“What have you done to my wife?”, Harry smiled as he brought his breakfast to the table. “She’s been doing nothing but reading books on physics for the last five days. Last night she was reading equations from that guy with a cat, whatever he’s called, until it was almost morning”.
“You mean, Schrödinger equation of wave function?”, Hermione failed to contain her giggles.
“She looks like a zombie. Hair all over the place, dark circles under her eyes, and she’s talking to herself”, he laughed. “Reminds me somewhat of you when you had to get the time turner to keep up with your schedule”.
Hermione looked behind him and smiled. “Oh, here you are”.
Harry turned to see Lyra, shocked that she seemed to be back to normal. Hair perfect, dark circles under her eyes gone, eyes focused and bright. “Who are you and what have you done to Lyra?”, he smiled.
“Oh, I’m done cramming physics”, she smiled brightly. “I think I have it figured out now”.
“Oh?”, Hermione lifted an eyebrow.
Lyra poured an espresso into a glass of milk, and bit into a croissant. “It took me a while to catch up. My brain doesn’t process equations well, and by that I mean not at all. I just glaze over, so I depended on someone explaining it in plain English, or at least Greek or Latin, and what I figured out somewhat late in the process is that when some phenomenon is well understood, the translation of equations into human language is very straightforward, and explanations are clear and unambiguous. Also, I kept translating their physical concepts into magic, how something is done, what it looks like, how I could explain it in terms of thermodynamics or classical mechanics, or laws of conservation of mass and energy. Then I came to the quantum mechanics and the standard model, and I struggled, because the explanations stopped making sense in human language. Some things, like the photoelectric effect, or radioactive decay, or indeterminacy, are straightforward and easy, but most of quantum theory sounds like outright nonsense, and at first I thought it was me, because, finally, I bumped into something that’s too hard for me to understand, or at least it can’t be understood outside the equations because they are not translatable to human language. Then I saw that the muggle physicists have the same problem, and I tried to do things experimentally. I touched the magical layer with my mind and observed what happens on the physical plane, and then it clicked. I figured it all out”, she smiled like a sun.
Harry and Hermione just looked at each other. “What do you mean?”
“We truly missed each other, the muggles and the wizards. We missed their understanding of the physical world derived in absence of magic, and they missed our understanding of magic, because without it, they tried to make up all sorts of nonsense based on not knowing and statistics and question marks of all kinds, and functions that collapse as soon as you touch anything real. You see, that entire story about the quantum this or that is about their muggle world collapsing as soon as it touches the layer of magic beneath the visible, tangible world. Also, when we, wizards and witches, touch magic with our minds, it manifests in the visible world, overriding statistics, probabilities and particle relations, and having the static and inert nature of the physical world collapse, but obeying laws such as the conservation of energy, but different kind of energy – meaning, sacrifice, materiality in a sense of preserving what matters”, she was glowing with excitement. “They mapped out what matter does until it touches magic, while we mapped what magic does to the matter when we touch it, but neither of us knew the whole picture. I think we still don’t, because both of us know very little about ‘why’ things are the way they are. They know a lot about thermodynamics and how covalent bonds behave and why hydrogen bonds break down at certain temperature, while we know about the Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration and exceptions thereto. They know how the stars are aligned into galaxies and how galaxies form galactic clusters and how there are voids between them, and Centaurs know about astrology and meaning of certain things in the sky, but neither of us know why that all is, because it comes from a deeper source. Yes, there is the physical, and it breaks down at quantum level where it touches magic, but magic is merely a layer that seems to break down at something deeper, and that deeper something is why there is love and why it matters, why there’s meaning and why things matter, and this meaning is what shines and sounds through when Hermione breaks the world when she’s stressed, and something on the other side, deeper than magic, shines through and it’s wonderful”, she finished, as her friends looked at her in absolute awe.
“Lyra, if you again tell me you’re not a proper goddess, I swear, I will tickle you on all your tickly spots, and I know all of them”, Hermione mock-threatened her sister.
Harry nodded. “I will hold her for you”.