I've been converted. I now support the idea that magic is physical energy. That wizards have a quantifiable amount of energy that they can use.

Let's see:

Let's say a pretty average spell for an adult wizard to use would be to use "Aguamenti" to conjure 8 litres of water - his daily water intake. We know that this water is real water as we've seen characters use it as drinking water.

Creating 8 litres of water out of nothing, using the equation E=mc^2, and bearing in mind that 1ml of water = 1g, means this aguamenti spell has used:

7.19 X 10^17 Joules.

That's in the same ballpark as the Krakatoa eruption, which was 8 x 10^17 Joules.

But that's just one spell. Let's assume that on average, a wizard casts two spells an hour, and is awake for 14 hours a day. Let's also assume that Aguamenti is a pretty standard spell.

That gives us an average wizard's daily energy expenditure as:

2 x 10^19 Joules

For comparison, annual energy production in the U.S.A. is 1.4 x 10^19 Joules.

Now let's go annual. 365 days a year gives us:

Annual energy use of a wizard: 7 x 10^21 Joules.

Comparisons:

Total world annual energy consumption in 2010: 5.0x1020 Joules (a whole order of magnitude less).

Much closer is...

Estimated energy contained in the world's natural gas reserves as of 2010: 6.9×1021 Joules.

Finally, let's go lifetime. Let's say conservatively that an average wizard lives 120 years. This brings us to:

Average lifetime energy consumption of a wizard:

8 x 10^23 Joules

Comparison:

5×1023 Joules: Approximate energy released in the formation of the Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatán Peninsula.

That's right. In an average wizard's lifetime, a wizard uses almost twice as much energy as can produce a global extinction event. At this point we're just three orders of magnitude short of the total energy output of the sun per second.

And bear in mind this is just average. It's far from an upper bound. We know that wizards can use far more magic than two spells an hour quite casually.

So yeah. Mknote, you've made a believer out of me. Magic is energy.

Now, who was saying that a shield charm couldn't withstand a bullet?

Source for comparisons.

(To anticipate: Even if you come up with some obscure mechanism for how aguamenti functions such that it hasn't created mass/energy, we know that wizards can create mass in general so as an objection it would miss the mark).

 

It isn't even close to April, Taure.

 

Har har har.

I've never said that magic in Harry Potter can be explained by real-world physics, and if I did it was retarded. Obviously if magic is explainable in some manner by something akin to science (and while I'll admit that I fervently believe that it is, it's not the only possible interpretation), it's some funky "new" physics that doesn't exist in the real world. Either that or wizards are fuck-ton powerful, which is precisely what I want to avoid at all costs.

Now, if you want to have a serious discussion, I'm fully willing to outline what my own "Theory of Magic" is (it has some striking parallels to The Force of Star Wars fame, actually), but all I get from your post is rather blatant trolling. That aside, I'm glad you actually crunched the numbers (couldn't have been easy for a philosopher ), and I'm quite interested in the results. I knew explaining it by conventional physics would result in absurd conclusions (Magic? Absurd? Absurd!), but I didn't know it'd quite go to those extremes. All the more reason to believe it's "new" physics... or no physics at all, as you believe.

 

Well, Lucky, obviously there are limits. Even if they have all that energy, you still need to use a spell to put it to work.

As there's no nuclear explosion spell, wizards can't channel that huge energy into big explosions (though Quidditch Through the Ages or Fantastic Beasts mentioned, I believe, a wizard who accidentally blew up a village).

Another limit is the various rules of magic, such as "time and space matter". Despite that huge energy, a wizard can only affect his immediate surroundings.

But within those limits it seems that a wizard has sufficient energy to overcome pretty much any natural process.

 

If you're going to throw around large quantities of energy, you might consider using proper units:

In some circles, a "jerk" is a Gigajoule, around 500x more energy than contained in the lasers for a single NIF shot (which themselves have about the chemical energy content of a jelly donut). There are 4.18 jerks per ton of high explosive.

An Aquamenti spell uses on the order of a billion jerks, meaning a yield in excess of 200 Megatons. Wizards control energies surpassing the largest weapons of mass destruction human civilization has ever conceived.

I have no idea what this is in midi-chlorians though.

 

How about we just say that:

1) Magic has rules
2) It doesn't really make sense for those rules to conform to human intuition UNLESS:
a) Humans created magic
b) Human evolution was influenced by magic
edit:
c) Magic has a feedback loop that changes it based on how it's used. This seems inelegant for various reasons.

 

I shall refer you to the quote in your signature, my friend.

 

I always considered magic to be a form of probability manipulation. Maybe a well cast spell manipulates probability to get a certain event to occur. Magic as a manipulator of quantum mechanics seems to be easier to believe than that people control enough energy to atomize the earth.

When it comes to the inability to create food, I very much prefer the idea in HPMoR that transfigured material reverts back to its base state after some time.

 

wut?

/10chr

 

That would make transfiguration almost useless.

 

I always liked the explanation that magic is dark matter/energy that wizards are capable of harnessing. Spoken spells modulate it to do casters bidding etc.
Sure it's just technobabble, but I prefer that to coherent explanations. Coherency drives us into the "single wizard produces more energy than the entire world can consume" Taure pointed out.

Since the point of all magic is energy stories is to make magic feel like something that could happen in our world technobabble should suffice.

 

Considering that the wizards bend space and time like nobody's business, breaking the laws on conservation of mass/energy isn't really all that big deal. Conjuration can be handwaved away by saying the matter simply comes from somewhere else, it's the fact that wizards can move matter that way that really breaks things.

If you go by the generally accepted rules of physics Hermione's handbag would need to have energy density close to a black hole to work, and the simple action of dragging a book out of it would require almost infinite amount of energy... Not to even mention the amount of energy needed to somehow impossibly counteract the massive forces involved in order to make the handbag look like a handbag and not explode or implode. Your asteroid impact is positively puny compared to that.

Modern science and magic don't work together. That said, it's not impossible to create a new science that works with magic, and even that has really nothing to do with the idea of wizards being somehow limited in their use of magic.

 

This is the nerdiest thread I have seen on DLP.

 

So basically Witch/Wizard burning the most potent environmentally friendly source of energy?

 

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that, purely because of the Taboo and the Trace.

 

I agree that this stipulation is Taure's head-canon.

Magical travel breaks this "local surroundings" thing quite profoundly: Wizards can Apparate over arbitrarily large distances--to Alpha Centauri, if desired--and Portkeys, Floo travel, and Vanishing Cabinets also entail magical nonlocality.

Extending to other aspects of magic, Voldemort could implant images in Harry's head over long distances. Owls somehow know to track down people over large distances. The Fidelius Charm functions equally well no matter how far away one is from the hidden location, so this is effectively a charm upon the entire Universe.

 

Sorry, will rephrase:

Wizards can only cast spells on things in their immediate surroundings. (Spells: magic using a wand and incantation). Enchanted objects, however, do not have distance limitations. This is also true of non-wand based magic e.g. Dementor numbers can affect a whole nation. That accounts for pretty much everything mentioned:

Taboo: This is a spell cast on an abstract object (a word) not a physical area. Also we don't know what it involves exactly, it might not be a spell e.g. it might involve enchanted objects.

Trace: like the taboo, it's unclear if it's a spell or something more complex e.g. involving enchanted objects.

Portkey: the portkey is in your immediate surroundings when you make it. The object of the spell is the portkey itself, not the destination. The enchanted object can affect long distances, but the spell cannot (i.e. I can't turn an object half way around the world into a portkey).

Apparition: 1. Not a spell 2. Arguably the magic is being cast on yourself, not on the destination.

Floo travel: not a spell. The fireplace must have been connected to the Floo network (i.e. enchanted) prior to travel.

Vanishing cabinets: Enchanted objects, not a spell. The spells used to create them are local, the effects are not.

Voldemort's legilimency: this is an exception explained in canon by Snape. Snape is in fact the one who tells us space matters in magic, and then refers to Harry's connection to Voldemort as a special circumstance which allows Voldemort to bypass it.

Fidelius: the charm is cast on an abstract thing - a secret - not a physical place. Secrets have no physical location.

Another example would be the Protean charm, used to create the Dark Mark and DA coins. The spell is cast locally, but the objects, once connected, can affect each other over distances.

 

I assume that Voldemort's Defense Curse is also a spell cast on an abstract thing - in this case a teaching position?

 

I see no evidence of non-locality in Harry Potter canon, nor, interestingly, evidence of violations of conservation of momentum (energy, on the other hand, is a trickier matter).

I'll post more on this when I'm not busting my head over a take-home stat mech exam.

 

I believe he meant non-locality in the common sense meaning, not the technical physical meaning.