Professor Skies
February 16, 2019 5:43 AM
Advanced Class - Something For Nothing by Professor Skies
“Good afternoon,” Selina addressed the advanced class. “Today, we will be revisiting Gamp’s Law, and trying to decipher what it can tell us about the nature of magic.” The students had been taught the Law and its five principal exceptions during their intermediate studies, contrasting that Law with the law - as in what was impossible versus forbidden.“One way of summarising the five principal exceptions to Gamp’s Law is that these items, food for example, ‘cannot be created out of nothing.’ Now, what implication does that give us?” she asked, calling on people until she got the desired response - that other things, not excluded by said Law, could be.
“Today we will be asking… is this true? Do conjured objects really ‘come from nothing’?
“The Plax Principle points out the falsehood of this. If things came from nothing, then surely things would pop into existence all the time, and they simply don’t. Things come into being only we focus our energy and direct our magic. As any of you who have tried to conjure things on an empty stomach, or overstretched yourself with extra practise will know, it definitely doesn’t feel like nothing. This point was largely put aside. Gamp refuted that of course nothing didn’t literally mean ‘nothing’ and that pointing out we are all using magic to achieve things is a bit like pointing out we walk by having feet - i.e. unremarkable.
“History largely sided with Gamp. We see that we can create objects in previously empty space and that is considered as good as ‘from nothing,’” Selina felt it was an interesting bit of social studies that Gamp had been Pureblood and Plax had not been, but refrained from bringing this up. Now didn’t feel like the time.
“When we consider making something ‘out of empty space’ we are clearly concerned with things on a scale smaller than the human eye can see. Wizards have not much concerned themselves with this, but non-magical scientists have. It turns out there isn’t really any such thing as an empty space. The world is full of particles smaller than we can see. Out in space, things are a little different. Space is a vacuum, which was commonly conceived to be ‘nothingness’ - there is certainly very little in a vacuum, nothing as convenient as oxygen, for example, but there are still particles, smaller than we can see.
“So, is it possible, that when talk about creating something from nothing, we are actually talking about creating something from these particles? Putting it in very simple terms, physics says that when you pour energy into a system, it can create new pairs of matter and anti-matter.” She wasn’t going to try to explain what anti-matter was. The name seemed about as self-explanatory as it needed to be. “Non-magical scientists have worked out the maths on this - that a sufficiently high powered light beam could pull apart a vacuum, and cause it to break down into its constituent parts, these tiny particles, which - when squeezed in this way - would start to produce more particles, until you end up with more than you started with.
“Now, all of this is happening only in theory, and in a vacuum, and on a very small scale. But could it be an explanation that applies to what we do when we create conjured objects? Magic is, after all, a highly concentrated beam of energy.
“What I would like you to do today it to consider whether this is an adequate explanation for how we conjure things. The full science papers, and summaries of them, are available at the back of the room for anyone who wants to understand this more in depth.
“As you answer this question, I would like you to consider whether this explains both what we can do but also what we can’t. You may discuss theories with each other. At the end of this module, you will write an essay outlining two scientific theories and how they relate to magic, with examples of what they explain and what they fail to. You won’t have to write about this particular theory, but it will be an option.
“You may begin.”
OOC: Science was stolen from the following sources and then mangled.
This gives a pretty good explanation of the experiment described by Selina in this post. The first box on this page also summarises/backs up the ‘something from nothing’ physics.
I am always happy to help and talk through class content if anyone finds this hard or gets stuck.
Subthreads: I like the nothing theory by Winston Pierce, Crotalus
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Professor Skies
Advanced Class - Something For Nothing
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Professor Skies
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Winston Pierce, Crotalus
March 19, 2019 10:43 AM
I like the nothing theory by Winston Pierce, Crotalus
Winston, quite frankly, did not care where conjured items came from. He’d be able to raise his hand and answer that objects that were not food could come from nothing (or rather, magic, but Winston felt this was as obvious and needless of specifying as Gamp did) and that was about as much as he thought he really needed to know on the topic. He certainly did not need to be studying muggle things to better understand how magic worked. Muggles did not know there even was magic so how could they possibly be useful? Clearly any conclusions they came up with must be flawed, seeing as they were entirely unaware of one of the most powerful forces in the world around them.He was therefore a bit unclear on what exactly it was he was supposed to be considering for the lesson. That magic changed air into objects? Or could he argue that magic really was creating something from nothing? Was there any evidence of that? How could you even test it?
He just couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that there was enough air to actually make a thing out of, even using magic. He knew air existed because he breathed it, and the wind pushed it around, but it wasn’t solid, and most of the time it was only noticeable when it was too thin, like at the top of a mountain, or too thick like of hot humid days. It was easier to to think the magic created it from nothing at all and pushed the air out of the way.
Well, he supposed he could see if he noticed it being harder to conjure something at a high altitude versus during a humid day at sea level, but he couldn’t exactly do that right now.
Instead he just sighed and turned to the person seated next to him. “We don’t have to write anything down for this, right? She said the essay was at the end of the module. So we’re just talking about it?”
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Winston Pierce, Crotalus
I like the nothing theory
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Simon Mordue, Crotalus
March 20, 2019 9:57 PM
I think I'd be suspicious of people just giving me things. by Simon Mordue, Crotalus
Simon was, on the whole, very pleased with his social standing. With it came many advantages: he was guaranteed a comfortable home, guaranteed connections in whatever sort of career he went into, as good as guaranteed an attractive and prestige-bringing wife someday, guaranteed to spend his life surrounded by beautiful things generally. However, his father (probably alarmed at the possibility of having a son as decadent and useless as his brother had been, before his father’s brother had abruptly ceased to be a subject the Mordue family acknowledged the existence of) had been careful to stress to him for as long as he could remember, his social standing also came with expectations and responsibilities.The responsibilities were enormous, or would be, when Simon was old enough to have them pushed onto him. When, for whatever reason, he couldn’t sleep, the thought of them sometimes made Simon feel frozen in place in his bed with his eyes on the canopy above him, as helpless as a butterfly pinned to a card in a collector’s shadowbox. They did not, however, seem to him to be things which necessarily involved a need to know Transfiguration theory, which he thought made it rather unfair that one of the expectations his father had for him was that he should complete his RATS in it.
The Plax Principle made no sense to him. Things only popped into existence when something made them do so. There had to be a first cause of things, and in the case of conjuring, obviously it was the wizard. Wizards used magic, turned it into things – this, he assumed, with only the vaguest ideas of stuff he had read once to support it, was why conjured objects didn’t last forever. Things went back to their proper forms eventually, like ice melting, or plants decomposing into fertilizer for the soil they had come out of. Of course, there were spells to make things decompose more slowly, or ice to stay frozen, but those were like…stoppers. Like an umbrella blocking the natural progression of rain onto his person.
The Muggle idea made even less sense to him. Particles smaller than they could see…an empty space that wasn’t empty, splitting emptiness – ‘pouring energy’? Energy did not work like that. At least, unless ‘energy’ was used as a synonym for ‘coffee’ instead of ‘magic.’ Magic, however, could not readily be poured, in and of itself. Unless, if one went to his earlier thought, and thought about conjuring water in Charms, which was for some reason Charms and not Conjuring in Transfiguration….
This was making his brain hurt. He wanted it to stop that. It didn’t seem to care.
“That’s my understanding, yes,” he said when Winston asked for clarification that they didn’t have to write anything yet. ‘Yet’ was an unpleasant word, implying an unpleasant future, but at the moment, it was the best thing they had going for them. “We can read papers back there, if we feel particularly virtuous, but it doesn’t seem to be required.” He flipped through a few pages of textbook primarily to look as though he were doing something studious if Skies was watching. “So. Would you care to open the discussion?” he asked, passing that particular Bludger back to Winston to give himself another moment to think of anything in particular that sounded smart enough to say to his roommate.
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Simon Mordue, Crotalus
I think I'd be suspicious of people just giving me things.
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