History Headscratchers / HarryPotterAndTheMethodsOfRationality

*** This definitely seems to be what Harry believes the stone does, in any case.

*** Beyond all the good points you made about the Weasleys' attitude toward Muggles, you also make a good point about Ron. Out of all the Weasleys, he is the one who marries a Muggle-born, after all.
**** Interpretation of this depends on ratio of muggleborn to purebloods.
***** Exactly my point. Of of the Weasleys, Ron is the only one who marries a muggle-born.
****** The biggest hint in the canon is how muggles are treated. Two words, memory charms. We are the culmination of our experiences and yet Barty Crouch repeatedly wipes the memory of the grounds keeper guy with nary a second thought. Wizards can heal pretty much every illness imaginable and yet muggles are out there with alzeimers and cancer. As far as I'm concerned wizards dont have long lives because of inate magic, but due to magical healing. There existence and lack of caring makes them responsible for the short lives of every muggle.
******* But Wizards also do things involving the mind to other wizards. They let Dementors at their prisoners after all. They just don't have the same opinions on the mind as Muggles do.

*** Really the dangerous part was that tons of weight was hanging off that little rope of transfigured carbon nanotubes and when they changed back to thread it was definitely going to snap and lots of really heavy weights falling is always kind of dangerous, even if it's just a few feet of the ground.
*** Carbon nanotubes are nanoscience; the molecules could have separated and been inhaled by anyone in the area. This is dangerous due to real-life concerns about nanoscience and in-universe transfiguration sickness.

*** Perhaps those author's notes [[spoiler:didn't mean Voldemort literally, but simply meant that Quirrel was the primary powerful dark character with antagonistic schemes.]] (though I had no opportunity to read those notes myself)

*** That's all assuming the author isn't lying.

*** Utilitarianism did tell him that the hat should die. The hat wasn't just neutral about living. It was against it.

*** There are several canon reasons it wouldn't work. The issue here is that they were not explained to Harry before he dismissed them.

*** Well the [[ItMakesSenseInContext plants were possibly people at the time]]
*** Unless he plans to become god within the next half a second, someone is going to die. If he implements a partial solution, he can save some of the people who would have died waiting for the full solution.
*** That one's easy. He doesn't want anyone to die, and he sure as hell isn't going to do it himself if he put up a fight with "killing" the hat. How on Earth would he live with himself even if he was somehow capable of killing one half of the population to save the other, let alone convincing people that it's the right thing to do. It's the classic "not in my yard" defense.

*** I also get the feeling that no matter how young rational!Harry wouldn't try talking to an animal with such a simple nervous system.
**** In canon, the snake started the conversation.

*** That would makes sense if Draco were upset about socio-politics like house Malfoy losing power to Grangers of the world. But he was upset about having to "sacrifice" a false belief and either disagree or pretend around Lucius. Except the belief Was. Not. False. He doesn't have to pretend or argue. Their relationship is not in danger and he doesn't need to test the patronus. It makes no sense for him to feel he does.
**** Lucius' and Draco-pre-experiment's belief was predicated on wizardry being passed strictly through purebloods interbreeding with purebloods, and anyone else who had access to magic having acquired it through some illegitimate means that was making magic weaker over time. Aside from other less obvious differences, Draco having "sacrificed" his belief in strict blood purism means that if Draco were to, e.g. learn Lucius had been somehow misled into believing he had found the source of non-pureblood's magic and was preparing to spend a good chuck of resources eliminating it, would now have to either plead ignorance and watch his father blow resources on something he knows to be futile, or risk confronting his father about the nature of magic transmission which could lead to Lucius possibly cutting Draco out of the family or at least out of real power, or worse. Draco is anguished because at first he only sees that Harry has made it impossible for him to in good conscience support fully the positions of his father, and has to have it pointed out that he's also made it possible for Draco to avert a crisis he wouldn't have even noticed as his old self.

*** It's actually a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep-wake_syndrome rare neurological condition in real-life]]. RealityIsUnrealistic?
*** The author has this problem in real life, one of the author's notes about a hundred chapters in mentions he finally got meds that work to treat it.

*** Unless magic has similar effects to ionizing radiation.

*** It could be the result of an Epistatic Gene. The squib is missing the gene so even if they have the two recessive alleles they are unable to express it.

*** Because very few wizards have any ounce of logic or scientific background. Scientific method just isn't something that's taught to wizards, so that just leaves muggle-borns, and most people still aren't very scientific. The wizards are told the rules, and they follow them without seeing why. Also, Harry was only able to do partial transfiguration based on an in-depth knowledge of quantum physics, something wizards just don't know anything about. Also, that's kind of the entire point of the fanfic, isn't it? That in the actual canon of ''Literature/HarryPotter'', no one actually does try to scientifically approach science; if they did, they'd notice that a lot of things don't quite make sense. So the author is running with that and showing one person who actually does try to apply science to magic, and is baffled when no one else has even tried what seems obvious to him.
*** The amount of knowledge necessary to do partial transfiguration is insane. You can do complete transfiguration believing in Aristotelian physics, but currently known and generally accepted physics is not sufficient for partial transfiguration. It won't work if you believe that time exists as an explicit dimension. It is well within the realm of possibility that no wizard or muggle in on the [[Masquerade]] even heard of timeless physics.
**** But if it's only a theory to begin with and the only thing in it's favor is that it hasn't been proven wrong, then how can Harry be so sure that Timeless Physics would allow partial transmutation in the first place? Isn't that the equivalent of taking a controversial theory as [[Series/TheColbertReport pure truthiness]] and not accepting an answer otherwise, even if it does cause the meltdown of reality as we know it? That seems like a big ass case of Harry Bias right there, especially right after Harry learned his lesson about playing around with Transfiguration and "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" even earlier.
***** Harry didn't have to ''know'' that timeless physics was right, he was ''experimenting''. He was testing the hypothesis that partial transfiguration is a conceptual limit and he tried several views/approaches - several were disproved, one of them happened to be right. That's how science works, you check your ideas with experiments.\\

*** Quirrel's help was writing in the rules that you could ask other people in you army to help strategize and both Draco and Harry had too big of egos to even consider doing this.
**** There was nothing in the rules explicit about that, as far as we know. The help was that he had assigned to Hermione's army all those people that Draco Malfoy himself had considered possibilities for the place of General (Zabini, Goldstein, Macmillan). So in short, the help was she had been given the best lieutenants there were.

*** StarWars is special, [[NoTrueScotsman obviously.]]
*** In chapter 28, "phasers" are one of the things Hermione tried to transfigure and Harry lists Captain Picard as one of his heroes in chapter 52. (I wonder if Harry hated missing TNG's fifth season while being without televisions at Hogwarts. Maybe he had his parents tape it for him.)

*** Eliezer said that he's ignoring dates and times when it comes to science&scientific theories - he's presenting the most modern available view, even if it's incompatible with the 1991 timeline. If you want an in-universe explanation, just assume that those theories/discoveries have been made earlier in MoRverse.

*** "A Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers. Kind of the opposite of Muggle-born wizards, but Squibs are quite unusual."

*** Uh... but isn't there in the book Lucius Malfoy having a Peacock Patronus?
*** No, Lucius Malfoy owns a white peacock. It is not a patronus.

*** Actually, Harry gets his cash back [[spoiler:when Hermione dies]] and [[spoiler:the Potter and Malfoy houses]] ally against [[spoiler:Dumbledore]].

*** An alternative to that: the comed-tea is magically tied to intuition, so that, when your intuition picks up on surprising events to happen in the next few seconds, it urges you to drink.

*** I think you're forgetting that Quirrell has a rule about no suspicious enquiries about him. Besides, the author has stated that this fic will only last first year and, letting Quirrell continue to teach is hardly "destroying all but a remnant" of him.
**** Source? I (random other person) was under the impression that the only thing he'd said about year 1 was that [=MoR=] Year 1 would cover the events of Canon Years 1-7, not that it would end there.

*** Except that the conversation about Hermione happened after the poisoning of the bones. The conversation in question is the discussion of rockets and other muggle technology and their involvement in the [[spoiler:Rescuing Bellatrix from Azkaban]] incident.

*** Because he felt too good for a 5th year book but not a 7th year book? I don't actually recall the event you are referencing, but I think it may have been part of a deception to cover up the true meaning of why he was sending the message...
**** Now it's me who isn't sure what event ''you'' are referencing, but I meant the one before the Taboo Tradeoffs battle when Harry figures out why potions work.
***** Found it. Apparently he needed to check a hypothesis he had and was too lazy to go all the way down to the library so he just paid a sickle to a 7th year to borrow his book for 5 minutes. Likely he wanted 7th year as it's more advanced than 5th year.

** "For example, call back… Voldemort – no, wait, forget it. He would just lie about where the Chamber of Secrets is and send us all to our deaths…"
** "… My parents."

*** No, that wouldn't be able to falsify Harry's primary hypothesis for the nature of the Resurrection Stone; since he thinks that the 'ghost' is just a projection made from memory, setting something up that you knew about would yield exactly the same results whether there was an actual afterlife being contacted or only a memory.
**** Trivial: find someone about to die, ask them to write down a secret phrase and put it in an envelope. After they die, bring them back and ask them about it (remember, you don't know the phrase), then once they've answered check it against the contents of the envelope. Insert 6-hour waits as needed to avoid potential time-turner nonsense. Mind you, the test could still be fooled if the stone were somehow storing "save-states" of every wizard who ever died in a similar way to horcruxes, but it would still clearly discriminate between that and the stone working off the memory of the ''holder''. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful way to test the save-state case against the true communication case, however, because both would result in the person brought back having access to anything they had in life plus potentially more (cross-contamination and afterlife experiences, respectively). At that point, the question would really become whether there was a meaningful difference between the two at all, or whether the stone might as well be the IT Crowd version of the afterlife.

*** It's really the wrong section for telling people the MST3KMantra. You can tell because it's titled "headscratchers".

[[WMG: '''Note:''' Traditional TV Tropes practice is to add new headscatchers to the bottom of the page.]]

* According to [[Wikipedia]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Barbour#Timeless_physics timeless physics]] was discovered in 1999. If this takes place in 1991-1992, how does Harry know about it? Did he work it out himself?

* Squib is someone who has magical parent but no magical abilities. muggle is someone who has no magical parents and no magical abilities. So
how can a child of a magical and a muggle parent be "either magical, or squbi, or muggle?" If one parent is magical, the child can't be muggle anymore.

** I always thought that differences between purebloods/hal-bloods and muggleborn are purely social and cultural.

* Did anyone figure out the code Harry used on himself when he sent a message to his past self? I know what the message was, but not how the code he wrote was supposed to convey that.

** Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the precise attachment/configuration of the rocketbroom was ever described in the chapter. With that in mind, the rocket might well have just been attached so as to protrude far enough beyond the end of the broomstick where the flame wouldn't go near it. Failing that, it may be common practice to ward broomsticks against fire (certainly possible, and rather sensible) or Quirrel may have placed a special set of protections on the broom they intended to promptly ride through a firefight regardless of his knowledge of the rocket (wizards are often insensible, but Quirrel is a notable exception).

** According to MoR!blood purists, the weakening in magic anyone could observe was caused by dilution of blood, but since Harry somewhat proved that magic is not weakening because of that reason, and that muggelborns are not weaker than purebloods, Lucius' whole castle in the air crumbles, thus Draco is pretty shocked.
The problem is that interbreeding in the MoR-verse is not a cause for loss of subjective magical power.

*** According to MoR!blood purists, the weakening in magic anyone could observe was caused by dilution of blood, but since Harry somewhat proved that magic is not weakening because of that reason, and that muggelborns are not weaker than purebloods, Lucius' whole castle in the air crumbles, thus Draco is pretty shocked.

** According to MoR!blood purists, the weakening in magic anyone could observe was caused by dilution of blood, but since Harry somewhat proved that magic is not weakening because of that reason, and that muggelborns are not weaker than purebloods, Lucius' whole castle in the air crumbles, thus Draco is pretty shocked.

* How did the fire from the rocket not burn the bristles of the broomstick?