The Magic of Science

Me outside the entrance...

Last Friday was my 23rd birthday. To celebrate the week before I went to visit the Harry Potter Studio tour, just outside London. My boyfriend had bought the tickets for Christmas but we'd been so busy that this was the first weekend we could comfortably fit it in.

I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I read all the books when they first came out and dragged either my boyfriend or my family to watch all of the films. I always felt like I kind of grew up with the characters, as they were always about my age when the books came out. I'm a bit of a geek - you might have noticed. Only when it comes to Harry Potter, Stargate, Firefly and Star Trek. That felt like a confession! Moving on…

Real slithering snake door (they
wouldn't let me press the button :( )

The Harry Potter studio tour was amazing. You get to go around lots of different sets and see how they made everything look so real. The biggest surprise for me was that most of it was real. A lot of the props look so amazing because instead of being designed on a computer they'd taken the time, effort and money to actually make the movements you'd expect. For example in one of the sets (The Weasley's kitchen for fellow nerds) there is a pot and scrubbing brush in the sink that washes itself. In the tour you can press a button to make it work. It’s all done with electric motors and clever counterweight systems! They’d also taken the trouble to hand make hundreds of prophesy orbs and that were never used in the end because they decided the computer generated graphics were better. The things you can do if you have enough money! The slithering snake door in the chamber of secrets and the magic door at Gringots that clicks open with a thousand tiny levers were both real too. The crew had actually taken the time to work out how to build each intricate piece and then fit it together so carefully that every cog and lever clicked seamlessly into place. The Goblet of Fire was also carved from a single piece of wood!

Of course a lot of what was seen in the movies was computer generated, using clever tricks like green/blue screens and false perspectives to fool our senses. Our world obeys physical laws so all computer generate graphics have to as well to be able to trick our eyes.

Huge animatronic spider
that took over 100 people to operate!

Put the fact that people can’t fly riding around on broomsticks to one side for the moment. If Harry Potter was whizzing around and flew to the left while his cloak flew to the right you wouldn’t believe it, because the centrifugal force* you know and love doesn’t work like that. Maybe he had a magic cloak that makes the centrifugal force acting on it result in a ‘magic force’ that acts in the opposite direction, but somehow this seems more unbelievable than the broomstick-flying in the first place.

Basically film makers have to be very careful about not breaking the laws of physics when they are creating even fantastical worlds, so they use clever computational 'physics engines' to keep track of things like gravity and centrifugal force.

The week after we went the royal visit took place and the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour London was opened officially. I would highly recommend it to any Harry Potter fans or fans of the magic of cinema in general, but if you get to go just remember: all magic is just clever scientific trickery!

Animatronic Buckbeak (he actually bowed!)

*Centrifugal force is a real force. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is a consequence of your sitting in a moving reference frame so technically is a pseudo-force, but so is magnetism and you wouldn’t say that didn’t exist would you? A magnetic field is caused by the motion of electrically charged particles. That’s why you can’t have a magnetic monopole in a normal situation because if charges move from one place to another they can’t disappear.