Like I say, it's a bad excuse. By all accounts conjurations should last.

The problem is that we have word of god saying that they don't.

(I suppose you could say that conjuration is really a charm, not transfiguration, so is a magical construct rather than an actual physical object. And we do see some conjuration in Charms (e.g. water conjuring charm, which, amusingly, is used by the characters for nutrition. As are expansion charms and refilling charms. The food exception to Gamp's law seems extremely trivial)).

 

If transfiguration is temporary, then transfiguring a solid into the gas is practically guaranteed to result in horrible horrible death - I remember one fic (possibly, ugh, Methods of Rationality) including McGonagall hammering in the point that you never transfigure anything into a gas for that very reason. If conjuration is temporary, then the sandwiches that Harry and Ron are given at the beginning of the second book is worse than useless, because depending on how long it would take it would either disappear from the stomach or even disappear from their body after it's digested and used to form new skin or tissue or muscle or whatever. And if transfiguration is permanent but can be reversed with finite, then feeding someone a diet of rocks transfigured into food for a couple months and then finiting them would be a most horrendous way to kill them.

All this and about a million more possible examples are what results when you put even a little bit of critical thought towards how magic works, making it exceedingly obvious that Rowling never did. Gamp's Law was an after-the-fact handwave to try to explain how Wizarding society isn't post-scarcity, and that's got more holes in it than Swiss cheese, as has already been pointed out in this thread. The only real way to try to explain all of this away is to posit that Wizarding society is extremely opposed to any sort of study of how magic works and therefore nobody in canon has any clue as to the answer to any of these questions, but that's just as flawed as any other answer.

None of these questions have answers because Rowling never gave them any thought while writing HP, because she's got no knowledge of any of the fields required to build a believable society or system of magic. Pretty much all answers that have been given are handwaves given in interviews that are contradicted by canon all over the place.

Long story thought, it's just another Taure-thread, and Scribblerus should feel bad for making it.

 

God, that sounds like an awesome way to wheedle information out of somebody. Feed them a few rock sandwiches, give them a watch or hourglass and tell them that you won't recast the transfiguration spell unless they tell you what you want. Or slowly revert the food to stop.

Man, Jack Bauer would have had so much fun in the HP-verse...

 

I'm not proposing that Transfiguration is temporary, so I'm not going to respond to that.

Re: conjuring sandwiches: they may have been from the kitchens. It's not like food appearing from the kitchens is unusual.

Re: permanent transfiguration. I don't think anyone is suggesting reversing a transfiguration is as simple as just casting a finite. That would still be going under the idea that there is a thing underneath which is the old object that the new object will revert to when a spell is cancelled. Rather, all indications point to reversing a transfiguration involving a whole new transfiguration. Which of course you could do to a person whether or not they had objects inside of them that used to be another object. Finally, even if transfiguration worked as you described, you're assuming that the broken down object still possesses a certain unity (i.e. you assume the transfigured meat, which has now been broken down by the body and used for muscle, still can be cancelled all at once).

TL;DR (and I kept this short because I know you have a short attention span): these questions aren't so unanswerable as you think. There are some unanswerable questions, sure, but there is also plenty of stuff that has plenty of textual evidence and we see if there's a regularity. You're not the voice of reason. Pretending that you're somehow above the debate because you have some great wisdom that allows you to see that it's pointless is retarded. A) A lot more can be salvaged than you think and B) defeatism never got anyone anywhere.

 

Taure: we can accept these as true, given that you accept that wizards seem to have no semblance of logical thoughts, ever, ever, period. Because if you accept that transfigurations are permanent, you can transfigure air into valuable muggle objects and become rich. Or transfigure dirt, or sticks, or whatever.

 

What are "these"?

Anyway, we already know that the Weasleys did considerable magical construction work on their home, which may have involved Trasnfiguration to some degree. I don't think that wizards don't use magic at all, just that they under-utilise it.

The out-of-book explanation is obviously that JKR wanted to keep certain analogies between our society and the wizarding world. In-book explanations get tricker. As I said, the main two are wizarding incompetence and legal obstructions to magicing up yourself a perfect lifestyle.

 

I get the impression it was an illusion. And yeah, I'd prefer the world to go over magic too.

 

While I agree that reversing the transfiguration would most likely involve another transfiguration, I also think that some "essence" of the original form must remain in the transfigured object, which gives us leeway to conjecture our way out of this.

The Malfoy ferret scene is what makes this likely. McGonagall came along and successfully transformed ferret!Malfoy back into human!Malfoy, despite the fact that she did not see the original transfiguration, and in fact didn't even know who the ferret was until she reverted him.

How do we rectify this with Rowling's statement about transfiguration? My favorite fanon explanation goes like this. Warning, boring essay coming up:

1. An object has physical properties and magical properties, and the two are distinct from one another.

My evidence in favor of there being such a thing as "magical properties" on an object is something Dumbledore said in DH: "Magic always leaves traces." Rowling probably wrote that carelessly, but if we except it as truth, then we must assume that transfiguration leaves traces. For this conversation, I'm including these "traces" as being part of an object's magical properties.

2. Transfiguration is a quasi-permanent change of the physical properties of an object.

By "quasi-permanent" I mean the following: That the physical properties of the object are changed, and that given a lack of any other magical interaction, the object will retain its new physical properties rather than reverting. Nor can you merely finite it. It's not truly permanent, because the object can be retransfigured, and more importantly can be transfigured back to the original form even if you don't know what its original form was (see: the ferret scene). From these, we might conclude that:

3. A transfigured object is physically identical to "natural" versions of its new form, while being magically distinctive.

So if you change a desk to a pig, the object is physically identical to a pig, and contains all of a pig's nutrient content, et al. At the same time, it's not magically identical to a natural pig; it retains traces of the transfiguration that was performed on it, and these traces make it possible for it to return to its original form even if knowledge of the original form is lost. And now for some unsupported conjecturing:

4. A transfigured object, despite being in a quasi-permanent state, is nevertheless unstable in the presence of transfigurative magic.

(Unlike the others, there isn't even the tiniest bit of evidence for this in canon.) The ability to return an object to its original form without direct knowledge of that form suggests that, in some way, the object "wants" to return to its original state. i.e., that it's easier to return an object to its original state than it was to transform in first place.

And one more bit of conjecture on top of that: putting aside any attempts to revert an object, a transfigured object can't quite be "trusted" to retain its new properties for any long period of time, because it's trivially easy to transform back. The nice thing about this fanon conceit is that it would also explain other strange aspects of the Wizarding economy. It would mean that only a fool would build a house out of transfigured materials, because in a magical sense, that'd be like building a house out of carelessly heaped straw. But even transfiguring your house wouldn't be as dangerous as food, because:

5. The exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration (including food) are particularly unstable in the presence of magic.

In DH, Hermione doesn't say that you can't create food. She says that you can't create "good" food. It may be that a single transfigured meal isn't likely to do too much harm, but Hermione wanted to make sure that Harry and Ron didn't get in the habit because too many meals would cause harm. Unlike normal transfigured objects (quasi-permanent), transfigured food might be completely unstable, and vulnerable to reverting back at any time, and for many reasons unrelated to attempting to retransfigure the digested food.

Edit: So I guess that I'd prefer that the magic is constrained and diminished, rather than assume that everybody in the world is fundamentally stupid. Most people are stupid, but it only takes a few clever types to totally break a society by exploiting what should be obviously easy to exploit.

 

...and to conquer Hogwarts, I would simply transfigure it into a duck.

 

I'd transfigure it into the Megazord or Voltron, myself. :awesome

But indeed, I definitely like to assume that it's made out of real, quarried stone. Stone that's been reinforced by magic, preserved by magic, even "mortared" together by magic, but still actual stone. When looking at it through my fanon-tinted glasses, it's easier to protect actual stone from transfiguration vs. dirt or trees that have been transfigured into stone.

 

If there were any clever people with minimal startup funds they would pull a LessWrong and take over the wizarding economy. But, yeah.

 

Without getting into a long discussion about it, nor dedicating any extended amount of time to anything LessWrong considers clever: no, they could not take over the economy, because any manner of magic imparted on the coins, or attention from the wizarding government or goblins themselves, could prevent it from happening.

So yeah.

 

You could ignore his hedge-fund scheme and just melt the coins down.

 

That assumes that the coins are solid gold, or that there aren't any spells/Secrecy protocols to prevent that very thing from happening.

 

I am, though please correct me if some Canon retracts this. You, more than myself, would know of some, small tid-bit of information that talks about specific Untransfiguration spells.

There's no 'Draco Malfoy transfiguration spell'. Moody didn't transfigure him back into himself, he took away the old transfiguration. The how is impossible to determine, but you're suggesting that there's a specific spell for transfiguring something back?

 

McGonagall did it, but same rough idea. As you say, we can't know how it's actually done. But the way I imagine it, it's not really a spell.

It's more like...well, imagine transfiguration to be like pushing an object out of an indentation in the ground, and then up a slope. Transfiguring it back again would be like pushing it back down the slope, where it will want to fall back into its original indentation (i.e. the object's natural state). The reason there's a slope and indentation to begin with is "Magic leaves traces."

The analogy is imprecise, but it comes close to how I think it works.

 

Well we know that time travel is possible, so what makes it so unreasonable to assume that either the wand or magic itself (being semi-sentient) looks back through time to what the item was before it was transfigured and then reverts it to that state. To the negative of that though, it would infer that any memories picked up while you were say, transfigured into a rabbit, would be lost after being re-transfigured into a human.

Also, you're all describing morphic fields demonstrated aptly by the Wizards of the Disc, specifically the Librarian.

 

This should sate Tehan, and it also is one of the awesomest explanations for why Gold is untransfigurable: it's atomic structure - it forms a perfect arrangement of protons and neutrons. There was a fic that dealt with it . . . but atm I can't remember the name.

It had Harry working with the arithmancy professor (iirc) and discovering that because of the perfect nature of the gold atom, it was "untransfigurable" that is to say, it's perfectly transfigureable, but you just needed to train magic to let you do it, and Umbrige was getting all up in their shit.

Anyway,

How . . . unfortunate.

 

Harry Potter and the Golden Needle.