Chapter 61: I don’t get what the laws of time are supposed to be. At one point, it seems that it’s impossible for information to get back more than 6 hours, by any method. At another (and for the test they plan to do on Harry), it’s impossible for a single person (or time-turner?) to go back more than 6 hours over the course of a day(/24 hour period?). Or both (with a strange coincidence between the absolute limit and the personal daily limit).
In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.
Dumbledore has one. :) My theory is that the message from McGonagall to Flitwick is going to pass through many hands (or pockets), including Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell,
several versions of Harry, and at least one use of Harry’s patronus.
You gotta understand, this is Eliezer doing the plotting here.
Of course, a different trick that could be used, if necessary, would be to bring a fresh time-turner (or several) back from the next day. I’m sure Harry has already experimented with what happens when you carry a time-turner back from just after midnight, and then hand that freshly recharged time-turner to an earlier version of yourself. Can a time-turner be transfered back in time? I’ll bet Harry knows. Harry is already familiar with puzzles involving trucks leaving caches of gasoline cans in the desert. The Ministry of Magic is not.
Harry has likely not yet experimented with taking time-turners back in time. He stopped all time travel experiments after he got the warning about not messing with time.
In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.
I expect he may bypass the test a different way. I could be wrong about the timeline, but it seems to me that McGonagall’s patronus is about to show up in the warehouse where Harry and Quirrell are having their little chat...
Could be. But another possibility is the McGonagall’s patronus passes the message to the Harry that she expects to reach, but then, after visiting McGonagall and receiving her message, Harry dispatches his own patronus to pass a message to the warehouse. From there the message passes to Mary’s room, and from there to Flitwick as an errand run on the on the way to Azkaban.
Need send a message to the past? Don’t have enough charge in your time-turner?
No problem. Just find someone who has already traveled back (using a fresh time-turner) and ask them to carry the message for you.
After visiting McGonagall and receiving her message, Harry dispatches his own patronus to pass a message to the warehouse.
But in this case, his patronus will still have to show up at the warehouse. IOW, it doesn’t alter the prediction that a patronus will show up at the warehouse to give them the message.
From there the message passes to Mary’s room, and from there to Flitwick as an errand run on the on the way to Azkaban.
They already went to Azkaban, so they can’t undo that to run an errand. The message would have to be sent on their return trip from the warehouse, i.e., before Harry’s “rescue” from the washroom. These are the only currently-blind spots in the story where a change can occur now.
What’s still not clear to me is whether this is even remotely possible within the story’s current timeline. Aside from it being not at all clear what the current clock time is throughout the story, the mere fact that the time turner was used in an overlapped way (first turning back to before lunch, then again back to the same point after the prison break), may mean that their total travel may not span the full six hours.
I’m guessing that Eliezer forgot to tells us about the errand in the earlier narrative.
If it turns out they did it before they left, there will be a clue in the narrative now, as Eliezer will already have used his timer turner to update the text by now. ;-)
[Edit: …and, it turns out I’m wrong. Also, disappointed in Eliezer. This does indeed lower my credence for future cliffhangers turning out awesomely, as it’s way too much of a deus ex machina here.]
I disagree. The existence of a Slytherin girl’s time-turner was all but spelled out before, which qualifies it as not-DeM. It was difficult to remember (I didn’t, until Eliezer pointed it out) because it was a minor passage from many, many chapters in advance, but that only makes it even less of an Ass Pull.
If anything is wrong with that resolution, I think it’s that Snape didn’t think of that possibility despite being Head of House Slytherin and a master schemer.
I disagree. The existence of a Slytherin girl’s time-turner was all but spelled out before, which qualifies it as not-DeM.
It’s not that, it’s that the entire timeline of events is inadequately spelled out (we’re NEVER told what time it is, throughout the TSPE arc), and no mention was made of advance preparations to defeat time turner tests, or even that HP had to go run an errand that Q thought would be important later. (So that we would remember it and be curious what it was for.)
IOW, I was fine with him using someone else’s time turner; it’s the order of revelation of events that’s problematic.
I was fine with him using someone else’s time turner;
I thought that would be impossible. Otherwise you can just chain them, and travel further than 6 hours, or more than 6hours over a day.
The Test McGonagall administers seems ridiculously stupid. She should be aware of ways to counter act it. It seems odd that there is no way to simple find out how much a time turner has left or even where/when it was used by looking at it, or using the spell.
Otherwise you can just chain them, and travel further than 6 hours, or more than 6hours over a day.
I expect that you can chain them, but you still can’t travel (or even send information) more than 6 hours back in time. That restriction is part of the nature of time, not a limitation of time turners, and a chain of time turners can’t break it any more than an individual time turner can, even if you were to turn it 7 times.
A minor flaw: The Slytherin girl who likes to get there first with gossip (in chapters 41 & 46) is named Millicent Bulstrode. But in Chapter 62, her name is Margaret Bulstrode.
Millicent is a 1st year girl, normally there is no reason to hand out time-turners to 1st years (no conflicting elective classes) and it would probably have been more difficult to directly include a 3rd or higher year in the foreshadowing. Presumably Margaret (4th year) is Millicent’s elder sister and told her the gossip in secret.
’Hermione had refused to answer any questions, and as soon as they’d passed the split leading to the Slytherin dungeons, Daphne and Tracey had peeled off at once, walking as quickly as they could. Rumor traveled fast in Hogwarts, so they’d have to go to the dungeons right away if they wanted to be the first to tell everyone the story.
...
“Yes,” said Pansy sourly, from where she was sitting with Gregory’s feet in her lap, leaning back and reading what seemed to be a coloring book, “Millicent already told us.”
It certainly does seem to be both. However it’s possible that the personal limit per time turner is specific to the construction of the time turners and is not an iron law of time travel. If they were constructed to have personal daily limit equal to the absolute limit (“Who would ever need to go back in time more than 6 hours in a single day?”) that would explain it.
Alternatively, the characters are just very confused, but I would expect they have enough experience with time turners that they are familiar with their operating limits (in “ordinary” situations, anyway).
Chapter 61: I don’t get what the laws of time are supposed to be. At one point, it seems that it’s impossible for information to get back more than 6 hours, by any method. At another (and for the test they plan to do on Harry), it’s impossible for a single person (or time-turner?) to go back more than 6 hours over the course of a day(/24 hour period?). Or both (with a strange coincidence between the absolute limit and the personal daily limit).
In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.
Dumbledore has one. :) My theory is that the message from McGonagall to Flitwick is going to pass through many hands (or pockets), including Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, several versions of Harry, and at least one use of Harry’s patronus.
You gotta understand, this is Eliezer doing the plotting here.
Of course, a different trick that could be used, if necessary, would be to bring a fresh time-turner (or several) back from the next day. I’m sure Harry has already experimented with what happens when you carry a time-turner back from just after midnight, and then hand that freshly recharged time-turner to an earlier version of yourself. Can a time-turner be transfered back in time? I’ll bet Harry knows. Harry is already familiar with puzzles involving trucks leaving caches of gasoline cans in the desert. The Ministry of Magic is not.
Harry has likely not yet experimented with taking time-turners back in time. He stopped all time travel experiments after he got the warning about not messing with time.
I expect he may bypass the test a different way. I could be wrong about the timeline, but it seems to me that McGonagall’s patronus is about to show up in the warehouse where Harry and Quirrell are having their little chat...
Could be. But another possibility is the McGonagall’s patronus passes the message to the Harry that she expects to reach, but then, after visiting McGonagall and receiving her message, Harry dispatches his own patronus to pass a message to the warehouse. From there the message passes to Mary’s room, and from there to Flitwick as an errand run on the on the way to Azkaban.
Need send a message to the past? Don’t have enough charge in your time-turner? No problem. Just find someone who has already traveled back (using a fresh time-turner) and ask them to carry the message for you.
But in this case, his patronus will still have to show up at the warehouse. IOW, it doesn’t alter the prediction that a patronus will show up at the warehouse to give them the message.
They already went to Azkaban, so they can’t undo that to run an errand. The message would have to be sent on their return trip from the warehouse, i.e., before Harry’s “rescue” from the washroom. These are the only currently-blind spots in the story where a change can occur now.
What’s still not clear to me is whether this is even remotely possible within the story’s current timeline. Aside from it being not at all clear what the current clock time is throughout the story, the mere fact that the time turner was used in an overlapped way (first turning back to before lunch, then again back to the same point after the prison break), may mean that their total travel may not span the full six hours.
I’m guessing that Eliezer forgot to tells us about the errand in the earlier narrative.
If it turns out they did it before they left, there will be a clue in the narrative now, as Eliezer will already have used his timer turner to update the text by now. ;-)
[Edit: …and, it turns out I’m wrong. Also, disappointed in Eliezer. This does indeed lower my credence for future cliffhangers turning out awesomely, as it’s way too much of a deus ex machina here.]
I disagree. The existence of a Slytherin girl’s time-turner was all but spelled out before, which qualifies it as not-DeM. It was difficult to remember (I didn’t, until Eliezer pointed it out) because it was a minor passage from many, many chapters in advance, but that only makes it even less of an Ass Pull.
If anything is wrong with that resolution, I think it’s that Snape didn’t think of that possibility despite being Head of House Slytherin and a master schemer.
It’s not that, it’s that the entire timeline of events is inadequately spelled out (we’re NEVER told what time it is, throughout the TSPE arc), and no mention was made of advance preparations to defeat time turner tests, or even that HP had to go run an errand that Q thought would be important later. (So that we would remember it and be curious what it was for.)
IOW, I was fine with him using someone else’s time turner; it’s the order of revelation of events that’s problematic.
I thought that would be impossible. Otherwise you can just chain them, and travel further than 6 hours, or more than 6hours over a day.
The Test McGonagall administers seems ridiculously stupid. She should be aware of ways to counter act it. It seems odd that there is no way to simple find out how much a time turner has left or even where/when it was used by looking at it, or using the spell.
I expect that you can chain them, but you still can’t travel (or even send information) more than 6 hours back in time. That restriction is part of the nature of time, not a limitation of time turners, and a chain of time turners can’t break it any more than an individual time turner can, even if you were to turn it 7 times.
That’s my interpretation, anyway.
A minor flaw: The Slytherin girl who likes to get there first with gossip (in chapters 41 & 46) is named Millicent Bulstrode. But in Chapter 62, her name is Margaret Bulstrode.
Millicent is a 1st year girl, normally there is no reason to hand out time-turners to 1st years (no conflicting elective classes) and it would probably have been more difficult to directly include a 3rd or higher year in the foreshadowing. Presumably Margaret (4th year) is Millicent’s elder sister and told her the gossip in secret.
What was the passage?
The bit with the Slitherin girls in chapter 46.
Ah. From http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/46/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality :
...
It certainly does seem to be both. However it’s possible that the personal limit per time turner is specific to the construction of the time turners and is not an iron law of time travel. If they were constructed to have personal daily limit equal to the absolute limit (“Who would ever need to go back in time more than 6 hours in a single day?”) that would explain it.
Alternatively, the characters are just very confused, but I would expect they have enough experience with time turners that they are familiar with their operating limits (in “ordinary” situations, anyway).