Why would it 'have to'? Seriously, I don't understand.

 

And thus we get to the crux of the argument lol.

---------- Post automerged at 07:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:34 PM ----------

To phrase this in a different, maybe more understandable, way for the Nuke>Shield camp: If a medical examiner investigates an AK'd body what do you think they'd find?

 

According to the first chapter of Goblet of Fire, it would appear they died of natural causes.

 

What if someone made a spell that acted like a nuke? Would that spell then be harder to block with a protego than a muggle nuke because THIS nuclear reaction was spell caused?

I do like the eloquence of magic > muggle, but I think that magic often does indeed cause a physical reaction. When Dumbledore casts a fire whip at Voldemort, that whip would have burned when it hit. Would it have caused magical burns, harder to heal somehow than if Dumbledore had made a whip of oil and then lit it on fire the muggle way?

 

Depends on the spell. If the spell is such that it can be blocked by a shield it will be blocked. If not, it won't. The same would go if the nuke itself was enchanted somehow. When you involve magic, then the result depends on the actual magic used. Otherwise, magic trumps whatever it is.

 

So long as the wizard shielding himself knew what he was doing, a spell that exactly reproduced the effects of a muggle nuke would still be negated.

 

I don't think that's it. Even if it is described that way. Natural causes can be anything, especially if it's someone old. There actually IS a reason. Someone who is like 90 could die of a heart attack, the flu, an aneurysm, whatever, all can be listed as natural causes.

It's just nicer to say that grandma died of natural causes than to say that the blood vessels in her brain ruptured, or whatever the doctors discovered the cause was.

I doubt the AK inflicts random fatal conditions to whoever it hits, and the description of those hit by it doesn't reflect that either.

A better description is just that it kills causing no observable injury, and no cause can be found by examining the body.

 

Ideally? If a medical examiner opened up the body of someone who was otherwise healthy but was hit with an AK, they wouldn't be able to determine cause of death.

"Coroner's Log: Patient STFU WITH SCIENCE IN MY MAGIC. Subject appears to be dead, despite the fact that all of his organs are fully functional. He has not suffered (insert list of everything that can cause people to die). He merely appears to have been alive at one moment, and then no longer living in the next with no discernable cause."

 

Magic trumps the mundane in the Harry Potter universe anyway. And it is because of this reason that mundane dangers, be they weapons or environments, wouldn't be a problem for a sufficiently skilled and prepared wizard.

 

Yeah, I expect the deaths got classed as natural causes because they couldn't find any any evidence of foul play, so just calling it natural causes and declaring the case closed was the simplest way to resolve it and move on.

 

I would say, though, for those wanting some limits on the protection, that if I wanted to break a shield charm with fire, I might use the wizard nuke, a.k.a. Fiendfyre.

 

Okay Sesc, thatsource you gave? It only refers to illnesses and injuries caused by mundane means. And sure, a broekn arm or something, that's easy to fix. But instantaneous things that kill you will still work.

And as for Rowling's quote: I decided that, broadly speaking, wizards would have the power to correct or override 'mundane' nature, but not 'magical' nature.

Broadly speaking she said.

Nothing natural about a nuke.

 

Eh, you bolded, italicised, and underlined the wrong word in that quote. The physics behind nuclear reactions is after all observable, quantifiable, and utilises mundane components in its construction and execution. Maybe if two insane wizards tried to tinker with or improve a nuclear weapon could it effect a shield charm in the way that you wish. Other than that its hard seeing a protection spell (magic) not protecting against something that it is naturally superior to (mundane nature).

 

How is a nuke not natural? Fissile material reaching supercriticality and causing a nuclear fission chain reaction is completely natural. That's what those things do, naturally. Cause and effect.

As a matter of fact, everything that muggles have done/made is natural. All our technology is essentially the result of us putting matter in a certain order and letting nature take its course.

Damn, ninja'd.

 

What about the aftermath of a nuke? Even if the shield holds up against the nuke you're going to have to release the charm eventually, and I doubt that radiation poisoning is something that wizards have a charm for yet. So even if the nuke loses to the shield charm, the wizard loses to nuclear winter.

 

Again, I would like to point out that she said Broadly speaking.

Also, I thought most of DLP hated the revisionist Canon that goes on in Pottermore?

 

Only if you follow the theory that wizards are affected by radiation.

 

Forgive me if I just skimmed over it, but I haven't seen anyone try and answer the question of whether a random wizard could vanish the planet Earth?

 

Except that's not revisionist. It's consistent with the way magic is applied in canon, and its only purpose is to remove a great deal of ambiguity.

 

Well. In the yes column:

There is certainly magic that can span the length and breadth of a country (the Taboo, the Trace for example), so it doesn't seem impossible that there could be magic that could span the entire planet.
Magic beats non-magic.

In the no column:

The Earth is not entirely non-magic. First of all, there's the question of whether magic is a force you can manipulate (like Magneto manipulating gravity), which would be a strong limitation in this example - I can certainly accept not being able to use magic to destroy magic.
If you don't like the 'magical field' theory, then there's all the magical flora and fauna, which I think would be implicitly included in the idea of Vanishing a planet.
Of course, the strongest limitation would be that in-universe, who the fuck would want to Vanish the planet they were standing on, and out of universe it's pretty shit story telling.