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Harry Potter headscratchers relating to the relationship between technology and the wizarding world.

For a specific book, please go to its specific page:


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    Speaking to dead pictures 

  • It's established that in the Potterverse, the dead can be spoken to if there are pictures of them. Why then, does Harry never even consider having pictures of his parents (or Sirius etc.) painted. I can buy that there might be arguments against it along the lines of "it wouldn't be real" or "it wouldn't do to live in the past" or whatever, but surely Harry would at least consider it?
    • No it isn't, it's not established. I think it's fairly clear that the Portraits are not means to communicated with the actual dead person, but merely portraits that gain limited sentience thanks to magic. If you need definite proof, Gilderoy Lockhart is noted to have had several portraits of himself in his office, which obviously weren't ways to communicate with the real one. Moreover, according to Word of God as paraphrased by the wiki (so okay, this is shaky source), the portraits can only be created by an artist who is either painting the living person, or has known the real person well enough, because the protrait's personality and abilities will be based on the artist's feelings about the real person. Therefore, any portrait that could be painted of James and Lily ten years after their death would be bound to be inaccurate — no more the real James and Lily than the idealized version of his family that Harry saw in the Mirror of Erised.
    • Pictures and paintings seem to capture the attitude and personality of the person when they are taken/made/painted. And since paintings are far more lifelike than pictures, one could assume some powerful magic would have to be involved, perhaps even requiring the subject of the painting to help bring it to life. So it seems unlikely Harry would request a painting of his parents a decade after their death—how would anyone capture their essence?
    • Half Blood Prince seems to dispute this, though, as Dumbledore's painting seems to be present immediately after his death, apparently without needing to be created by someone.
    • Since Dumbledore planned his death, it's possible he had himself painted beforehand and simply told Snape to pull the painting out after his death.
    • I recall Rowling once saying that Harry ended up commissioning a painting of Snape after he died. So it seems possible they can be made after death.
    • Not everything that a character might think has to be put to page. I think it's safe to say the thought occurred to him but Harry decided against it for a variety of reasons. Not the least being that a Portrait, while apparently alive and assuming the qualities of the subject, would not really be his parents. Creating a portrait of Snape after his death was possibly meant as a sort of memorial to someone Harry felt he had treated unfairly. And more importantly, it would be a way to show respect for Snape's sacrifice by hanging it in Hogwarts.

    Professors 

  • Sorry if this is obvious, but why are the teachers called Professors when they are teaching the equivalent of high school, not college?
    • Well, a person is called 'Professor' based on his/her educational degree, and not the place they teach. For that same reason, none of the teachers in my college are called Professors. They are either Doctors, or simply teachers...
    • It seems to just be an honorary title; Hagrid is suddenly referred to as 'professor' when he becomes Care of Magical Creatures teacher.

    Internet 

  • I know that everyone has thought of this but still, why is there no internet? Every book involves something which the Trio spends ages in the library figuring out which would take 5 seconds with internet. "Who's Nicholas Flamel""How do you make/buy Polyjuice Potion" "How do you survive underwater""What are Horcruxes" "Voldemort's favourite places"...the list goes on.
    • To keep the info out of the hands of the muggles?
    • But they could take care of that, if they can hide a big Quidditch ground, I'm sure they could hide a search engine from the wrong people, even Muggle computer technicians can do that.
    • Why would there be an internet? To begin with, we know that electronic devices like computers don't work well around magic and don't work at all at Hogwarts. Then consider that the books take place from 1991 to 1998. How much of an internet did we have back in 1998? Just because people have magic doesn't mean they're going to invent things before Muggles do and it's actually stated that having magic makes you less likely to be logical or creative since you can just cast a spell and solve your problems instead of having to work at it.
    • (Small point: I don't think it's actually stated that magic makes you less logical, it's more of a correlation.) Even if they cobbled together some sort of...Wizardnet, having the infrastructure for a digital information network doesn't mean you have the actual information to go in it. They would have to transcribe all those books in the library into a computer and upload them somewhere. In the real world by the time the internet as we know it came to be we had already digitized millions of volumes worth of information. All that was necessary was upload it and distribute it. Even if the Wizarding World could create their own internet they would have a very long way to go before they had anything useful to work with.
      • Even if for some reason they aren't able to come up with some spell or means of quickly digitizing books and information, that a technology would take some time to be developed is hardly an excuse to ignore it. And you seem to be under the impression that most of the web is filled with content that was digitized before its conception. It's not, nor was in its early years.
    • Wizarding Wireless Network? Wizarding Wireless Network? Wires?
    • I think this one can be explained as certain slang not transferring well. Wireless just means radio in Britain IRC. Doesn't explain radios and no TV though.
    • No, it doesn't. We say radio.
    • A bit of history tells us that "Wireless" was a term the British referred to the radio ("wireless transmission with radio waves") and was popular until WWII, where the military preference for "radio" slowly replaced it. If the Wizarding World is as out of date as it appears, referring to it as a Wireless wouldn't seem that strange.
    • In Deathly Hallows, I remember the radio being referred to as "Wireless" at least twice.
    • "Wireless" is an old-fashioned but genuine word for "radio" in Britain, used here for Added Alliterative Appeal.
    • Radios work because they do not require integrated circuits, which are vulnerable to the EMPs created by magic. Notice that every radio mentioned in the books was old and bulky; this is why, a more advanced radio with I Cs would fail the first time someone used a spell near it.
    • Someone already answered this above. The books take place from 1991-1998. No reason for wizards to have the internet before the Muggles do.
    • This troper remembers a Word of God somewhere on Pottermore stating that wizards don't have their own television despite knowing of its existence and considering it an useful invention and despite having radio channels, because it's considered far greater danger to the International Statute of Secrecy than radio is (it's believed that, in case of hidding spells somehow failing and causing Muggles to accidentaly access wizarding broadcasts, they are far more likely to dismiss something they overhear in radio as mishearing/remembering wrongly than something they see on TV). Presumably the same applies to the internet.

    Nukes 

  • Nuclear weapons: Although wizards claim to be better than Muggles at everything and refuse to pay attention to anything they do, having Hiroshima, an entire city, be wiped off the map in WWII should have alerted wizards to the destructive capabilities of nukes. For so long, wars were just person against person, easy to avoid for wizards, but nukes wipe off parts of geography, not something wizards should be able to avoid, no matter how ignorant they are of the Muggle world. What would a wizard say when confronted with the subject of nukes? Would they try to change the subject because it's not proper in the wizard community? Or would they really be ignorant enough to not know about it?
    • It's never really addressed if wizards were in the general area of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It's possible the wizards that knew about them think their shielding spells could protect them even from a nuclear weapon. After all, who knows how strong magic is against the atom.
    • I would tend to think wizards just assume their Shield Charms would hold up, because very few of them have any understanding of Muggle STEM and don't realize the magnitude or proportion of the energy from an atom bomb (like little kids knowing the world is round who try to walk around it - seemingly reasonable in principle, but with infeasible scale). I doubt there's even any proper quantification of a Shield Charm's capabilities.
    • But you have to know exactly when a nuclear bomb is about to go off to set up a shield. Plus their magic shields don't seem to block out light, a.k.a. electromagnetic radiation. Even if a shield can stand up to the shock wave and keep out the fire storm, will it keep out all the x-rays, gamma radiation, and infra-red radiation (heat)?
    • Magic doesn't work by normal logic. Protego is not a field of force preventing minor-moderate curses, solid objects or shockwaves from hitting you, it's a magic shield which stops you from being harmed, no matter the means, up to a point (i.e. powerful curses like Avada Kedavra). Since visible light is not harmful, Protego won't block it. However, since other types of radiation are deadly, it would stop them. Indeed, if you trained a powerful laser on a Protego, it would probably block the light as it is now high-powered enough to burn. Magic doesn't work by logical laws, it works by laws of how a human thinks, and a human thinks a Shield Charm would stop him from getting hurt.
    • I doubt that many wizards are familiar enough with the technology to realize it does more than just cause a really big explosion.
    • Why assume it actually was a nuke that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Considering Rowling seems to be trying to tie Grindelwald's story to World War II (the dates she gives for his reign match up almost perfectly with the rise and fall of the Reich), it's possible that it was a spot of particularly bad magic that they invented the nuke story to cover up. Once you add magic into a story, you have to consider the A Wizard Did It explanation for nearly everything.
    • But then the nuclear weapons R&D of every nuclear country, spanning decades and costing untold billions of dollars, would have to be a part of the cover-up.
    • Magic! (Troper waves hands furiously) Perhaps skimming the Nuclear weapons research money off the top is what funds the Wizard government; IIRC, we never hear taxes mentioned once. Perhaps the wizards magically de-activated the nukes that each country built; they clearly have people at the highest levels of Muggle government. Perhaps the average wizard doesn't even understand what a nuke is; Arthur Weasley couldn't handle British money or a Underground ticket without help, and the Daily Prophet had to explain to the population what a handgun was.
    • I like the deactivation theory. It's a very sensible thing to do, since even wizards wouldn't be able to survive the results of global thermonuclear war, and it doesn't impair the deterrent function of the bombs.
    • It's also pretty safe to assume that the atomic bombs weren't the result of wizardry when you consider that, frankly, wizards aren't very good at killing each other in large numbers. Remember, Sirius Black supposedly killing 13 people with a single curse was some serious Nightmare Fuel for the wizarding world, and 13 people in one attack is a pretty big step down from vaporizing entire cities.
    • It's safe to assume that Nukes are real and not a wizard invention for two reasons. One is logical. In the absence of magic physics in the Harry Potter setting follows the laws which Muggles understand. Hundreds of warheads have been tested in programs involving dozens of nations, millions of witnesses, hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers requiring an extensive and interconnected base of scientific knowledge. The Ministry would keel over dead trying to keep that train of lies going. But much more importantly, narratively speaking, nukes are not relevant to the story of Harry Potter. It wasn't like Fudge was ever going to request a Trident strike on Scotland. Nor, if Voldemort won the war, was he likely to go on a campaign of direct conquest when he could rule and make muggles suffer from the shadows.
    • Killing 13 people at once would be pretty potent Nightmare Fuel in the Muggle world, too. And Muggles don't even have anything that could annihilate a large group of people in one shot at close range without killing the killer at the same time.
    • Not in the same way it is in the wizarding world, though. Here in the muggle world, 13 people get killed, everyone's shocked, "Oh my God, how could this happen?!" aaaaand it's not even a headline story on the news a month later. Wizards, on the other hand, still get a chill down their spine simply talking about 13 people getting blown up with a single curse 12 years earlier.
    • A grenade launcher? If they are unarmed, any modern weapon could do it in a few seconds, fast enough for you?
    • A grenade launcher fired at close range would easily kill the shooter. You can't catch a piece of shrapnel to the face from a wand-blast.
    • One, the fact that we can kill 13 muggles in a single shot from even further away is more scary than the wand, not less. And two, you want 13 dead people in a single trigger pull and wave at close range? Behold, the flame thrower.
    • The average person does not own a flamethrower. The average wizard does in fact hold a wand. I think it's less the ability to kill 13 people in one shot than the fact that Black did it and laughed about it.
    • You don't even have to mention nuclear weapons. Most older British wizards will have lived through the Blitz and should know what Muggle weapons are capable of. This Troper's guess is that you just don't mention it in 'polite company', so that most wizards have simply forgotten about it, or never learned about it. The Purebloods we see in the books don't even understand age-old technology like electricity and telephones, and if the Daily Prophet article about Sirius's escape is an indicator, they have no idea what a gun is. In the worst case Muggle weapon technology would be used as an example of how dangerous those 'vile creatures' [sic] are.
    • If you ask me, some wizards, in organized fashion or not, discreetly threw a few Reductor Curses at the Germans during the Blitz.
    • Knowledge about the Muggle world seems to be somewhat inconsistent. For example, Arthur Weasley somehow managed to obtain a car, learn how to drive it and give it magically enhanced abilities. He also works in a Ministry department that regularly deals with 'Muggle artifacts'. Yet, his biggest ambition in life is to find out how airplanes stay in the air, something he could pick up from any number of (children's) textbooks.
    • That may have been a joke. Also, incidentally, he wouldn't have, because most children's books give the incorrect "air on top and bottom of wings has to get to back at same time so Bernoulli effect" explanation.
    • I'm pretty sure it was stated that Arthur liked to take Muggle machines apart to learn how they work, including the car, which is how he enchanted it in the first place. I guess he never thought to look at a Muggle textbook for answers. And the reason why he can't figure out how a plane works? Simple. It's too big to fit in his garage.
    • Maybe a small one could. ;-) Or a model.
    • Also, he may be able to learn how a car works by taking it apart, and also how to operate it, but he cannot gain knowledge of traffic regulations from that. In other words: someone must have shown him how to drive safely, so he must have another source of information than simply taking stuff apart.
    • Who says he needs to gain that knowledge? He could have just confounded his traffic examiner to get the license and relied on magic to get him through a drive safely. That's what his son does, after all. Or he just drives unlicensed. He floos into work normally, and he can apparate, so he probably relies on those for his transportation needs. He probably just thinks of the car as a really cool toy that he takes out on joyrides, and he does seem to live in a pretty isolated rural area, so he probably can do that without running into a whole lot of danger.
    • Considering Arthur's car became sentient on its own, and even the staid Ministry of Magic cars can leap to the front of a traffic queue, it's possible that no wizard is 'driving' any car, just directing them generally in the right direction, and they all are self-driving like the Knight Bus, along with various spells to keep Muggles from noticing their impossible behavior. However, no one besides Ernie Prang directs their vehicle in such a crazy manner, so Harry doesn't notice this.
    • Finally, something I'd like to add. Out of all forms of transportation technology, the one that is used more than any other by wizards is the steam locomotive, by far more complicated and more difficult to master than most anything else around. How is it that a bunch of people who have thus far demonstrated little to no technological knowledge can somehow figure all those valves, gears, and levers out? I suppose the easiest explanation would be that the Hogwarts Express is driven by a special crew of Muggle Studies experts, but that seems like way too much effort for no logical reason. Or possibly the train only looks like a typical steam train but is actually some sort of Eberron-style Magitek contraption.
    • A combination of Rule of Cool and the time to learn how it worked. The first successful steam locomotive was designed and built in Britain, in 1804. British Wizards have therefore had a long time to figure out how to magically replicate a steam train. It's also a relatively inconspicuous way of getting lots of over-excited magical children to Hogwarts - even today, there are enough working steam trains in the UK that the Hogwarts Express would look like an enthusiasts special.
    • Pottermore actually goes into more detail on the Hogwarts Express when you reach the appropriate chapter in Book 1. Basically, everyone had to make their own way for many years however they could (though nobody could Apparate due to the magical defenses and no headmaster was willing to incorporate a Floo network due to security concerns), which made for some difficulty in arriving. They tried a portkey network, but up to 1/3 of all students wouldn't show up on opening due to missing the inconspicuous object at the appropriate time and many students suffered from hysteria and nausea due to their sensitivity to the teleportation process. It was finally some time in the 19th century when wizards got the idea to take advantage of the development of steam trains, and they used a massive effort (involving lots of memory and invisibility charms) to essentially steal an entire Muggle locomotive. As for why they would continue to use an apparently complex steam train, keep in mind that they have access to magic. It's probably modified to run through magical means (or at least some kind of magical assistance).
    • "nobody could Apparate due to the magical defenses and no headmaster was willing to incorporate a Floo network due to security concerns". Uhm, what? Magical defences are around the castle proper, same for the security concerns. Nothing should've prevented people from Apparating or Flooing into Hogsmead.
    • Same person as above, JK Rowling also said on Pottermore that she imagines that wizards are able to create one of the "between platforms" like 9 3/4 for any specific purpose and it simply disappears or is no longer accessible when the train station is no longer needed.
    • To me, wizards' knowledge of the Muggle world, or lack thereof, is absolutely inexcusable. One of the more egregious examples of this is when, in one of the books (I think it was Prisoner Of Azkaban), they mention that the Muggle authorities were reporting that Sirius had a gun when he escaped, which the magical source of news had to clarify as "A kind of metal wand Muggles use to kill each other," meaning that enough of the wizarding world doesn't know what a gun is that clarification must be made. I don't buy that. Guns have been around for over five hundred years, and wizards don't know what they are? This just raises even more questions: do they know anything about the history of the modern world? Harry seems to sleep through all his wizard history classes, and they never seem to cover Muggle history, so exactly what kind of bubble does the wizarding world live in? Then there's the fact that you've got people like Ron, who, unlike Harry or Hermione, have spent their whole lives in the wizarding world, and then proceed to go to Hogwarts, apparently having never gone to basic school, where they proceed to sleep through their history classes, essentially becoming full fledged adults with little to no understanding of the history of the world, current events, or even some major technological innovations that have changed the world forever.
      • It could be less having to actually tell them what it is, more remind them of what that particular thing is. It's like how a lot of news reports have to remind us muggle that, say, a scientific item is. They know what guns ARE, they just don't interact with them regularly enough to have a clear mental image of what a gun is.
    • What's even more odd about wizards needing an explanation for what a gun is is the fact that they know what cannons are. A handgun is nothing more than a tiny, handheld cannon.
    • And yet they all run right though Kings Cross Station in the middle of muggle London every September 1st. One has to wonder just how many ministry obliviators are doing 'Muggle crowd control' every time the Hogwarts Express leaves or arrives. Okay, maybe they have the possibility to arrive directly at platform 9¾ by floo or apparition, but we never see that in the books.
    • Weirdness Censor. The only sign of anything unusual to Muggles would be seeing a kid run through a brick pillar, something that the witness would likely try to forget about or dismiss as a hallucination or "trick of perspective". Even if they tried to spread word, who would believe them? Nuts exist everywhere, after all. Some random person screaming about a child and his pet owl phasing through a wall would just get their ramblings posted in a tabloid at best, or on Thingsoverheardinlondon.com.
    • Um, about the "people like Ron" thing... isn't that pretty much Truth in Television for most students in the real world?
    • A thought just occurred to me: what if a wizard, on his/her way to Diagon Alley, got held up by a Muggle with a gun? They wouldn't know what a gun was, all they'd know is a person stuck something weird looking at them and said something to the effect of "gimme the casssssssssssh." They'd be confused, say "no," and try to walk away, not knowing their life was being threatened. Cue a wizard getting shot because of gross ignorance.
    • OR, if that wizard is not a complete idiot (I know, I know, what are the odds, but let's presume that just for the sake of argument), he'd understand that he's being mugged, and that the mugger regards that thing in his hand a weapon, and act accordingly. Besides, it's stands to reason that a petty street crook would be reluctant to move straight to murder and would fire a warning shot.
    • Sounds plausible, but Britain has very strong firearm laws, so its more likely that the mugger would use a knife or something similar. But it certainly seems strange that British wizards lived through at least two big wars in the last hundred years, including a whole lot of German air raids, and are still ignorant to Muggle weaponry.
    • Strong gun control laws means a mugger would be more likely to use a knife? Yes, because all criminals follow the law.
    • Actually, yes. It's difficult enough to obtain guns that if you are mugged, as was stated, the mugger is more likely to be using a knife.
    • It also has a lot to do with how British courts handle armed robbery. Armed robbery with a knife is usually punished less severely than armed robbery with a gun. So for minor hold ups going through the difficulty of acquiring a handgun is simply not worth the effort for most street muggers.
    • And that's what Apparation and the Floo Network is for: so wizards don't have to deal with the Muggle World. They don't have to know anything about us, and we can't find out about them should someone get careless and pull out a Galleon instead of a subway token.
    • It could be argued that this ignorance is only true for isolated living purebloods, like the Weasleys or the Malfoys. Hogsmeade is said to be the only all-wizarding town in England, so any Wizards who lives in a town not called Hogsmeade would have at least some contact with Muggles. Heck, even the ancestral home of the Muggle-hating Blacks is somewhere in London, surrounded by Muggle houses.
    • Another theory: It is more act than real ignorance, although there is a certain amount of ignorance. Most wizards seem to have at least passing knowledge of the Muggle world, even Draco bragged about outflying Muggles in helicopters in book one. They have no deeper knowledge because they live in their own bubble, so most of them never use a telephone or watch a movie in their entire lives. Add to this the fact that Muggles are looked down upon by a lot of wizards, and you can imagine that stuff like "a gun is like a metal wand" is mentioned because it is 'just not proper' to know these things in pureblood society. Everyone knows it, no one talks about it, and if it comes up, people feign ignorance.
    • How much are we aware of how people live in other cultures? Just being a migrant between two very different countries, I notice how ignorant people are of the most subtle things - things I figured would be obvious. Muggles have difficulty living outside their own bubbles, why hold wizards to a higher standard?
    • I believe that the business about the gun was an As You Know. Newspapers still talk about 9/11 as if it happened yesterday, and wizards are shown to be kind of stupid, so it follows that the Daily Prophet would need to say something everyone already knows.
    • Probably true, as wizards apparently have enough awareness of firearms to have named Ron's favorite Quidditch team, the Chudley Cannons, after them.
    • Related to the above: Why didn't the British Military just send some well trained marksmen to take out Voldemort's top men? Couple them with well trained Aurors who can apparate silently and you've got a team that can kill from a kilometer or more away before the target can even get a shield up (unless they are lucky and see the muzzle flash), since they wouldn't hear anything before it impacted. Sure, it wouldn't kill Voldemort, what with his Horcruxes, but it could really cripple his ability to inflict damage on anything more than a one on one scale.
    • How? You can't just send the military wherever you want on assassination missions, especially in your home country. Voldemort seems to have primarily or even exclusively operated in Britain and he and his Death Eaters are often in populated areas. Assuming all of the below discussion about just how Muggle soldiers would be able to find locations intentionally hidden through magical means were gone from the equation, what do you think would be the response to an SAS team being sent into downtown London for an assassination? Or even worse, a missile being launched into a forest up in Scotland? You can't just make all of that disappear.
    • But even then, this could be fixed by using air-to-surface missiles which travel faster than the speed of sound. It may not destroy his soul, but you should be able to cripple his body long enough to incapacitate him and throw him into the sun or find some way to send him into deep space.
    • This still bugs me that people seem to think the Muggle military is the solution to everything in the story. It's a fantasy book, not something where the moral of the story is going to be "The military and guns saves the day". Besides, the Muggle government when this is happening is being kept in the dark about most of what's going on before Voldemort takes over, so aurors won't be helping them. Plus Voldemort, once he takes over, probably has the Prime Minister under the Imperius curse to not do anything. Even if he's not under Voldemort's spell, you can't just send solders to places you can't find, and aurors themselves aren't exactly able to find any real Death Eaters. Especially when the Ministry has to use fake death eaters as signs they're doing something. Also, firing missiles inside the United Kingdom will cause a bit of panic among the citizens.
    • Just because it's a fantasy book and the military isn't going to be the solution doesn't mean that it couldn't. Just because the muggles don't know and wizards aren't helping them find the places to attack or using muggle technology themselves doesn't mean that, if it happened, the muggle technology couldn't win the war. If nothing else, the Death Eater's lack of familiarity with it would be a huge advantage.
    • "This still bugs me that people seem to think the muggle military is the solution to everything". Well, that's how it works in real life, so it's natural that people are trying to apply that elsewhere.
    • No it doesn't. People thinking military force is the silver bullet often comes up in reality, yes, but really, it's not. See; Iraqi and Afghan Wars.
    • There are more than 15 or so enemy combatants in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    • Also, one should note that wizards are much more resilient to physical damage due to their instinctive magical protection; Hagrid scoffed at Harry's belief that his parents died in a car crash, as no car crash can kill a wizard, the story where Neville got tossed out of a upper floor window by his relatives to tempt out a sign of magic is treated as a joke, and Qudditch players take regular lead cannonballs to the head with nothing worse than a mild concussion. So I would guess that a wizard would shrug off non-magical firearm rounds as something painful and annoying but not lethal. Also, it has to be noted that Rowling's wizards do not excel in purely offensive magic and wreaking of general havoc, but on subtler skills, like disguise and obfuscation (they hid a city in the middle of London), speed (apparation, flying), and mind-control (the Imperius curse, and the Memory spell). Sure, a nuke or a Muggle army might surprise and overcome a group of wizards by sheer brute force. But that nuke and army is not going to do any good if: they can't find the wizards in the first place, said wizards vanish into white smoke every time they get close, the soldiers suddenly get all of their mission objectives and combat training wiped from their brains, or the nuke gets transmogrified into a sperm whale and a pot of petunias on its way down to the target.
    • Hagrid scoffed at the idea because Lily and James don't drive cars, not because they are somehow invulnerable to fiery metal death. Bludgers are made of iron, not lead, and they are never stated to be solid rather than being relatively thin shells. Also, if the wizards aren't coming out and fighting in the open, that's what special forces and intelligence agencies people are for. It helps that wizards are so outnumbered.
    • Actually, he specifically states that 'no car crash could kill a wizard', implying that even should wizards be caught in one (and they do drive, as shown a few times when Ministry cars picked them up at the Burrow) they would easily survive. There is also nothing even close to implying that Bludgers are anything but solid metal — how the hell would a thin shell knock full-grown wizards off of their broomsticks? By the by, how do you propose any intelligence agency would be able to gather anything approaching intelligence about wizards when anything they do manage to gather would mysteriously disappear? Remember, there are wizards in the highest levels of Muggle government (at the very least, they work with the Prime Minister to keep the general population in the dark) and I highly doubt they would allow any intelligence unit to gather information. Regardless, Muggles can't see Hogwarts. Likewise, they can't see the Leaky Cauldron, which is the entrance to Diagon Alley from the Muggle world. My suspicion is they wouldn't be able to see Hogsmeade either. How are they supposed to attack what they can't even see? And nukes are COMPLETELY out of the question, because they would be destroying Muggle Britain without any guarantee that they would even be able to see the wizarding world to hit it. That may well be exactly why the wizarding world is so close to the Muggle one — mutually assured destruction if Muggles attempted to use their most dangerous weapons against them in a war.
    • Actually. Hagrid says "Car crash? A car crash killed Lily and James Potter? It's an outrage, it's a scandal!" Lily and James are some of the most well-known martyrs in wizarding history. Hagrid is offended that anyone would try to cover up their heroics. It would be like saying that Jesus was run over by a donkey.
    • His full quote is "CAR CRASH? How could a car crash kill Lily an' James Potter? It's an outrage! A scandal! Harry Potter not knowin' his own story when every kid in our world knows his name!" It does seem like he says this because he thinks Harry should know but it also sort of implies that Lily and James could get in as many car crashes as they wanted and they'd be fine.
    • It could be that they don't know where exactly Voldy is at any time, so they can't just apparate wherever and snipe him right away. If they sniped random Death Eaters, Voldy would pick up that Muggles were fighting against him and there'd probably be huge retribution against Muggles in general. Even after he took over the Ministry, he didn't immediately massacre every Muggle, but if there were signs that Muggles were a threat, he probably would have. Even if gun beats magic, the majority of British civilians won't know what the hell is going on, would be unarmed, and even if they were armed, they probably wouldn't know how to use the gun properly.
    • Regarding the "Wizards high up in government" thing, I got the impression that Kingsley Shacklebolt being in the Prime Minister's office was sort of a one-off thing for the duration of the current emergency with Voldemort. Other than the communication between the Prime Minister of Britain and the Minister of Magic, there doesn't seem to be much communication between the governments, nor any penetration of the Muggle government by the wizards.
    • They certainly were able to get him in past all the security checks you would assume anyone working directly under the Prime Minister would require and he apparently was very good at his cover. That implies that either the Ministry of Magic had a program ready to put secret agents in the U.K government or someone used a lot of memory erasing spells to convince everyone that Shacklebolt should be there. Either way the implications are disturbing.
    • Regards Hagrid talking about Lily/James: he didn't say "A car crash killed Lily and James Potter?!", as if he meant that was definitely not what happened (but could have happened) and was the outrageous thing, he said, "A car crash kill Lily and James Potter?!" as if the notion of a car crash killing them, which was the outrageous thing. Methinks a subconscious non-verbal wandless Protego Totalum would have saved them from a car crash.
      • This troper really thought that the outrage was out of the idea that people who died such heroic deaths were implied to have died in such a mundane way, like claiming that Jesus was trampled by a donkey; in other words, not that they would have been immune to a car crash, but that it was blasphemy to say that the heroes met such a stupid, muggle-ey death.
      • Or it could be a bit of both. Hagrid has nothing but the highest respect for the Potters and that probably extends to their magical abilities. It isn't that all wizards are trivially immune to car crashes. It's that he can't imagine something so mundane killing this particular witch and wizard. Not unless it was one unbelievable car crash or exceptionally bad luck. Something that could happen but was never regarded as likely. Couple that with the outrage at trivializing their deaths and I think it makes sense.
    • I thought that really had more to do with Hagrid's accent.
    • We are talking about people who can vanish one's arm's bones accidentally and magically regrow them - they can repair bones, concussions and the like without even needing a full-blown hospital, only what amounts to a trained nurse and a few potions. I presume they can also heal people who fall off brooms if immediate care is given, so I think the only way a car crash could be lethal is that if they were hit badly enough they couldn't protect, send a message or heal themselves quickly enough.
    • *Waves Occam's razor threateningly* Wizards are resistant to mundane deaths. Wizards are powerful enough to do stuff like nukes, but don't because the Ministry has Charms to detect such spells and punish them (hinted in DH). Magically-hidden places cannot be damaged by Muggles.
    • Occam's Razor? Ooh, that's easy. Lily and James didn't drive. They weren't likely to be out anywhere that they could be involved in a car crash. Just like someone who spends their whole life in Florida isn't likely to die in a blizzard or avalanche. Much more simple than Wizards being resistant to mundane deaths.
    • To those saying wizards can't be killed via mundane means, remember that Helena Ravenclaw and Dobby (not a wizard, but capable of magic nonetheless) were killed by being stabbed. If a wizard can be pierced by a blade, he or she can be pierced by a bullet.
    • Both knives were being wielded by other magical beings, which equalizes the confrontation. If they had been wielded by muggles, the outcomes probably would have been much different.
    • Now your just grasping at straws. Thats like saying that the forks that Harry and Co. use to eat at Hogwarts are more deadly than grenades. Wizards are no more tougher than a normal human. Its just that they have more efficient medical aid. Basically if they are injured they can just use a magic spell to heal themselves. But the physical body itself is just as normal as any other muggle. Besides Wordof God said that the she purposely left out the guns and stuff like that because a gunshot would obviously hit a wizard before he even spoke the word.
      • It is not grasping at straws to point out that in a magical setting who's using a weapon is important. This is a very common rule throughout fantasy (weapons becoming divine in the hands of a cleric, blades becoming cursed in the hands of an evil spirit). Also, Rowling never said anything like that. Rowling hasn't talked about guns at all and I can't see why she would.
      • So you're applying rules from other fictional universes to Harry Potter? Yup, definitely grasping at straws.
      • No, I'm applying a trope common throughout this genre of fiction. A bit like guessing what Dumbledore's fate would be based on the fact he's the lead character's mentor.
    • To be absolutely clear: unless the knives have been enchanted prior to the encounter, or wizards are somehow able to cast spells with the knives, then a wizard with a knife versus a muggle with a knife, of similar combat skill and stature, are basically on equal footing. If we're talking about a wizard with a wand versus a muggle with a knife, then the wizard definitely has the upper hand, because the wand has greater range and versatility. If it seems to have been implied that wizards are more durable than muggles, then it must be owed to their ability to cast spells to protect themselves and their access to healing magic. If the wizard were unable to use his wand, and were unable to access healing potions, then we would very probably find that the wizard is just as physically vulnerable as his muggle counterpart. Before you go citing Neville being dropped out a two story window, I will point out that accidental magic, the kind performed instinctively without a wand, is implicitly stated to fade once a wizard begins training in actual spells.
      • Accidental magic fades because it stops being accidental not because wizards lose the ability. Becoming an animagus or learning to apparate doesn't require wands. Wands are a tool, not the source of the magic. And besides, it's canon that a wizard body is more durable than a normal human body. A wizard's body remains agile and fit (physically as well as mentally) well past a hundred. Only the luckiest muggle would even live that long let alone retain any real amount of vigor.

    Failing technology 

  • I can't remember what book that the statement comes from, but at one point, it's mentioned that "technology" does not work at Hogwarts, or anywhere that is particularly magical, and breaks down. Harry at one point draws attention to his wristwatch, which has stopped working as a result of this "magical interference," if you will. I found this to be a really lazy bit of writing, as it raises the question of "what exactly constitutes 'technology?'" Aside from the batteries, a wristwatch is entirely mechanical in its construction, IE, it's just gears turning against other gears. The process by which batteries produce energy is also a fairly simple process, which is why you can power a lightbulb using a potato or an orange, so both instances in this case of "magical interference" are retarding basics of machinery, essentially causing the laws of basic physics and chemical reactions to stop working. Let's suppose for a minute that it's not the mechanical processes of a wristwatch (the gears and such) that are being retarded, but the chemical process of the battery that are, as to assume the former is insinuating that magic somehow causes basic mechanics to break down, the implications of which this troper would rather not think of, as he prefers to retain his sanity (his most conservative estimate is that every simple machine would spontaneously stop working, meaning doors, locks, wheels, pulleys, levers, and the human skeletal system would stop working). So, as stated, let's assume magic causes batteries to stop working. Batteries work, in laymen's terms, by transferring negatively charged particles and positively charged particles, and utilizing the reactions of them migrating across from one location to another. Because we're assuming that magic retards this process, it is also assuming that magic causes particles to either lose their charge, or renders the physical properties of this process obsolete; it basically means that it causes the process of producing any form of energy to stop working. The implications of this are also not too pretty. This troper estimates, again, at its most conservative implications, that all life in the universe would simultaneously cease to exist.
    Now, I know what you're asking. What does this have to do with anything? So Rowling decided to not research the implications that making magic subvert basic laws of chemistry and physics would have, namely that most likely the world would implode or something due en masse violation of the laws of physics? Big deal, a wizard literally did it, and we're talking about a series with wizards and elves in it. Well, here's the thing. It shows that Rowling was a lazy writer by putting an arbitrary label on "technology," while ignoring the question of "what constitutes technology?" Or, claiming "magic" causes it to not work, by virtue that it's magic. It shows that Rowling decided to be lazy, and rather than exploring the very cool idea of how modern technology and magic might have evolved alongside each other, maybe even get into the idea of how eventually the dichotomy between magic and technology may someday be indistinguishable, we're instead given a huge Hand Wave by having the series pretend Muggles and things to do with Muggles don't exist unless the plot needs them to for a few minutes. It was a cop out, and not a very well written one, in my opinion.
    • "...essentially causing the laws of basic physics and chemical reactions to stop working." Congratulations, you have answered your own question as to whether or not magic can screw with the laws of physics and chemical reactions.
      • Is magic perhaps a "reality bomb"? It seems a — very dangerous — overkill.
      • Interference would be a simpler explanation. You need to see also if there are lightnings in the storms when they happen over the magic world. Eventually to see if the vice versa also holds: if a strong electric field, magnetic field, or electrical charge can jam magic. Narratively, it is not implausible: in old fairy tales, cold iron was able to disrupt fairy magic.
      • So the possibilities are: a) interference (the simplest one), b) alteration of reality (overkill), c) virtual reality (in this eventuality the world where Harry is living is a Matrix-like construct, and there are not physical laws, only rules. Some fanfictions with this idea were done as Harry Potter / The Matrix crossovers); d) meta, it is a Plot Device to have an old-style world: only old and antiquated objects can be used (as in the Die Andere Seite by Alfred Kubin).
    • I suspect that Harry's watch was digital.
    • Saying "apart from the batteries, a wristwatch is entirely mechanical and should therefore work" is a logical fallacy. It's like saying "apart from casting spells, a wand is just a stick, so why do wizards carry wands?" Besides, an in depth examination of magic and technology working together would be a completely different series of books.
    • What I meant was to take the two processes that cause a wristwatch to work (kinetics and electricity), and address them separately.
    • Considering the fact that the previous generations’ worth of wizards intentionally go out their way to ignore anything Muggle-related as being unworthy of basic contempt (I have no idea the mental strain it must have taken to maintain a life-long ignorance of the British currency system and modern dress code). So I doubt that the wizard world would care about adapting to Muggle technology. Also, the Muggles are kept in the dark about magic, and I have no idea how marrying magic to modern technology would benefit a Muggle, considering you need the "magic genes" to use any of them. All in all, magic and technology has no chance to crossbreed. Also, Rowling has a very clear label on technology, it must be electronic (the mechanical clock that Harry uses in Hogwarts, a steam engine, non-computerized SCUBA gear, and a late-Victorian mechanical camera all work in Hogwarts). Furthermore, Rowling's magical system works by temporary suspension of "a few very specific laws of nature in a very specific area (the wizards can play around with gravity, electronics, laws of thermodynamics, space-time, chemistry, physiology, kinematics, and elemental transmutation... magic is basically a codification on deciding on which law to modify, for how long and by how much to produce the intended effect). This may be a taint too much of fanwank, but Rowling is only following in the illustrious footsteps of Tolkien, Lewis, myth writers of throughout history, and Doctor Who editors who never really ask you to think too deeply about the logic behind magic.
    • Sorry, you lost me when you compared Rowling to Tolkien and Lewis. That's like comparing Danny Elfman to Beethoven. One is good, one is a god. Again, the in-depth explanation of why the idea of magic is capable of suspending the laws of physics was not the point; the Hand Wave was what bugged me, because it showed Rowling wanted to dismiss a very interesting aspect of the story she could have addressed, and chose to do so in an extremely lazy way.
    • Frankly, I found Tolkien rather boring.
    • Exactly, if Tolkien is a god, then Rowling is perfectly permitted to follow the examples set by Tolkien and not worry about codifying her system of magic down to a science. After all, where exactly did you find the chapter where the narrator describes the metaphysics of the One Ring in full or provides description and justification of the powers of the Silmarils? The most that Tolkien and Lewis ever says is "it works like that, everyone and everything in the story will react accordingly, take my words on it; after all, the characters do."
    • Stop applying logic to the magic. It's stated quite clearly in book 1 that logic doesn't apply to magic-craft. As Hermione said in the potions-puzzle: (paraphrasing): "The most brilliant of Wizards don't have a drop of logic. They'd be stuck here forever."
    • Also, remember, wasn't it a KID explaining this? A Professor might be expected to explain this better, but JKR probably just gave the response that any kid would have given. I can't remember exactly who said the quote, but it WAS a kid who talked about everything going fuzzy, right?
    • The fact that it doesn't make sense is the point. Magic does not make sense. Inconsistency, irrationality, and nonsensical...ness is part of the game. If science can be considered a kind of applied logic, magic in the HP-verse would be applied illogic. It abhors anything and everything that makes sense. That's why Muggle devices don't work in Hogwarts.
    • You are missing the clarifying point of what I said. I said myself quite clearly that it's not the lack of logic that irritates me, but the lazy Hand Wave that Rowling used to make less work for herself rather than address a very interesting idea. My long spiel about the mechanics and such of a wristwatch were essentially a "cover my ass" clause; my issue was with Rowling's lazy writing, and the ignoring of a potentially very interesting story aspect.
    • Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Harry's wristwatch stop as a result of jumping in the Black Lake during the second trial of the Goblet of Fire? Nothing magical about that; clearly his watch wasn't water proof, but, as it was mechanical, magic didn't interfere with it. As has been noted, an old Victorian-style mechanical camera still worked, but my suspicion is a digital one wouldn't.
    • How does that make an interesting story aspect? If you're reading the books, it's to know about Harry's story about defeating Voldemort, not to know about the magical laws of physics. I don't know about you, but if there had been a multiple-paragraph long spiel about how technology doesn't work in highly magical places and what can be qualified as technology, I'd be lucky to skim it, but if it was a few sentences, I'd read it. Also, if it's one of the earlier books, don't forget that those were rather oriented to children and I think a ten-year-old would rather be reading about action then he would about technology. What I'm saying is that it's really a minor aspect in the bigger scheme of things.
    • Again, I'm not referring to the laws of physics being broken here being the problem. As I myself mentioned (although no one seems to notice that I did), the laws of physics kind of go out the window when you're dealing with magic. I included my bit about physics as a "cover my ass" clause. What the interesting story element would be is again, how magic and technology might have evolved alongside each other. Maybe there's a big push in the wizarding world for modernization? Maybe you've got pureblood enthusiasts that reject it? Maybe technology is starting to take a foothold amongst students, but the school officials are against it? It could serve as both an interesting story element as well as a symbol of the conflict between the accepting and the non accepting aspects of the wizarding world, which is essentially the whole point of the Harry Potter series. But instead, we get a lazy handwave from Rowling in addition to her attitude about Muggles as compared to wizards, which basically tries to pretend that it's about the pointlessness of racism against Muggles and Muggle-borns while simultaneously showcasing how every Muggle in the series is either rude, incompetent, stupid, or such a blatant ass that it's almost appropriate to call them evil (years and years of child abuse is funny!).
    • Just think of it this way; if it runs on electricity, it doesn't work at Hogwarts.
    • The questions you're asking all start with maybe. Maybe, since no wizard really showcases any vast amount of knowledge, or, hell, small amount of knowledge, about most technology (and this is often Played for Laughs), they just don't care about technology, because magic is all they really need, and they don't want to trouble themselves with learning to use a lot of devices to do various things that they can easily do with their wands. And the Muggle characters in the series forms a grand total of three recurring characters, Aunt Marge and Dudley's goons, who remain nameless. You're forgetting that, though they don't physically appear, Hermione's parents are mentioned to be dentists and very nice people.
    • Hermione was the one that said "Technology doesn't work at Hogwarts", it only came up in book 4 as to why Rita was able to listen in on private conversations. I always assumed it was some kind of magical EM field side effect that, while disrupting electronic devices and radio waves (of a non magical type), wouldn't mess with power production from something like a chemical battery (Rechargeable and/or lithium wouldn't work). So mechanical devices work, even if they need electrical input (mechanical watches, cameras of the time period), but micro-possessors and anything that uses electricity in a way other than to produce kinetic motion (Digi watches, CD/tape Walkmans, Game Boy, radio transmitters, other mid 90s technology) would not work right or not work at all.
    • Wait a second, if Technology doesn't work in Hogwarts, what happens to muggleborn kids with a pacemaker when they enter the school grounds?
    • Kid enters Hogwarts. Kid collapses. Teacher runs out of wards, Apparates to St. Mungo's. Healers extract pacemaker/cast Reparo on heart. Problem solved.
    • We know from the first book that a child with magical talent can unconsciously use magic to their own benefit (Harry regrows his hair overnight after his Aunt gives him a bad haircut, and leaps onto the school roof to get away from bullies). Presumably this includes Muggleborns. So it's likely a Muggleborn child would never develop a heart condition in the first place, or would find their condition "miraculously cured" right after being diagnosed. Still, in the exceedingly rare likelihood that a Muggleborn child developed an incurable (by Muggle science) heart condition that required a pacemaker, the Ministry would probably make sure to send them straight to St. Mungo's to get fixed up before they were allowed to set foot inside Hogwarts. If they can send personalized letters to every magical child in the nation then that should be no challenge.
    • Confirmed by Word of God. Rowling says that are aren't any conventionally disabled wizards, because the magic in their blood will automatically correct any disability or illness they may have had (that being said, wizards can become disabled via dark magic or get ill from wizard-specific illnesses. Whether or not this is Unfortunate Implications, your mileage may vary.
    • That's patently untrue. I know it's untrue because the main character of the series has an innate disability that requires the use of a prosthetic device. Without the use of this device, the hero of the book would be severely handicapped. They're called eyeglasses. Also sharing this disability are Albus Dumbledore and Rita Skeever.
    • My first thought was that if a wizard back at the advent of such technologies abhorred it so much that they subconsciously caused it to fail, then they may have passed on that belief to others who did the same. Then someone wrote it down and it became 'fact', it doesn't work because people are taught that it shouldn't and they make it so.
    • I think we've forgotten that the reason Harry's watch wasn't working was because he dived into the lake during the second task while wearing it, and continued to wear it out of habit. As to Hermione's comments on bugs not working, it's possible that Hogwarts has some kind of protection against malicious technology such as bugs and bombs and the like.
    • So does technology work or not? Cause it is very likely that Harry's watch was a cheap little electronic watch, even if it did use an analog face. Is it only technology that requires a circuit board that doesn't work?
    • To paraphrase Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: the [Harry Potter] universe doesn't care how you think magic should work any more than it cares how you feel about gravity.
    • Maybe Rowling didn't go into it because she was writing a children's book and knows that among the numerous things that will cause children to give a shit, the workings of technology versus magic will not be found.
    • The problem here is to pretend that Rowling had to write what, well, others want. She may not be interested in the subject of technology developing at the side with magic, and magical enhanced technology, and the like, and she doesn’t have to, nor she is a bad writer just because the subject matter is not of her interest. Each writer is free to choose what subjects want to explore and the reader can choose to read it or not. And she is not the only fantasy writer in the world either, the idea of technology and magic coextisting have been explore in some other literary works, like the Shadowrun series. Also you can take the idea an write a fanfic or, if you want to be even more professional about it, write an original work and try to publish it.
    • I would like to point out some evidence in favor of technology: the headlights on the Weasley's magic car still work after flying to Hogwarts. Same with the headlights on the magic bus. If fireworks are able to work at Hogwarts, then guns should be able to work at Hogwarts.
    • The very simple answer is "JK Rowling adhering to the trope/belief that magic and technology cannot co-exist due to being polar opposites". This stems from the Enlightenment when people started rejecting the world as being full of demons and spirits and the beginnings of science as we know it today.

    Writing 

  • I know that this is due to Rule of Cool, which (after plot and theme) is the controlling factor in how the Potterverse works, but still: parchment, quills and ink bottles? People having been trying for a long time to make writing implements which improved on the quill, and wizards have shown that they're willing to copy things invented by Muggles, but they haven't copied fountain pens, much less ballpoint pens. Now, if all the quills were enchanted to be "ink-free" or "self-inking", then wizards would have no need to adapt those Muggle inventions, but those sorts of quills are the exception, not the rule. And do they do Arithmancy with ink? If so, every time they make a math mistake and need to correct it, they have to put down their quill, pick up their wand, cast an erase spell, put the wand back down, and pick the quill back up, whereas if they used paper and pencil they could just use the eraser on the end of the pencil.
    • Don't hate on the quill and ink bottle, I still do my university homework with a quill and ink (and yes, all my friends think I'm weird). Not to mention the wizard quills are much better than actual pens, they never run out of ink, they can change colour at your command, they have a built in spellcheck/factchecker, and they can write an essay by itself via mimicking your own style. Also not all educational institutions allow you to write your homework in pencil, and not all pencils have a eraser on the end, a regular eraser erase probably takes as much time as doing a spell, finally, looking at the proliferation of non-erasable Muggle writing implements (e.g. the above mentioned fountain pens), most of us are obviously not as dyslectic as you.
    • Dyslexic? I was talking about making mistakes in math problems, not spelling mistakes. As for never running out of ink (and for forth), those are expensive/novelty quills, not the run-of-the-mill ones most everyone uses. Harry carries around a bottle of ink which he spills in the second book.
    • Right, because Newton and Company couldn't do math until after the invention of the pencil (or more specifically the eraser).
    • The pencil, as in a piece of graphite wrapped in wood, had existed for more than 80 years by the time Newton was born. There was also such thing as chalkboards.
    • Not to rain on your parade, but the more "useful" types of quills, like Spell-Checking (a Punny Name if I ever saw one) and Quick-Quotes varieties, are considered to be cheating. At least, during the O.W.L.s; not sure about for normal assignments. As for never running out of ink, I think there's only one example of that shown throughout the series, and it's the type that you'd want to be careful using, lest you end up with a five-inch essay on the Goblin Rebellion of 1798 etched into your forearm.
    • Which brings up another comment: How do 'inches' work as a measurement of written work? Obviously, it means how many inches' worth of parchment need to be used on the assignment, measured vertically. But unlike typed work, where increasing the font size and indents are easy to notice when you're told to write a five page paper, everyone's handwriting is different. You can get one student who gets frustrated because he can never fill his quota with his tiny, squiggly handwriting, and another who breezes through it with great sweeping words, and you can't really accuse either of not doing the assignment properly, since that's just their own style of writing. Is the parchment lined, like notebook paper? Or does X amount of inches equal a particular amount of words to be written?
    • In this troper's school, you were always required to hand in an essay no less than X pages long. And he knows the tiny handwriting frustration too well. Real schools are not fair, why should magical ones be?
    • I remember it being mentioned somewhere of Ron and Harry writing in a very large hand to fill up space while Hermoine was writing in tiny script to get all the information she wanted into the allotted space.
    • As you move up in the grades, they make you print a certain number of pages with a specific font and specific size. Or at least, that's how it happened with this troper's schools. Isn't that fair? And anyway, using this little topic as a justification for why quills and ink are used in the Potterverse disregards a lot of what has already been said.
    • alright, so we have discussed the use of quills. Now: Parchment. I have never seen parchment used for anything other than formal documents, so I assume paper is cheaper or easier to make. Why don't they use that?
    • Because wizards hate sheep and love trees.
    • You ^ have just made reading this entire page totally worth it. Thank you so much. You are my new favorite person.
    • Parchment and quills are simply fashionable in wizarding society. Pottermore has a mention of how many wizards often wear out-of-date fashions because they pick a look early in life, spend decades among entirely or almost entirely magical society (which tends to be rather isolated from the rapidly changing Muggle pop culture), and then cause an incident when they show up in Muggle society in anachronistic (or at least horribly old and unfashionable) clothing. On the subject of technology, wizards don't NEED to change with technology as much as Muggles thanks to magic. Magic provides many easy solutions for problems that Muggles can only solve through tech and creativity, and even young children can perform things that any Muggle would LOVE to do to make life easier. The site also mentions in its article on the Hogwarts Express that bigoted pureblood families tend to be highly disdainful or even fearful of Muggle technology and had to be downright threatened into using a train. Parchment and quills are a fashionable tool because the wizarding universe simply hasn't seen a need to advance (since they've grown reliant on magic, often to the detriment of their logic skills) and their pop culture changes are practically stagnant.
    • Onionskin paper is not literally made of onion skins. Perhaps "parchment" is shorthand for a type of paper that has the texture and appearance of traditional parchment.
    • One fanfic, whose name I have forgotten, hypothesizes that wizards prefer parchment to paper because it lasts longer and is more durable (that is, unlikely to be damaged by stray spells).

    Glasses 

  • This has bothered me since reading book one; why do people in the Potterverse wear corrective eye-pieces? I mean, with all of the incredibly powerful medical techniques, i. e. regrowing bones and mending complex fractures in less than a second, why hasn't some form of spell that could fix bad eyesight arisen?
    • This is because eyes are immensely more complex then bones. Magic that can be used to regrow or mend large structures like bones, doesn't exactly require the finesse it would take to shape almost microscopic imperfections in the lens of the eye.
    • Even without altering the eye itself, wouldn't special charms be able to produce the same optical effect as glasses or contact lens without the discomfort that physical, heavy glasses and contact lens cause?
    • Also, if you have magic, then regrowing a bone isn't that incredible; we've known how bones have worked for a very long time. But almost all that we know about how eyes work are relatively recent innovations that were determined by powerful microscopes that the average wizard wouldn't have access too. They're not exactly on the forefront of modern medical technology. Bet they don't even know what a "stem cell" is. Combine this with the numerous things that can be wrong with one's eyes, the amount of effort that would have to into creating all the spells needed to fix each one of them, and all of this can be solved by placing some oddly shaped glass over the eye, I'll bet it just seemed easier to go with what they had already. Bad vision isn't really all that inhibiting if you have glasses.
    • Okay, but from the logic that the science of eye problem is too complex to simply 'magic' away, then brain activity, as the brain is the least understood organ, should be another problem. Yet in Goblet of Fire, Harry is given a potion for dreamless sleep. This could just be a potion that prohibits the sleep cycle so that R.E.M. sleep is never attained, I suppose, but that, to me, seems incredibly complex.
    • It's not complex, because magic. Also they probably do have magic laser eye surgery but it's probably expensive, and why should Harry bother anyway?
      • I don't think the question was really about Harry (though, considering the state of his Muggle glasses, he might have reason to bother still), but rather about long-lived, wealthy and skilled wizards. For instance, Dumbledore or McGonagall.
    • Not really. It's relatively simple to sedate someone deeply enough not to go through REM, or at least not to remember it in the morning. Also look at it from a folklore standpoint. Real-life witches believe in herbs that stop hemorrhaging (relatively simple) and herbs that stimulate lust (not possible in real medicine) attributed with the same complexity. Given that magic is based on actively not making sense and breaking natural laws (applied illogic, as a troper above put it), you have to accept that at some point we're talking less science and more rock and roll.
    • Glasses could be a fashion statement.

    Plumbing 

  • Well here's one thing that I didn't really understand - Hogwarts has indoor plumbing. I can understand the wizarding world accepting some muggle inventions, or maybe through some radical theory, indoor plumbing was invented by wizards, or maybe a lot of muggle inventions were kick-started by a wizarding friend who wanted to help muggles out and inspired them to invent it. but this is off-topic. They don't look entirely modern, but how the heck are they able to have 20th century bathrooms in a school that's supposed to be a thousand or so years old? I can understand some modernization by more liberal wizards because people were sick of doing it in a chamberpot or outhouse, but the thing that doesn't make sense is the Chamber of Secrets is in a sink in the girl's bathroom. Was it something like a pump, originally but got turned into a sink by renovation wizards?
    • Hogwarts is always changing. Maybe they just left some toilets in an empty room and the castle made it's own plumbing.
    • The Wizarding world takes on muggle technology, but just at a slow rate. They have cameras, elevators, clocks and what have you. It's not too farfetched to think that plumbing filtered in through the save process of mental osmosis. Furthermore, plumbing is ancient, the Romans had them.
    • The entry through the bathroom sink might be something Tom Riddle whipped up himself, when he was at Hogwarts in the 1940s. Only the second gateway with the carved serpent statues would date back to Salazar Slytherin's day; after discovering the Chamber, Tom could've backtracked the pipes until he found one that led to an accessible part of the castle, then bewitched one of the sinks to facilitate Parselmouth-only access. Just his bad luck — and Myrtle's — that the path he found led to a girl's restroom.
    • If you're complaining about the anachronistic of Hogwarts, the bathrooms are trivial problems. For a better example, there are no 1000 year old castles in Scotland. Or England. At all. Castles filtered in from the Normans, which invaded England in 1066, and castles didn't get to Scotland until the 1100s. And those were the wrong kind of castle, which were really just stone keeps with wooden fences...Hogwarts, as described, couldn't possibly exist until the end of the 13th century, and really seems closer to 15th, the very end of castles before cannons made large flat walls impractical.
    • The founders could've copied castle designed from the continent, which later generations of wizards modified. Certainly it would've had to expand over time, as Britain's magical population grew alongside its Muggle population.
    • The Chamber of Secrets was originally accessed through a trapdoor. In what I believe was the 18th or 19th century, a descendant of Slytherin covered it up by building the restrooms over the entrance, as part of renovations that were being made. (Probably to install the plumbing.)

    Ignorance 

  • Why is the Wizarding world so ignorant of muggle lifestyles and technology when there is a significant population of muggle-borns who spent their first eleven years as muggles? Harking back to the earlier discussion on whether or not the average wizard would know what a gun is or not, the number of muggle-borns in the population should have filtered firearms, as well as other bits of muggle technology like telephones or television into the Wizarding world by way of Pop-Cultural Osmosis. It's especially weird that the Wizarding world doesn't have television, considering how it's a big part of muggle children's lives and that innovative muggle-borns would have brought it with them into the Wizarding world, kind of like immigrants bring foods, customs and fashions from their native countries into their new homes.
    • Define "significant population". There is a significant population of people in the United States who are Indian (that is, from India) but I'd wager that very few Americans know much about Indian culture besides "many-armed elephant god" and ultra-spicy food. And given the strong prejudice against Muggles and Muggle-related things in the Wizarding World, it's likely that any Muggle-born who tried to tell other wizards about Muggle society would be teased mercilessly (or worse) until they stopped.
    • Pottermore's article on the Hogwarts Express goes into some more detail on the pureblood bigotry against Muggle technology: Hogwarts had to downright threaten the pureblood families with denying their children admittance if they refused to use the train. Purebloods of that nature (who are often the wealthy, influential families) tend to view Muggle technology as dangerous and prone to malfunction, and wizarding culture in general tends to be decades behind the times because of the insular nature of their community (many witches and wizards wear anachronistic or unfashionable clothing, for example, because they pick a style early on and spend decades outside of major Muggle communities). Moreover, magic means that there's little need to advance in the first place: they can cook up a magical solution from a young age for many problems that Muggles would need technology, creativity, or both to achieve.
    • It's two fold. First, it is trivially easy for the Wizarding world to cut itself off from the outside. Magic does a bang up job of filling in for technology in a lot of ways that matter. But I also think Rowling was quite clever here. Rowling's characters say a lot of unflattering things about the general disposition and cleverness of muggles. And we see that, in many cases, there are muggles that prove these observation true. But we also eventually see every one of those qualities displayed by a witch or wizard. That's the point, other than magic, Wizards and Witches are as flawed on the whole as everyone else. That includes being lazy and incurious.
    • Wizards tend to be full on with their, if not hatred for the Muggle masses, but at least biogtry, example Muggle: I invented a device that allows me to amplify my voice several times over! wizard: *points wand at throat* "Sonorus". they see muggles as children, but should admire them due to the fact that muggles make do without magic, we invented airplanes, they can fly using a stick and some twigs and teleport, gnenrally they feel they don't need to advance and we are monkeys still fumbling in the dark, ut if anything they are worse in their attitudes than (most) of us ever will be, anyone in their world who even has a muggle second cousin is generally looked down upon, a good few wizards are or were openly racist about anyone with muggle heritage or even accosiated with muggles in any way, hell takinga muggle object and making it magical in any way is highly illegal, Arthur made a godamn flying (sometimes invisible) and sentient car, and got punished for it, I would give that guy thousans of galleons to make that and work out the invisability problem, now that for some reason carpets are banned in the UK (???) they can charm a huge castle to look like a ruin, but not a carpet or a car to look like a bird or a plane (or superman!) i reckon if they could get their heads out of their asses for a while and try some cutural appropriation they would advance by leaps and bounds.

    Communication 
  • Many other things relating to the wizard world's separation from the Muggle world and its lack of technology. Speaking of using owls to deliver their mail—well, wouldn't the Royal Mail work just as well and not require cleaning messy bird droppings? Wouldn't some of the communications issues that the members of the Order have to deal with in later books have been greatly simplified if they had telephones, or email which was starting to become widely available towards the end of the story's time frame? Wouldn't the wizard economy be more prosperous if they would institute fiat money instead of paying for everything with precious metal coins, a practice the Muggle world abandoned long ago?
    • It's stated that in areas of high magic, such as Hogwarts, technology simply breaks or fails to work. While this wouldn't preclude many witches or wizards from owning phones, it would make communication to, from or between highly magical areas nigh on impossible without significant magical aid. Another reason for why things are so archaic is simply because they've worked for generations, and given how many races seen work on traditional means, it seems pretty natural for witches and wizards to do the same simply for ease of working with those magical beings. Even modern day businesses typically use outdated hardware and software because they've proven to work well and are less costly than upgrading the entire system to work with new, possibly fallible technology.

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