opposed to the regular non-forbidden forests surrounding the grounds which have only mundane plants.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong.
I stand corrected.