[HPforGrownups] Hermione Aging via Time turner

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 53577

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Mark D. wrote:

> From the book, I believe she had almost triple classes which would 
> mean she might have aged 26-27 hours for each 24 hour day. I suggest 
> she might have occasionally abused the time turner to get extra 
> sleep and study at the same time.

Let's assume your estimates are right.  I think they are a bit high, but
using high numbers will give us a good upper bound.

3 extra hours/day * 5 days/week (no classes on weekends, remember) = 15 extra hours/week 
15 extra hours/week * 40 weeks/school year = 600 extra hours/school year
600 extra hours/24 hours per day = 25 extra days

So even with your estimates, Hermione aged less than one extra month 
during PoA, not enough for anyone to notice much of a difference.  

My impression is that not every class meets every day.  Therefore, she is
likely to have some days where no classes conflict and she would use the
time turner less often.  In that case, she would age even less than the 
three and a half weeks we came up with above.

> During breaks, I believe Hermione was the only 3rd year Gryffindor 
> girl at Hogwarts and might very well have taken advantage of having 
> a private bedroom to sleep and study at the same time.

I don't agree. If Hermione had been using the time turner to get extra
sleep, she would not have been so haggered during PoA.  Plus, given how
seriously she took Prof. McGonagall's warnings about the dangers of the
time turner, I find it unlikely she would intentionally place her past and
future selves in the same room.

> The result of overuse of the time turner would  be that Hermione 
> might now be older than Harry or Ron. Could she have gained an extra 
> 6 months during her third year? This would explain why Hermione 
> seems so much more mature than Harry or Ron. (It also makes it less 
> creepy that Krum at 18 yo is so smitten by Hermione at 15 yo.)

Well, Krum was smitten with Hermione fairly early on in the book, before
she had a chance to accumulate much extra aging, so the time turner is no
help there.  (Not that I think Krum liking Hermione is creepy in any case.  
I think it shows he has good taste.)  In any case, girls mature faster
than boys, both physically and emotionally, and Hermione is naturally a
very mature person, whatever her age.  It's not like she seemed immature 
back in PS/SS when she was eleven.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"