I'm going to have to agree with Pers on this one. It seems like when I worked out the quadratic equation on my own in freshman year of high school. Sure, it was a little in advance of most of my peers, but it wasn't ground breaking by any means, I just figured it out based on all the other algebra I already knew up to that point.

My teachers said "good job," but no one flipped their shit over it.

 

The potions idea is a good idea but overly complicated. I don't see Harry's train of thought that would have gotten the idea.

Here's another option. Harry was theorizing that spells like the immobolus was causing a magical pressure on the animal and bodypart to stay together, and switching the two so quickly results in the severing of the connection the bodypart has to the donor animal and so can no longer function.

Harry's theory had never been tested before because immobolus was shown to work with switching spells between real animals and so it was assumed it was the same between an inanimate transfiguration and a real animal. While Harry theorized that being able to make a new connection with the other true living being it was switched with, is what enables the body part in an animal-animal switch to continue to function.

Harry was not very confidant that it would work so he had a back up plan. He had the snake fed a potion that makes it a familiar to whomever added some of themselves to the potion. Harry found this potion through research on the Polyjuice, the two sharing the same characteristic final ingredient.

Harry planned on switching a part of the viper with the spider to see if the spider also becomes his familar. This was never tried simply because it is a cross disciplinary experiment and hardly anyone does it.

But first he is does the pillow experiment, starting with the potion fed snake which works and then with the spider that does not.

The reason why it worked with the snake is that the familiar potion works by strengthening the natural, but usually very weak, bond that all creatures/beings share with one another. However, the potion also strengthens the bond that a body parts have with one another. This is what enabled the switching to succeed.

So Harry's hypothesis was falsified but he stumbles onto the solution anyway.

 

Whatever. When the secret sauce recipe is just Heinz ketchup, it sort of takes away from the genius. That was really my only point (a scene that just didn't work for me). I'm not that hung up over it.

 

I was actually hoping that Harry's experience with anchoring the expansions charm to a receptacle would play a part in how the transfiguration/switching spells were maintained, though even that might be too basic for others to have not thought of before .

 

I thought the switching spells worked well for the story, both as a cool thing Harry invented and as an appropriate 4th year level breakthrough. I think that feeling could be strengthened by more clearly bringing out a couple of points I thought Santi implied but never stated.
1) The whole Harry and Calypso talk about the rules concerning breeding weird species is beefed up to show that magical crossing (in a biological way) is an established field - maybe there exists a department at the Athens Academy specializing in magical breeding for example.
2) Switching spells between real animals is known to not work (they both die, or explode or something), so you can only go animate to inanimate or inanimate to inanimate.

As for point one, it would explain why it wasn't something people really messed around with, if you wanted to accomplish some cross species hybrid there were already known ways to do it. As for point two, I think is solves Pers clever work around problem (Harry bets that the Rabbit maintains its inanimate character so you can switch stuff onto it) without Harry doing magic well beyond his 4th year level in transfiguration.

 

That's not entirely the case. Neville, bless the little bugger, managed to switch parts of his body with a cactus.

Granted, there might be some plant-animal combo that's a little different, but to say switching spells don't work between two living things is proven false by canon.

 

I thought everyone was getting excited, not because Harry switched two animals legs, but that he discovered animals maintain a connection with their parts after they have been switched.

We studied subatomic particles for 75 years before we knew about quantum entanglement.

I have no problem with the discover being such a big deal.

 

I actually don`t want Harry in the Triwizard Tournament.
Better if Victor is still in it, and he has to chose who to help. His brother or his best friend.

 

And here I was all set to just drop this topic once and for all...

This shitty analogy actually makes my point. If Einstein or any other physicist could have just pulled out a wand and done the definitive experiment in five minutes (as Harry and Calypso did), there'd have been no wondering about nonlocality and hidden variables. Moreover, there'd be no excuse whatsoever for why folks debated alternative descriptions of quantum mechanics for decades afterward.

Either Harry is in a retarded Wizarding world where the obvious things haven't been tried, or an explanation is given for why he at 12 could discover something so fundamental that the man-centuries of research into transfiguration by the likes of Dumbledore, Grindelwald, and McGonagall and legions of wizards beforehand missed it. I could accept it being a combination of fortune and opportunism on Harry's part (right place, right time, right circumstances, right mindset) to see something missed by others. I can't accept that nobody would have tried an experiment of the type described.

The author doesn't have to change the scene much--hell, just add something, anything, to make me not picture Wesley Crusher as I read. And now I really will drop it (until the next boneheaded, misapplied physics analogy).

 

Nah, Viktor won't be there. With how he's viewed as the stupid one or the typical jock, he won't be a prime candidate as Durmstrang's representative.

With the way Santi is carefully handling Harry's academic and magical prowess, he'll likely be the Durmstrang champion, and that will be awesome.

Viktor will probably come along with the Durmstrang contingent to add prestige to their presence with his quidditch star status.

 

While that is true, if anyone else did the switching they would have discovered the same thing. It is extremely unlikely that you could do the former and not discover the latter.

The only way that would not have been discovered is if you switched the body parts back the way they were before changing the transfigured inanimate object back or killing the true animal. All the while not noticing the change in behavior of the transfigured inanimate object.

 

Dude, you did read the books right?

 

That's why I mentioned giving the experiment a practical application. Say...make two rabbits, cut off one's leg or vanish an organ, and then do a switching spell, leaving the rabbit in good health as a result of the missing part being replaced by a part from a transfigured animal. It's already established in the events of the chapter, the significance is just understated. A transfigured animals limbs were viably integrated without killing either the spider or the snake until the spell was canceled. More complex animals might not work, but this is essentially opening the door on the topic, Harry doesn't have to make the ultimate discovery, he just has to get the ball rolling to be good enough for the M rank. The fact that the animals were so diverse in species and biology has its own significance.

Transfiguration is permanent, so it wouldn't wear off unless canceled (or if the performing wizard died, a problem that could be solved by having the wizard do the transfiguration personally). So basically, Harry might have just discovered unlimited prosthetics/organs for everyone. People experimenting with the effects of switching spells specifically on transfigured animals sounds obscure enough, and the ramifications of it are significant without making Harry look like he just stomped Dumbledore, McGonagall, and anyone else who's mastered transfiguration.

The nuances of the discovery could be given more importance, to flesh out the idea so it doesn't seem so...easy or simple a discovery that got Harry such recognition.

 

I agree that it doesn't really make to much sense that nobody had discovered this before..

Anyway, I'm not sure if it said, but did Calypso catch the snake to see if Harry was also a Parslemouth?

 

I thought the important discovery was the transfer of instincts along with the parts, even so, that still wouldn't explain how it was never discovered before, unless it is suppose to be a case of missing the obvious for a really long time.

 

Sigh. Damn you Pers.

This was one of 2 problems that I initially had with this scene. One of the problems has already been solved, and I had really hoped this issue would just go unnoticed, or that people would sort of fall closer to Secs post when thinking about it.

Obviously, the discovery is made very easily, and, yes, it should have probably been made by someone at some point. I did give this problem a lot of thought about a year ago, but I eventually just gave up after I realized that I couldn't see a solution that wasn't either (A) too complex or (B) took the story's magical theory in a direction I didn't want it to go.

All I can say is I hope people will keep posting ideas because I still have no clue how to fix it. I'm pretty much locked into this project for future reasons, so I can't really alter it a lot. I'll keep my eye on the thread for any suggestions, but, for now, I'm probably going to work on the last bit of this chapter. Maybe something will come to me if I'm not focused so intently on trying to fix the problem.

 

Your forgetting that the tournament takes place after Victor's performance in the world cup and how good he is in Dark Arts.

 

Can't it be thought impossible due to some advanced theory, which Harry has no way of knowing (kind of like it's usually assumed that effects of 2 cars crashing into each other would be equal to them crashing into a wall with double speed)? With wizarding society's size, and their general attitude (it works/doesn't work? it's magic!) it'd be acceptable to me that nobody tried that.

That'd also require both Calypso and his professor to ridicule him when they first hear about it, I guess.