Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

Chapter 28: Reductionism

"Okay," Harry said, swallowing. "Okay, Hermione, it's enough, you can stop."

The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn't changed shape or color at all, even though she was concentrating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -

"Hermione, stop! It's not going to work, Hermione, I don't think we can make things that don't exist yet!"

Slowly, Hermione's hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.

"I thought I felt it," she said in a bare whisper. "I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second."

There was a lump in Harry's throat. "You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard."

"I probably was," she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said 'ALZHEIMER'S CURE'.

They couldn't have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn't enchant the targets - it wouldn't Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a nonmagical pill, one that worked for ordinary material reasons. They could have secretly made pills for a Muggle science lab, let them study the pills and try to reverse-engineer them before the Transfiguration wore off... no one in either world would need to know that magic had been involved, it would just be another scientific breakthrough...

It hadn't been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn't respect mere patterns of atoms that much, they didn't think of unenchanted material things as objects of power. If it wasn't magical, it wasn't interesting.

Earlier, Harry had very secretly - he hadn't even told Hermione - tried to Transfigure nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler. (He'd tried to produce a desktop nanofactory, of course, not tiny self-replicating assemblers, Harry wasn't insane.) It would have been godhood in a single shot if it'd worked.

"That was it for today, right?" said Hermione. She was slumped back in her chair, leaning her head against the back; and her face showed her tiredness, which was very unusual for Hermione. She liked to pretend she was limitless, at least when Harry was around.

"One more," Harry said cautiously, "but that one's small, plus it might actually work. I saved it for last because I was hoping we could end on an up note. It's real stuff, not like phasers. They've already made it in the laboratory, not like the Alzheimer's cure. And it's a generic substance, not specific like the lost books you tried to Transfigure copies of. I made a diagram of the molecular structure to show you. We just want to make it longer than it's ever been made before, and with all the tubes aligned, and the endpoints embedded in diamond." Harry produced a sheet of graph paper.

Hermione sat back up, took it, and studied it, frowning. "These are all carbon atoms? And Harry, what's the name? I can't Transfigure it if I don't know what it's called."

Harry made a disgusted face. He was still having trouble getting used to that sort of thing, it shouldn't matter what something was named if you knew what it was. "They're called buckytubes, or carbon nanotubes. It's a kind of fullerene that was discovered just this year. It's about a hundred times stronger than steel and a sixth of the weight."