But then why is GOLD the one exception? After all, we know it can be created by the Philosopher's Stone, so why should regular transfiguration be any different?

My theory is that if you attempt to conjure gold, you'll get a material that is very much gold like, but if you break it down to it's base elements it is not in fact gold.

When a student transfigures something into a goblet, it is not 100% the metal it appears to be, it's a magically synthesized version of the metal.

Say you transfigure something into a silver ring, okay? Now you take it into a jewelry store and they look over it to make sure it's real, right? It would fail the test as no matter how much it may LOOK and FEEL like the real thing, it is in fact not.

Magic cannot create the real element, but instead creates a purely magical substitute that looks and feels and acts (mostly) exactly like it.

Otherwise, either you can transfigure/conjure everything including Gold or you can't. I don't see why gold would be any different than silver or platinum or any other metals, or gems.

What I'm saying is that the animals wouldn't TRULY be alive, no matter how finely detailed your transfiguration/conjuration is, they wouldn't be ALIVE.

My theory would be like, well, like this:

Example One: You conjure a lion and have a sort of link between it in your mind, that allows you to control how it acts. You mentally command it to attack and it does that, you mentally command it to jump in front of a curse and it does that. It may be subconscious, and not something you need to actively think about.

Example Two: When you conjure/transfigure part of the spell is taking what you expect it to act like, subconsciously, and that is how it will behave. It's actions are still not 100% it's own, however, as they are based purely on what you expect it to act like. It lacks a soul or any sort of free will to actively think for it's self.

I mean the beam or whatever of light that you see coming towards you. Also, things like the enchantment that Harry ran into in the maze in GoF, thats a physical manifestation of magic. I'm just saying that it can't be transfigured or anything.

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Just my opinion on what Hermione says, if you have food then you can transform it into something else, for instance you have an apple you can transform (transfigure) it into an orange. It would still fundamentally be an apple though, as far as nutritional values and such, but it would look like an orange.

Also, you can enlarge or duplicate food if you already have it, likely at a diminished value from the original.

 

@Sesc: Hermione was explaining to Ron "in english", so she could have easily used transform as a synonym to trasfiguration, for simplicity's sake. Furthermore, trasfiguration is a subject that include more than trasformation (like switching spells and animation), so she might have used the term to specify what she meant. And if transform is in the context of transfigure, then, it will be changing the nature of something in to something else and not putting an temporary and aesthetic change (as it would a charm).

If it's possible to put a tail in a boy, and said tail have all the complexity and chemical and organic components to function and stay alive time enough to call for a cirurgical intervention. All this while bypassing all the obvious biological incompatibility. So I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to, as easly, to tranfigure something in an apple, with all the nutritive value and chemical components of an apple. This still assuming that the restriction works only for conjuring.

The 'laws of magic' allows much more flexibility than cientific ones. And even impossible things can be eventualy attained, as in Voldemort's flying spell that breaked an earlier statement that said that self sustained flight was impossible. The Hallows also possess law-breaking abilities, and it would not be hard to put the Philosopher Stone in the same league, as exception to the exceptions. That is, a complex magical item that can do things that no spell can.

Well, I could say that all gold was cursed, long ago, by atlantean wizards so it could exist an trading material that could not be done with a wand wave. Or that the inerent philosophical proprieties of gold impede that such perfect metal be done by puny wizards. Or maybe it's the goblins fault. But that is bullshitting. It's magic.

 

I don't really like that explanation though. With that, you could do anything at all including raising the dead, because "it's magic" and magic can do anything and everything perfectly.

If you know the right spell.

What I'm saying is that the spell works by creating the animal according to your general impressions of how it acts, looks, feels etc. etc. It acts as it does because that is how Draco, the one who conjured it, would expect the snake to act (at a subconscious level). Magic would of course fill in the holes of course.

If you could just conjure or transfigure an animal into existence, then why on earth are their stores selling animals? People could just conjure an owl when they needed to send a letter.

Okay, you can argue that post owls are specially trained or charmed, and thus couldn't do that.

Still, people could just transfigure any animals they wanted into existence. Why don't people do that then?

Perhaps my theory is not right, fine, but I don't think it's as simple as you make it out to be either.

I never said anything about raw magic, I'm just saying that I don't think you could use transfiguration to alter magic. Harry couldn't transfigure that enchantment in the maze into something else. He could use a spell to dispel it or to counter it or to alter it in some other way to either do something else or to not effect him, whatever. But it's not the same as transfiguring a brick wall into a curtain so he could easily get through it.

You could use a sort of illusion charm to make it look and taste like something else, yes, and that would be a charm.

Actually transfiguring it from an apple to an orange is different. I'm saying that if you actually transfigured it, it would look like an orange and physically be an orange and perhaps even taste like an orange, and even be an orange in almost every respect (as opposed to if it were simply charmed to look and taste like an orange). However it would still be an apple that was transfigured, at the end of the day.

Say you transfigured a piece of paper into an apple. You could eat it, but while it would look, feel and taste like an apple you'd still be eating paper. It doesn't matter what it's transfigured into, it still is whatever it once was.

 

Holy Shit! I just noticed something very subtle.

We know that you can't conjure food, but we also know that you can multiply it. Think of one person in history who is rumoured to have multiplied food on a massive scale... I think JKR just trolled every Christian in existence here!

 

Since no one else brought it up yet...The elder wand seems to make seemingly impossible feats of magic possible. So we know through the use of the Philosopher's stone, elder wand, etc. that the rules of magic do not always apply as stated when certain magical artifacts are entered into the equation which would seem to indicate that they are only rules which apply to standard magic unmodified by objects created through grand sorcery which can enhance certain acts enough to surpass the laws.

Personally, I prefer using an idea that came from another book series about wizards (Wizard of Earthsea?). It stated something to the effect of that it isn't that it is impossible for a wizard to create water or food from nothing, but doing such magic would have unknown possibly horrible beyond belief results that it would be better to starve to death that to face the potential effect of creating food. It wasn't about food in this case of the example in the book, but it was the same idea. My idea would be that for the Harry Potter series certain artifacts can negate the negative effects that would otherwise be associated with creating something that would have the lasting power needed to work to sustain the body, and something like water can be conjured due to the fact that it utilizes the water in the air. Of course I feel this probably has a lot of plot holes in regards to the Harry Potter series, but I like'd the original premise used in the other series a lot.

 

I like to think of Gamp's law's as the "new hot thing from the recent past (less then 100 years) explaining tranfiguration (and other magic) on matter, using the periodic table.

To enter Hogwarts, the best school of magic you must have x much magic ability to tranfigure iron. Gold takes y much and so far no one has shown that much power.

A set of laws, like boils law that says this much magic can/will have these effects.

 

She only especificaly explained the impossibility of conjuring it. And even assuming that trasfiguring food is viable, most wizards would be unable to do, as transfiguration is suposedly a very dificult subject (and the general population is mostly incompetent). So the amount of people with the skill and the confidence to make food would be minimal. Also, a failed transfiguration makes what you were transfiguring stuck mid-transformation, and few would risk themselves eating a branchbread.

So the fact that they should find food don't nullify the possibility that they could have magicaly made, but choose otherwise for safety reasons. The lack of mention of any food markets, as the dificulty for most wizards to deal with muggles suggest that wizards have other means to get food, most likely magical. Like, using magic to make, conserve and multiply it.

 

Indeed, there's definitely room for interpretive leeway. The only reason I favor the "no self-sustaining life" idea is because I felt that Rowling took care to never dwell much on any bit of transfigured life. e.g., if somebody created some birds, they'd immediately fly off away from Harry's perspective.

It does get me wondering about all the animals used for training in McGonagall's class, though - does the castle keep them stored somewhere, or does McGonagall conjure them up herself, etc. I wouldn't expect pureblood wizards to give a shit, but since we never heard Hermione make a big fuss about it, my guess is that it's not as grotesque as it sounds.

Number 3 (or a variant of it) sounds like a nice idea to me. I'd expand it to something more general, like "You can't transfigure a non-magical object into a magical object." An example would be: you can make a visually perfect copy of a magic wand, but it won't actually be a magic wand. Magical creatures might also fall into that exception.

 

I think we should keep in mind the fallibility of Gamp's law. It's not necessarily correct in all cases. Wizards are always breaking the rules when they come up with some new spell.

So you don't have to resort to some complicated explanation of a difference between the way the Philosopher's stone transfigures and normal transfiguration is done. Just refer to the fallibility of Gamp's law, and note that the exceptions aren't really exceptions to a law, but rather simply what the wizards haven't got around to figuring out yet.

With regards to being able to conjure food fine, but sustenance being the problem: Hermione's quote from DH seems to indicate that you just can't create it at all, not simply that you could create it, but it would provide no nutrition.

Transfigured animals: appear to behave exactly as natural animals do, with the same amount of free will - however much that may be.

I also think people ITT should remember the dictum: "a difference which makes no difference is no difference at all". So saying "a wizard has conjured a metal which has all the properties of a metal but really isn't" doesn't make sense. If it has all the properties of metal, then its ontological status doesn't really matter. All of our science proceeds by the properties of things, not what they "really are" - whatever that could possibly mean beyond some thing's properties.

Further: many metals are involved in animal bodies, and we know that you can conjure animals.

Why I chose "magic" for one of the four: it means you can't conjure/transfigure magical animals, or turn Muggles into wizards.

 

Well, this topic went from interesting to 'too long, didn't care enough to read' pretty fast.

 

It was actually Draco Malfoy who conjured the snake, using the spell Snape whispered to him, and I doubt Malfoy had any more control over the snake that Finch-Fletchley would have. The one other instance of animal Transfiguration I remember that did not involve Malfoy becoming a ferret was in GoF, when Cedric changed a rock into a dog to distract his dragon. There was no clarification of whether Cedric controlled the dog or not, but the trick worked until the dragon noticed Diggory.

I happen to fall on the side of the debate that Conjured or Transfigured animals are not truly alive, but I can see your argument, Sesc. I just feel that witches and wizards would be making their own familiars and household pets willy-nilly if it were possible to Transfigure live, real animals. I also - like someone earlier - recall JKR saying somewhere that Conjured items eventually disappear.

There's still the matter of why magical people would choose to live in hovels like The Burrow if they could Transfigure their homes into something more, I don't know... livable or appealing or whatever. After thinking it over, I have to chalk it up to "Transfiguration Is Hard". That's about all I can figure, since otherwise, The Burrow makes absolutely no sense.

When you examine the seven books, you don't really see that many instances of intricate Transfiguration, let alone Conjuration. We see D'dore do all sorts of course, and Voldemort as well. And in the fight between Snape and McGonagall in DH, there's a good bit of nifty Transfiguration too. But we never really see Lupin or Arthur or most other adults do anything remotely complicated. Granted, we don't generally see them in a fight, and the books are Harry's perspective, but from the context and evidence, it seems to me that anything beyond basic-A-to-basic-B changes just get harder and harder.

And Conjuration? I always got the feeling D'dore's Conjuring of the "squashy armchairs" was his subtle but unmistakable way of saying "Is Dumbledore gonna have to choke a bitch?"

On that I definitely agree.

Finally figured that one out, did you? It's Fishes & Loaves Night!!

 

Agreed. I also view transfiguration as nothing more than an intricate glamor that holds so long as there is a constant stream of magic maintaining it.

What if Gamp's Law was more of a legal law than a law of physics?

If we accept the view that transfiguration is glorified illusion, then there are certain things that one ought not ethically transfigure:

1) Food - if you transfigure a rock into an apple, someone eats it, and the illusion wears off, well, that's shitty.

2) Money - obviously, the economy would collapse if people were transfiguring money left and right. This would also place more value on the Philosopher's stone: it truly changes the physical composition of a substance, rather than just giving the illusion of it. The instance at the World Quidditch Cup with the Leprechauns is an example of breaking this legality for the sake of entertainment.

3)
4)
5)

^ whatever they may be...

 

You're wrong.

Next!

(Oh wait, you want justification? How about this:

"Charm: Does not fundamentally alter the properties of the subject of the spell, but adds, or changes, properties. Turning a teacup into a rat would be a spell, whereas making a teacup dance would be a charm." - JKR

Transfiguration is not Charms. Transfiguration does therefore not add or change properties, but rather fundamentally alters the properties of the object.)[FONT=Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif]


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Indeed. That's why it's called 'Alchemy' and not 'Transfiguration Soup'.

 

Alchemy is the process by which the stone is made. Given that we haven't seen the process by which the stone is used to make gold, I'm not really sure if we can say that it is alchemy too.

There is no contradiction in the idea that you can make a magical item through alchemy which performs transfiguration.