Yup. Harry is allowed to know about cognitive psychology from arbitrary time periods, too, and have read anachronistic science books, etcetera. Science is Timeless.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
Other than the buzzword “timeless physics”, this doesn’t go beyond anything that I knew about in 1991 (when I was older than Harry but still in high school and had never heard of Julian Barbour). This is implicit in Minkowski’s formulation of special relativity (1908) and Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics (1925); I don’t know who made it explicit, but I probably read about it in popular science books.
ETA: The buzzword that I knew then (or perhaps learnt later and immediately connected to what I knew then, I’m no longer sure) is “block universe”.
What about the Singularity/FAI/Yudkowsky stuff that Harry would be allowed to read? Would HJPEV (given his disposition) have been a Singularitarian if he was born in the 90′s?
Let the man have some licence for pedagogy! The story wouldn’t be worth much if it only taught lessons of things learned up to 1991.
Yup. Harry is allowed to know about cognitive psychology from arbitrary time periods, too, and have read anachronistic science books, etcetera. Science is Timeless.
I don’t think that this is a good idea. If Harry talks about, say, ice volcanoes on Titan, that will seem wrong to me.
On the other hand, Harry doesn’t seem to have said anything on physics that requires having read Barbour. Or have I missed it?
Chapter 28:
Other than the buzzword “timeless physics”, this doesn’t go beyond anything that I knew about in 1991 (when I was older than Harry but still in high school and had never heard of Julian Barbour). This is implicit in Minkowski’s formulation of special relativity (1908) and Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics (1925); I don’t know who made it explicit, but I probably read about it in popular science books.
ETA: The buzzword that I knew then (or perhaps learnt later and immediately connected to what I knew then, I’m no longer sure) is “block universe”.
Why doesn’t Harry seem to have heard about the Singularity then?
What about the Singularity/FAI/Yudkowsky stuff that Harry would be allowed to read? Would HJPEV (given his disposition) have been a Singularitarian if he was born in the 90′s?