this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (13 children)

As nonsensical as it is, giving the limit of the suspension of believe necessary to keep the world reasonably coherent, the wizard world has a solid grasp on the non-magical world while it's a given (literally a given, it makes no sense otherwise) that the people from the normal world have no idea magic exists, other than what is leaked and relegated to fairy tales (it's our world).

Wizards, their institution and governments, their own citizen are aware of what weapons are. Harry himself of course knows what a gun is and could potentially grab a number of them to prepare for war.

So it's an implied obvious implicit answer that even a limited mastery of magic vastly overpowers weapons. Which is obvious if you consider that in the magical world they are aware of the "laws" of physics AND the extra laws of magic.

They just know more about how the world works, how to inflict death and how to protect against harm.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (4 children)

But IIRC that is never implied in the books and it is shown a couple of times that they know very little about technology and being very surprised by stuff like television. Which is very weird given that a non insignificant part of the wizards are from muggle families and lives among muggles.

Whilst I loved the books, as I read I always had this question in my mind about what if the wizards approached magic with a more scientific method and if they integrated with the scientific advancements of the human world.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Given that there are governmental departments for interacting with muggles, and qualifications taught at Hogwarts, my assumption was that it was like many other fields of study typical members of the public did know little, but plenty of research exists. How much does the typical person know about nuclear thermodynamics? Not much, and they don't really need to, but that doesn't mean all of humanity knows nothing. Hermione states pretty regularly that the spells protecting Hogwarts protect it from being discovered and prevent electrical communications from functioning.

I would think that, in a war with muggles, any wizard signing up to fight would be given training (by those few governmental and academic experts) in muggle warfare, weaponry, and relevant defensive spells needed for such a conflict.

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