Just got thinking about why, in the Potterverse, technology from electromechanics on up goes cattywumpus around magic, and I got thinking about Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Remember, Thomas Edison was called the "Wizard of Menlo Park," and Nikola Tesla was not very far behind in jaw dropping wondrous devices.
IT might just be the sheer amount of basic magical forces at work in even the simplest mass-produced trinket. Because of the magical laws of Similarity and Contagion, any common electronic device is the same as any other from the same factory... rather, every gadget from the same batch is one big gestalt item. Thus, as magic tries to interact with transistor radio A, it also interacts with the seventy thousand other similar ones elsewhere in the world, overloading the one in closest proximity to magic. Then, of course, you add in the fact that each microchip is really several hundred identical switches...
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
IT might just be the sheer amount of basic magical forces at work in even the simplest mass-produced trinket. Because of the magical laws of Similarity and Contagion, any common electronic device is the same as any other from the same factory... rather, every gadget from the same batch is one big gestalt item. Thus, as magic tries to interact with transistor radio A, it also interacts with the seventy thousand other similar ones elsewhere in the world, overloading the one in closest proximity to magic. Then, of course, you add in the fact that each microchip is really several hundred identical switches...
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll