Well, Harry breaks his glasses in the canon books, because nobody ever does anything sensible, but as a more general rule, if you could simply transfigure people into objects and enchant those objects to be unbreakable, and thereby prevent damage to their body structure, human transfiguration would already be possible within ordinary means.
It wouldn’t completely prevent damage, but it will prevent any damage that would be noticeable on top of the significant amount of damage Hermione has.
My understanding is that “unbreakable” magic makes the object unable to change at macroscopic level, but doesn’t prevent small alterations at microscopic level. And those small alterations at microscopic level, in case of a transfigured human, will lead to DNA damage and similar things. It’s not known if the information encoded in the brain will resist or not—it’s much higher level than DNA, so there is a good chance it would.
Another possibility if that “unbreakable” works fine on things that have very few moving parts, but if you try that on a human body then they become utterly incapable of changing. Their muscles don’t flex, which means they can’t breathe and their heart stops beating, and they die very quickly.
Well, Harry breaks his glasses in the canon books, because nobody ever does anything sensible, but as a more general rule, if you could simply transfigure people into objects and enchant those objects to be unbreakable, and thereby prevent damage to their body structure, human transfiguration would already be possible within ordinary means.
It wouldn’t completely prevent damage, but it will prevent any damage that would be noticeable on top of the significant amount of damage Hermione has.
My understanding is that “unbreakable” magic makes the object unable to change at macroscopic level, but doesn’t prevent small alterations at microscopic level. And those small alterations at microscopic level, in case of a transfigured human, will lead to DNA damage and similar things. It’s not known if the information encoded in the brain will resist or not—it’s much higher level than DNA, so there is a good chance it would.
Another possibility if that “unbreakable” works fine on things that have very few moving parts, but if you try that on a human body then they become utterly incapable of changing. Their muscles don’t flex, which means they can’t breathe and their heart stops beating, and they die very quickly.