Making Potions

Potions Trivia Quiz:

1. What is the first potion that Harry Potter has to brew in his first year?

2. What is the last potion that Harry Potter has to brew in his first year?

If you easily answered these two questions without any help, you have a good memory or your mind is filled with Potter-trivia. Answers are at the end of this post.

Now that I have finished grading my exam, here are the results of my no-credit question about what Potion my Muggle students would want to concoct. Keep in mind that those who did answer the question probably didn’t ponder it for more than a couple of minutes. There were three dominant answers: Felix Felicis, Polyjuice Potion, and something that would help one do better in chemistry class or exams. I suppose that last one is not surprising given the exam context. Interestingly, I only got one response of the more broadly philanthropic category – a potion that would cure cancer. Granted the sample size was small with 20+ students opting to write something. (There was also a difficult extra credit question at the end of the exam, which more students attempted, instead of my no-credit frivolous question.)

Of the first year classes that Harry takes, many of them don’t require the explicit use of magic. History of Magic, as taught by Professor Binns, seems like a very boring history class that a Muggle may encounter. (Disclaimer: I personally enjoy reading history and I think it can be taught in an engaging way!) Herbology involves the care of plants, some of which possess magical traits, but seems not to require using magic. It might be akin to Botany in the Muggle world. Astronomy has its counterpart in the Muggle world although the emphases might be different. In that sense there are many similarities between a Hogwarts and a Muggle education.

Potions class is a lot like my Muggle expertise, Chemistry. Professor Snape starts off the first class admonishing against “foolish wand waving” although the text does not discuss whether the students went through safety training, which is mandatory in all our chemistry lab courses. Given the in-class accidents that frequently involve Neville Longbottom, this seems to me something crucial. Do the Hogwarts students wear close-toed shoes, lab coats and safety glasses? Do their robes offer any special protection? Would that even help given what they are brewing? Should there be protective spells cast before class, perhaps some version of Impervius?

Although Potions, like chemistry lab, involves the mixing of different substances, brewing a potion has the goal of making a specific product with specific properties. In this sense, it is akin to doing synthesis in chemistry lab. My colleagues and I would colloquially call the activities in chemistry lab as “making and measuring”. Harry’s Potions classes in the early stages cover mainly the “making” but not much of the measuring other than asking whether the Potion was correctly prepared following the standard recipe. 

If memory serves, the first somewhat detailed recipe described is the Polyjuice Potion. It’s unclear what many of the ingredients have to do with the effects of the potion. The shredded skin of a boomslang could allude to changing one’s appearance – shedding one’s skin sort of. The crucial ingredient seems to be adding a bit of the person you want to morph into. This reflects an alchemic way of thinking. The alchemists, in attempting to synthesize the philosopher’s stone that could turn base metals into gold often used sulfur and mercury as ingredients, since these have some outward macroscopic similarities to gold in color and sheen. Aristotle’s “Four Elements” as the fundamental basis of matter suggest that you can transmutate one substance into another as long as you get the right combination of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) in the mixture. We “modern” folk know that this basis of matter is wrong and that no amount of chemical mixing of different substances would turn something that was not gold into gold. If you only move around the valence electrons (essentially almost all chemical reactions with the exception of nuclear chemistry), you will not change the element (which would require changing the number of protons).

However, the alchemic approach is the one that makes sense to our senses, so to speak. The ancient practice of science or natural philosophy made use of the senses to separate the “real” from the “fictional”. The cutting edge of science today involves much that is far removed from our senses. As chemists, we have fancy instruments to measure, at the atomistic or molecular level, what we make in the lab. But most people don’t have access to such equipment. Our present view of the atom is so strange that one might say it defies the senses. “Truth is stranger than fiction” is a common expression in scientific discovery today. This is part of the excitement of being a scientist, delving into strange realms like the explorers of old.

Solution to quiz:

1. Potion to cure boils

2. Forgetfulness Potion (end-of-year Exam)