Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.

And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.

You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.

You had to stay and fight.

"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."

Hermione looked up from the graph paper, her face surprised. "That's real? "

"Yeah," Harry said, "just hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of the stuff, we could use it to build a space elevator all the way up to geosynchronous orbit or higher, and in terms of delta-v that's halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Plus we could throw out solar power satellites like confetti."

Hermione was frowning again. "Is this stuff safe? "

"I don't see why it wouldn't be," Harry said. "A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -"

"I know what graphite is, Harry," Hermione said. She brushed her hair back absentmindedly, her eyebrows furrowed as she stared at the sheet of paper.

Harry reached into a pocket of his robes, and produced a white thread tied to two small gray plastic rings at either end. He'd added drops of superglue where the thread met either ring, to make it all a single object that could be Transfigured as a whole. Cyanoacrylate, if Harry remembered correctly, worked by covalent bonds, and that was as close to being a "solid object" as you ever got in a world ultimately composed of tiny individual atoms. "When you're ready," Harry said, "try to Transfigure this into a set of aligned buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings."

"All right..." Hermione said slowly. "Harry, I feel like I just missed something."

Harry shrugged helplessly. Maybe you're just tired. He knew better than to say it out loud, though.

Hermione laid her wand against one plastic ring, and stared for a while.

Two small circles of glittering diamond lay on the table, connected by a long black thread.

"It changed," said Hermione. She sounded like she was trying to be enthusiastic but had run out of energy. "Now what?"

Harry felt a bit deflated by his research partner's lack of passion, but did his best not to show it; maybe the same process would work in reverse to cheer her up. "Now I test it to see if it holds weight."

There was an A-frame Harry had rigged up to do an earlier experiment with diamond rods - you could make solid diamond objects easily, using Transfiguration, they just wouldn't last. The earlier experiment had measured whether Transfiguring a long diamond rod into a shorter diamond rod would allow it to lift a suspended heavy weight as it contracted, i.e., could you Transfigure against tension, which you in fact could.

Harry carefully looped one circle of glittering diamond over the thick metal hook at the top of the rig, then attached a thick metal hanger to the bottom ring, and then started attaching weights to the hanger.

(Harry had asked the Weasley twins to Transfigure the apparatus for him, and the Weasley twins had given him an incredulous look, like they couldn't figure out what sort of prank he could possibly want that for, but they hadn't asked any questions. And their Transfigurations, according to them, lasted for around three hours, so Harry and Hermione still had a while left.)

"One hundred kilograms," Harry said about a minute later. "I don't think a steel thread this thin would hold that. It should go up much higher, but that's all the weight I've got."

There was a further silence.

Harry straightened up, and went back to their table, and sat down in his chair, and ceremoniously made a check mark next to 'Buckytubes'. "There," Harry said. " That one worked."

"But it's not really useful , Harry, is it?" Hermione said from where she was sitting with her head resting in her hands. "I mean, even if we gave it to a scientist they couldn't learn how to make lots of buckytubes from studying ours."

"They might be able to learn something, " Harry said. "Hermione, look at it, that little tiny thread holding up all that weight, we just made something that no Muggle laboratory could make -"