Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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."

"Um..." Harry said. "Hermione, I hate to put it this way, but imagine we'd decided to hold off on research until later, and the first thing we tried after we graduated was Transfiguring an Alzheimer's cure, and it worked. We'd feel... I don't think the word stupid would adequately describe how we'd feel. What if there's something else like that and it does work?"

"That's not fair, Harry!" Hermione said. Her voice was trembling like she was on the verge of breaking out crying. "You can't put that on people! It's not our job to do that sort of thing, we're kids!"

For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.

"Anyway," Hermione said. Her voice shook. "I don't want to keep doing this. I don't believe children can do things that grownups can't, that's only in stories."

There was silence in the classroom.

Hermione started to look a little scared, and Harry knew that his own expression had gotten colder.

It might not have hurt so much if the same thought hadn't already come to Harry - that, while thirty might be old for a scientific revolutionary and twenty about right, while there were people who got doctorates when they were seventeen and fourteen-year-old heirs who'd been great kings or generals, there wasn't really anyone who'd made the history books at eleven.

"All right," Harry said. "Figure out how to do something a grownup can't. Is that your challenge?"

"I didn't mean it like that," Hermione said, her voice coming out in a frightened whisper.

With an effort, Harry wrenched his gaze away from Hermione. "I'm not angry at you," Harry said. His voice was cold, despite his best efforts. "I'm angry at, I don't know, everything. But I'm not willing to lose, Hermione. Losing isn't always the right thing to do. I'll figure out how to do something a grown wizard can't do, and then I'll get back to you. How's that?"

There was more silence.

"Okay," said Hermione, her voice wavering a little. She pushed herself up out of her chair, and went over to the door of the abandoned classroom they'd been working in. Her hand went onto the doorknob. "We're still friends, right? And if you can't figure out anything -"