I think I'd also add that we don't really see wizards ever run out of energy so the idea of too much energy doesn't even make sense. In GoF, Harry spends basically an entire day casting the summoning charm. He starts sometime before lunch, skips lunch to keep practicing, and even when he stops to go to class he is still summoning things under the table during class before having a short dinner and resuming practice until 2am. He is consistently getting better at the charm throughout.

I think maybe the idea comes from the fact that charms tend to wear off of objects over time, but look at how long those charms last. You are talking wearing out over years in many of the objects we see. Think of a broom and how much use it gets vs how long those charms last. You'd run out of bullets and bombs before that shield charm wears out.

 

Yeah, it destroys the whole kinetic energy argument. Conjuring even a single glass of water would require the energy of numerous nukes. And even Hagrid can conjure enough water to put out a house fire.

 

I'm very, very on the wizard side in this whole debate, but I've always thought that conjuration wasn't exactly pulling from literally nothing, but pulling from a kind of... aether, in the classical sense.

I remember a line from DH, when McGonagall has to answer the Ravenclaw common room riddle, which was "where do Vanished objects go?" Her answer - "into non-being, which is to say, everything."

 

Even if you were assuming that, there are also spells like engorgio, geminio and transfiguration spells that clearly make there be quite a bit more mass than there was before.

 

The whole premise of conjuration being the creation of matter in that sense is locking yourself into a paradigm of the mechanical instead of conceptual. Quite muggle of you.

 

The whole point was that if we looked at it that way, wizards would still be superior.

 

I think that's because if you look at it as conceptual then the muggles have no chance. Physics would have zero effect on magic.

 

Except the argument being made is mechanical, that wizards could only block a certain amount of bullets/explosions because of energy. If they are making that argument then the argument that magic is creating matter out of nothing can also be made to disprove it.