Skip to main content

harry potter - How much older was Hermione after her third year at Hogwarts?


In her third year at Hogwarts, Hermione is given a time-turner so she can take more classes. Several of her classes are concurrent to each other, so she attends one class (for 1-2 hours) goes back in time, and attends a different class during the same time frame.



But from an aging point of view, she should age 4 hours in relation to the 2 hours everyone else ages. How much older should Hermione be relative to everyone else after using the time-turner for an entire school year?



Answer



For those of you who aren't going to make it to the end of this post, it comes out to a week (plus half a day).


It is not certain whether wizards using time turners "age" faster, but for the sake of the question let's assume so and see if we can quantify somewhat.


According to the Harry Potter Wiki, there are 12 classes she could have been taking (7 core, 5 elective), and she signed up for all of them (Chamber of Secrets, first American edition, p.252). Assume she was allowed to take all of them (reasonable, I think). After dropping two classes (Divination and Muggle Studies), Hermione was able to resume a normal schedule. We'll take that as showing that ten courses fills the time allotted for classes completely. Let's say that's six hours a day, five days a week. That would make three hours per class per week; the two extra classes would then add six hours a week to Hermione's age. We'll assume she didn't use the TT for extra studying time on top of that (though I'm not quite certain of that).


The students arrived at school on September 1st as always, and Hermione dropped Divination around Easter. I didn't quickly find the event in the book, so we'll assume it was Easter (April 3, 1994). Now, if I counted right on my calendar, that's 29 weeks for Divination. The Christmas holidays remove two weeks from that, and we'll say another week for reading and exam period, so we'll say 26 weeks for three hours a week, making the added time from Divination three days and six hours.


She continued Muggle Studies through the end of the year. The wiki page says that's in the third week of June, for a total of 40 weeks (again assuming I counted correctly). Take out the three weeks off before Easter, and another two for reading, exams, and results, for a total of 35 weeks doubling for Muggle Studies another three hours a week. This comes out to four days and three hours.


Adding this to the Divination time and the three hours she and Harry spent saving Sirius and Buckbeak, we get seven days, twelve hours. Therefore, the answer appears to be just over a week.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.
Post a Comment
Read more

harry potter - Did Dolores Umbridge Have Any Association with Voldemort (or Death Eaters) before His Return?

I noticed that Dolores Umbridge was born during the first Wizarding War, so it's very likely she wasn't a Death Eater then (but she is pretty evil -- who knows?). After that Voldemort was not around in a way that could affect many people, and most wouldn't know he was planning to rise again. During that time, and up through Voldemort's return (in Goblet of Fire ), did Umbridge have any connection with the Death Eaters or with Voldemort? Was she doing what she did on her own, or was it because of an association with Voldemort or his allies? Answer Dolores Umbridge was definitely not a good person. However, as Sirius points out, "the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters". Remember that he also says that he doesn't believe Umbridge to be a Death Eater, but that she's evil enough (or something like that). I think there are two strong reasons to believe that: Umbridge was proud to do everything according to the law, except when she trie...
Post a Comment
Read more

aliens - Interstellar Zoo story

I vaguely remember this story from my childhood: it was about an interstellar zoo that came to Earth with lots of bizarre and unusual species, and humans would file through and gape at all the crazy looking creatures from other planets. The twist came at the end when the perspective shifted to the other side of the bars and we discovered that the "creatures" were traveling through space on a kind of safari. They thought they were the visitors and we were the animals. Neither side knew that the other side thought they were the zoo creatures. Answer Got it. Zoo, by Edward D. Hoch. Published in 1958. Link to Publication History Link to PDF
Post a Comment
Read more

Which Doctor Who works are canon?

I have been watching a Doctor Who documentary and they mentioned that Paul McGann did audio stories so he wasn't just a one-hit Doctor (and that there are novels featuring his Doctor as well). My question is: is Doctor Who canon just the show, or is it like Star Wars where some books and audios are canon and some are not? The documentary also shows that before 2005 they did audio stories where the Doctor is female and obviously that cannot be — not the female part, but the show doesn't count any female Doctors in episodes like The Day of the Doctor . Answer Nothing, and also everything The definitive piece of writing on Doctor Who canon is this blog post by writer Paul Cornell . I'm essentially going to be summarizing his post here, much less eloquently, but one section I want to quote directly is this: Nobody at the BBC has ever uttered a pronouncement about what is and isn't canonical. (As I'm sure they'd put it, being such enthusiasts for good grammar.) Be...
Post a Comment
Read more