Chapter 119

Chapter 87:

"No, of course not," said Harry. Harry pulled out the chair next to her own, at the small table, and sat down beside her in his accustomed place on her right, just like he'd never left; she had to choke back a catch in her throat. "The idea of 'too good to be true' isn't causal reasoning, the universe doesn't check if the output of the equations is 'too good' or 'too bad' before allowing it. People used to think that airplanes and smallpox vaccines were too good to be true. Muggles have figured out ways to travel to other stars without even using magic, and you and I can use our wands to do things that Muggle physicists think are literally impossible. I can't even imagine what we could rule out the real laws of magic being able to do."

Harry says this in response to Hermione asking if he thinks the Philosopher's Stone is too good to be true. Given recent chapters, the next paragraph is quite amusing:

"Well..." Harry said. The boy reached over her own outstretched arm, his robes brushing hers, and tapped the artist's illustration of an ominously glowing red stone dripping scarlet liquid. "Problem one is that there's no logical reason why the same artifact would be able to transmute lead to gold and produce an elixir that kept someone young. I wonder if there's an official name for that in the literature? Like the 'turned up to eleven effect', maybe? If everyone can see a flower, you can't get away with saying flowers are the size of houses. But if you're in a flying saucer cult, since nobody can see the alien mothership anyway, you can say it's the size of a city, or the size of the Moon. Observable things have to be constrained by evidence, but when somebody makes up a story, they can make the story as extreme as they want. So the Philosopher's Stone gives you unlimited gold and eternal life, not because there's a single magical discovery that would produce both of those effects, but because someone made up a story about a super happy thingy."

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