Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

copies of. I made a diagram of the molecular structure to show you. We just want to make it longer than it's ever been made before, and with all the tubes aligned, and the endpoints embedded in diamond.' Harry produced a sheet of graph paper.

Hermione sat back up, took it, and studied it, frowning. 'These are all carbon atoms? And Harry, what's the name? I can't Transfigure it if I don't know what it's called.'

Harry made a disgusted face. He was still having trouble getting used to that sort of thing, it shouldn't matter what something was named if you knew what it was. 'They're called buckytubes, or carbon nanotubes. It's a kind of fullerene that was discovered just this year. It's about a hundred times stronger than steel and a sixth of the weight.'

Hermione looked up from the graph paper, her face surprised. 'That's real?'

'Yeah,' Harry said, 'just hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of the stuff, we could use it to build a space elevator all the way up to geosynchronous orbit or higher, and in terms of delta-v that's halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Plus we could throw out solar power satellites like confetti.'

Hermione was frowning again. 'Is this stuff safe?'

'I don't see why it wouldn't be,' Harry said. 'A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -'

'I know what graphite is, Harry,' Hermione said. She brushed her hair back absentmindedly, her eyebrows furrowed as she stared at the sheet of paper.

Harry reached into a pocket of his robes, and produced a white thread tied to two small gray plastic rings at either end. He'd added drops of superglue where the thread met either ring, to make it all a single object that could be Transfigured as a whole. Cyanoacrylate, if Harry remembered correctly, worked by covalent bonds, and that was as close to being a 'solid object' as you ever got in a world ultimately composed of tiny individual atoms. 'When you're ready,' Harry said, 'try to Transfigure this into a set of aligned buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings.'

'All right...' Hermione said slowly. 'Harry, I feel like I just missed something.'

Harry shrugged helplessly. Maybe you're just tired. He knew better than to say it out loud, though.

Hermione laid her wand against one plastic ring, and stared for a while.

Two small circles of glittering diamond lay on the table, connected by a long black thread.

'It changed,' said Hermione. She sounded like she was trying to be enthusiastic but had run out of energy. 'Now what?'

Harry felt a bit deflated by his research partner's lack of passion, but did his best not to show it; maybe the same process would work in reverse to cheer her up. 'Now I test it to see if it holds weight.'

There was an A-frame Harry had rigged up to do an earlier experiment with diamond rods - you could make solid diamond objects easily, using Transfiguration, they just wouldn't last. The earlier experiment had measured whether Transfiguring a long diamond rod into a shorter diamond rod would allow it to lift a suspended heavy weight as it contracted, i.e., could you Transfigure against tension, which you in fact could.

Harry carefully looped one circle of glittering diamond over the thick metal hook at the top of the rig, then attached a thick metal hanger to the bottom ring, and then started attaching weights to the hanger.

(Harry had asked the Weasley twins to Transfigure the apparatus for him, and the Weasley twins had given him an incredulous look, like they couldn't figure out what sort of prank he could possibly want that for, but they hadn't asked any questions. And their Transfigurations, according to them, lasted for around three hours, so Harry and Hermione still had a while left.)

'One hundred kilograms,' Harry said about a minute later. 'I don't think a steel thread this thin would hold that. It should go up much higher, but that's all the weight I've got.'

There was a further silence.

Harry straightened up, and went back to their table, and sat down in his chair, and ceremoniously made a check mark next to 'Buckytubes'. 'There,' Harry said. 'That one worked.'

'But it's not really useful, Harry, is it?' Hermione said from where she was sitting with her head resting in her hands. 'I mean, even if we gave it to a scientist they couldn't learn how to make lots of buckytubes from studying ours.'

'They might be able to learn something,' Harry said. 'Hermione, look at it, that little tiny thread holding up all that weight, we just made something that no Muggle laboratory could make -'

'But any other witch could make it,' Hermione said. Her exhaustion was coming into her voice, now. 'Harry, I don't think this is working out.'

'You mean our relationship?' Harry said. 'Great! Let's break up.'

That got a slight grin out of her. 'I mean our research.'

'Oh, Hermione, how could you?'

'You're sweet when you're mean,' she said. 'But Harry, this is nuts, I'm twelve, you're eleven, it's silly to think we're going to discover anything that no one's ever figured out before.'

'Are you really saying we should give up on unraveling the secrets of magic after trying for less than one month?' Harry said, trying to put a note of challenge into his voice. Honestly he was feeling some of the same fatigue as Hermione. None of the good ideas ever worked. He'd made just one discovery worth mentioning, the Mendelian pattern, and he couldn't tell Hermione about it without breaking his promise to Draco.

'No,' Hermione said. Her young face was looking very serious and adult. 'I'm saying right now we should be studying all the magic that wizards already know, so we can do this sort of thing after we graduate from Hogwarts.'