Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

The superiority of Apparating things into enemies as opposed to A King them is that AK is a massive green jet-o'-doom that's ridiculously easy to dodge. There's no way to dodge a large rock suddenly occupying the space where your brain used to be. Also, to use Apparition offensively in combat (though Methods!Quirrell does imply Apparition is possible under duress), just have an ally shield you for a few seconds. It'd be like driving a car for three seconds while a friend is restraining the guy trying to kill you. Similarly, HJPEV could make partial Transfiguration a highly powerful weapon by having somebody shield him then Transfiguring an infinitesimal portion of floor under an enemy's shields to antimatter. The enemy's shields would probably block most of the blast if it was a very tiny amount and it's probably possible to block or heal the damage caused by radiation with magic. Offensive Apparition is still safer, though.

On second thoughts, if possible it'd be even better to Apparate a large section of ground over the building Voldemort is in as soon as you know where he is.

edited 1st Sep '12 12:17:42 PM by LogicDragon

Or some really big asteroids.

It would definitely require significant training and practice to hold the mental state required to Apparate while in combat. It is, however, doable, and I have significant doubts that Harry is going to have major problems with it. Hacking his mental state is just what he does.

I think partial Transfiguration requires physical contact. Also, it's questionable whether Harry can be truly said to understand the substance of antimatter well enough to Transfigure it, given that by definition he can't ever have had contact with it.

AK's advantage is that basically anyone can do it. We're getting a bit too wrapped up in what's clever over what's practical. Have someone shield you for a few seconds? Your focus won't be on dodging the AK going towards you. We don't have any evidence that you can apparate something that isn't you or "connected" to you, so that's out. From harry passing out when he casts to many spells in quick succession we can surmise that magic works like stamina and teleportin' round and casting spells at the same time has to be draining.

Sure voldermort, dumbledore or even an older harry could probably accomplish it but when you're a bogstandard auror or deatheater it's much more practical to throw AK's at your enemy and dodge theirs.

It reminds me of how guns essentially destroyed knights. Sure knights had several advantages and one-on-one were the superior soldier but you could teach damn near anyone how to shoot a gun and enough of them could crush knights simply because they were easier to field and replenish.

edited 1st Sep '12 1:15:08 PM by thatguythere47

We don't have much reason to suppose that this is even possible. If it were, it's likely Quirrell-as-Voldemort would already have made a habit of using it, but he seems to have treated Avada Kedavra as his old standby.

We also don't know if transforming regular matter into antimatter with transfiguration can be done. It's kind of like assuming that because chemical reactions have been found to change lots of types of matter into lots of other types of matter, there must be a reaction for turning lead into gold. This may simply not be in the domain of what transfiguration can do. And even if it is, it would be awfully dangerous to practice, and shields for blocking offensive spells may not block gamma radiation.

When you've got a tool like partial transfiguration, and a solid command of muggle science, you don't need to take it to its speculative logical extreme to turn it into a powerful weapon. You could, say, put on a gasmask to avoid inhaling combustion products and then transfigure some oxygen difluoride.

Hermione never had contact with carbon nanotubes, but she could Transfigure them just by knowing the type and arrangement of atoms. If you were talking about contacting the target with your wand, contact the floor, Transfigure a section of floor that is a line of single atoms that then branches out, with the line being some safe substance and the part under your enemy's shield being antimatter. In canon, Dumbledore Apparates repeatedly while fighting Voldemort to avoid A Ks.

The whole point is doing something an enemy can't dodge or block. Avada Kedavra is so obvious that you may as well tell an enemy what you're going to do. It'd be very useful against large targets like dragons or trolls or as a way to knock an opponent off balance by making them dodge or as an assassination tool, but unless you've already defeated an enemy it has limited use because it's so easy to dodge. I've already cited Dumbledore Apparating luggage in canon and Apparating in combat, but even if for some wacky reason you can't Apparate things that aren't you in Methods, just Apparate next to your enemy while holding a knife outstretched in your arm so that the knife ends up in the enemy's head.

Transfiguring things to burn breaks the rules of Transfiguration :P Transfiguration turns some substance into another. There's no reason it can't turn stone into antimatter. You're probably right about it being easier to Transfigure safer but still lethal substances, I was just trying to think of something even Voldemort wouldn't be able to defend against.

EDIT: Gah, I just had a thought that invalidates Apparating into Voldemort: Anti-Apparition Jinxes. Voldemort would probably have the presence of mind to put wards around himself wherever he was to stop people just Apparating a bomb at his feet, so the only use of Apparition would be an explosive (standard or antimatter-based, makes little difference) to break the wards around a building he was occupying, or my older suggestion of a large section of ground over the top of the wards.

edited 2nd Sep '12 4:54:53 AM by LogicDragon

You're missing the point. AK is the most reliable, efficient spell available to your standard fighter. Most duels take place 1/1 in see the whites of their eyes distance. Throw enough A Ks downrange and you force your opponent to expend energy dodging about. Eventually he won't be able to dodge successfully.

The spray-and-pray approach, essentially. If I throw enough A Ks at you, eventually one of them will hit and that's all that I need.

edited 2nd Sep '12 6:20:53 AM by thatguythere47

I almost think that is why Rowling gave the spell the initials "AK" in the first place. It's the wizard world's version of the Kalashnikov.

Considering it's primarily used by bad guy revolutionaries....there might be some merit to that hypothesis.

See, I am not just an ugly child of uncertain though no doubt illegitimate parentage, 8-)

Dumbledore Apparates repeatedly while fighting Voldemort to avoid A Ks.

Actually, they way it was described was completely different with all other depictions of apparition in canon. There was some fan speculation about it, but since it was never brought up in canon we'll never know.

Well, he gets kudos for mentioning the others, but why doesn't anyone ever bother mentioning the communists? Were they okay to gas?

No. They were not. You are right about that, a lot of people do forget that they, the Communists and the Russian PO Ws were exterminated as well.

I think Americans sometimes get into the habit of thinking all communists are Stalinist or naive n00bs who don't know how nasty communism can get. I mean, I'm Canadian and in high school we covered Canadian socialism in the form of the Winnipeg riots and a little bit of modern Russian history and that was it as far as political theory went; presumably American high schools do pretty much the same thing, covering their main rival in the 20th century and homegrown movements with a brief examination of Maoism, and anyone who isn't an autodidactic history nut doesn't do much extracurricular reading on the European or South American movements.

Entirely understandable, seeing as I don't exactly seek out books on trigonometry in my spare time.

edited 3rd Sep '12 11:16:32 AM by FurikoMaru

HMPOR Harry said trigonometry was easy. :/ Is that true?

Not if all of your training your whole life has been focused on understanding why humans make the decisions they do and fields related to those kinds of questions.

Or maybe I'm just a little mentally-scrambled. The instant anything to do with numbers comes up - it doesn't even have to be proper math, just using numbers to represent something else - my brain decides to stop recording faithfully. It's like throwing a snowball at a living Sun; it might know something had happened, but it'd be fucked if it knew what.

edited 3rd Sep '12 12:59:46 PM by FurikoMaru

For a math-type, trig is easy once you get it. It just requires a few new concepts off the algebra track, which I imagine is why it's considered difficult.

Once we started talking about imaginary numbers in high school my brain basically went kaput. Anything after that is just so much noise.

The Rule of Three says that you use at most three examples of anything. Mentioning the communists would've been four.

It would have taken quite a while to list all the groups targeted in the holocaust. I think it's clear from context that it's not meant to be exhaustive.

I'm not even sure why trig is considered a separate subject. Are angles that difficult a concept?

edited 4th Sep '12 7:42:15 AM by storyyeller

Well, trig is notable in that it introduces the sin/cos/tan functions, and the various math surrounding them. It's a new intersection of geometry and algebra.

Trig's pretty easy once you memorize SOH-CAH-TOA. Unless you go into polar coordinates, those are tricky if you have trouble with imaginary numbers.

Yeah, trig's not especially difficult if you can remember the basic trig functions and how they map to each other. It still ought to be taught far earlier than it is, but I digress...

edited 4th Sep '12 7:10:53 PM by Exetera

Before the trigonometry deviation, regards Dumbledore Apparating in combat during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries:

It's described exactly like other Apparition: he turns on the spot and appears elsewhere. This is exactly the way other incidences of Apparition are described.

I don't think there was any popping noise though.