That said, it’s been stated that solids undergo internal changes over time, and so a living thing transfigured into a solid and back would die within hours.
Hermione was dead when transfigured. Any revival has to already surmount post-mortem decay and the transfiguration damage might not be a significant additional cost.
That may be true, but it may not be, and in transfiguration, you may recall, you do not care to guess. Harry will take every possible avenue to reduce the amount of magical omnipotence he needs to revive Hermione, and he has utterly no clue how much damage will be done with a straight transfiguration, and he has nobody to ask. I don’t believe for a minute that the best he came up with thinking about it for 5-6 hours was to simply transfigure her into a ring/rock.
Harry knows why solids undo internal changes, though—it’s because they do. You sit a block of gold down for an hour and random heat vibrations are going to reorganize the atoms. Map that gold block back to a human, and now you have heart-atoms where lung-atoms should be. Wait too long and you’ll get a ghoulish soup.
He can avoid this by using a very stable crystal, and keeping the crystal itself cool, but it’s still probably a temporary solution.
Or transfiguring the body into something that doesn’t change very much over time even if it is warm, such as an electron or a molecule of nitrogen and store that safely (what about a single carbon atom within a diamond? Should go about unchanged, and is easy to store).
What does it mean, on a molecular level, to “touch” things? It’s just repulsion of electrons. So if Harry has learnt to do partial transfiguration by considering things to be just piles of atoms, he might also be able to get around that restraint.
Of course, you are still completely right that transfiguring stuff into very small particles is quite dangerous: What if the atom sublimates? What if somebody somehow takes it up so it becomes part of that person’s body? How to find it in case it gets lost in the atmosphere, in the sea, or anywhere else? Etcetera. All sorts of fatal mistakes can be done, and Harry will not want to risk dying, or making Hermione’s recovery impossible.
I’m not sure you can transfigure things into individual atoms, though. It’s been implied that large scale changes are hard, and the scale change from body → gem is, what, twenty orders of magnitude smaller than that from gem->atom?
Now, the real ideal would be some supercooled perfect crystal of nitrogen or something. But that has… obvious problems.
Hermione was dead when transfigured. Any revival has to already surmount post-mortem decay and the transfiguration damage might not be a significant additional cost.
That may be true, but it may not be, and in transfiguration, you may recall, you do not care to guess. Harry will take every possible avenue to reduce the amount of magical omnipotence he needs to revive Hermione, and he has utterly no clue how much damage will be done with a straight transfiguration, and he has nobody to ask. I don’t believe for a minute that the best he came up with thinking about it for 5-6 hours was to simply transfigure her into a ring/rock.
Harry knows why solids undo internal changes, though—it’s because they do. You sit a block of gold down for an hour and random heat vibrations are going to reorganize the atoms. Map that gold block back to a human, and now you have heart-atoms where lung-atoms should be. Wait too long and you’ll get a ghoulish soup.
He can avoid this by using a very stable crystal, and keeping the crystal itself cool, but it’s still probably a temporary solution.
Or transfiguring the body into something that doesn’t change very much over time even if it is warm, such as an electron or a molecule of nitrogen and store that safely (what about a single carbon atom within a diamond? Should go about unchanged, and is easy to store).
Actually ,there’s an even bigger problem. In order to maintain the transfiguration, you’d have to touch that carbon atom again.
What does it mean, on a molecular level, to “touch” things? It’s just repulsion of electrons. So if Harry has learnt to do partial transfiguration by considering things to be just piles of atoms, he might also be able to get around that restraint.
Of course, you are still completely right that transfiguring stuff into very small particles is quite dangerous: What if the atom sublimates? What if somebody somehow takes it up so it becomes part of that person’s body? How to find it in case it gets lost in the atmosphere, in the sea, or anywhere else? Etcetera. All sorts of fatal mistakes can be done, and Harry will not want to risk dying, or making Hermione’s recovery impossible.
I’m not sure you can transfigure things into individual atoms, though. It’s been implied that large scale changes are hard, and the scale change from body → gem is, what, twenty orders of magnitude smaller than that from gem->atom?
Now, the real ideal would be some supercooled perfect crystal of nitrogen or something. But that has… obvious problems.