Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

Until we had really good fast computers, and had learned a little bit about how to model the complexity of ecosystems or companies or bacterial communities, most of us practised the reductionist trick of looking for the bits we thought we could understand and modelling those. Then we hoped we could put these separate bits together to understand the whole thing. We were nearly always wrong.

As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, fairy tales are certainly not, as modern detractors of the fantasy genre believe, set in a world 'where anything can happen'. They existed in a world with rules ('don't stray from the path', 'don't open the blue door', 'you must be home before midnight', and so on). In a world where anything could happen, you couldn't have stories at all.

Admittedly, many African tribes think no such thing: you can hide things from the fairly simple local god. But then it's not much of a god. Probably the tribal mores have been corrupted with the passage of time.

Why birth, the sheerest accident during our development? Why not fertilisation? Or hatching from the zonapellucida, the egg membrane? Or the first heartbeat? Or the first dream (while still in the uterus)? Or the first word, or the first carnal experience? There are aspects of our future that are determined by, at least, the date of our birth (we may end up the youngest or the oldest child in the school intake that year, and that can make a big difference) but we're not talking about these human-created things here.

The gravitational attraction exerted by a single doctor at a distance of 6 inches is roughly twice that of Jupiter at its closest point to the Earth.

At least on Discworld you can see the gods acting disgracefully.

Lancre was so backward that its population of 500 had only one civil servant, Shawn Ogg, who handled everything from national defence and tax gathering to mowing the castle lawns, although he was allowed help with the lawns. Lawns required care.

There doesn't seem to be a good word for 'to be altruistic'. To altru?

In Fisher's day, this simplification was a great idea, because it made it possible to do the sums. Nowadays, it's a bad idea, for the same reason. You can do them, but you can't put any faith in the answers.

Altruism, cooperation and love among humans are not the only examples of evolutionary overcommitment ... as the Librarian well knows. A banana is much better suited to being eaten by an orangutan than it needs to be. The rest of the fruit kingdom doesn't come close. What's in it for other fruit, like the tomato, is that its seeds pass through the animal and are dispersed, complete with a built-in packet of fertiliser. A bean-counting tomato could reduce its level of suitability and still ensure that its seeds, rather than those of the competition, were propagated (the juiciest tomatoes used to be from the plants growing at the sewage farm ...). But an over-committed banana avoids the need to test such fine points. By going over the top, losing its seed-producing capacity entirely and relying on humans to propagate it, it ensures that it wins so comfortably that no competitor even gets a look in.

... which can be applied so overpoweringly that the people who aren't Us aren't anything. See the Imperial China parody -the Agatean Empire -in Interesting Times, and a number of Roundworld cultures, too. Being Them is quite a step up by comparison.

Other recorded spellings are cience, ciens, scians, scyence, sience, syence, syens, syense, scyense. Oh, and science. Naturally, the wizards have invented another one.

So called because it is near the larger island of Kythera. This is 'anti' = near, not 'anti' = opposed to. Though, metaphorically, the two usages are close.

Think about the meaning of 'opposed to'. And 'against'.

The symbols have the following meanings: 0 = Sun, 3 = Moon, § = Mercury.

On TV news we are repeatedly told about scientists who are proving' a theory. Either the people making the programme were trained in media studies and have no idea of how science works, or they were trained in media studies and don't care how science works, or they're still wedded to the old- fashioned meaning of the verb 'prove', which means to test. As in the phrase 'the exception proves the rule', which made perfect sense when it was first stated - the exception casts doubt on the rule by 'testing' it and finding it inadequate -and makes no sense at all when it is used today to justify ignoring awkward exceptions.

In this, he is acting exactly like a scientist. Especially if it's very expensive apparatus.

Gait analysts do put horses on treadmills. However, the closest parallel to Phocian's experiment is the widespread use of soot-covered cylinders to record insect movements.

There have been many others. One of our favourites is Sir George Cayley, the early nineteenth-century aeronautical pioneer. He did sterling work on wing design, invented the light-tension wheel (effectively the modern bicycle wheel) as a light wheel for aircraft, and would almost certainly have achieved powered flight if only anyone had got around to inventing the internal combustion engine. He didn't go mad, but he did experiment with an engine that ran on gunpowder.

We're in danger of heading into postmodernism here, which is a very bad idea when discussing an ancient Greek, and even more so when he's fictitious.

Suffice it to say that science also involves stringent reality-checks, and therefore is not a purely social activity.

Some current controversies, all 'respectable' - that is, with serious evidence for both sides - include: Is new variant CJD related to BSE (mad cow disease)? Has the human sperm count fallen? Was the Moon formed by a Mars-sized body hitting the Earth? Will the universe ever stop expanding? How are birds related to dinosaurs? Is quantum mechanics really random? Was there ever life on Mars? Is the triple-alpha process evidence that our universe is special? And is there anything that does not contain nuts?

Yes, in some cases, it is claimed, werewolves and vampires have their roots in rare human medical conditions. Now try angels and unicorns...

Cartesian, again, because of Descartes, whose cogito ergo sum and mind-is-different-stuff-from-matter still influence pop philosophy.

Though Ian has a friend, an engineer named Len Reynolds, whose cat managed to type 'FOR' into his computer by walking on the keyboard. Three more letters, 'MAT', and the cat would have wiped his hard disc.

The superstition is common in the Black Country, in places like Wombourne and Wednesbury. Though that's not why it's called the Black Country. The thing about your Black Country is, it's black. At least, it was black, with industrial grime and pollution, when it got its name. Some bits no doubt still are.

Schrodinger pointed out that quantum mechanics often gives silly answers like 'the cat is half alive and half dead'. His intention was to dramatise the gap between a quantum-level description of reality and the world we actually live in, but most physicists missed the point and derived complicated explanations of why cats really are like that. And why the universe needs conscious observers to ensure that it continues to exist. Only recently did they twig what Schrodinger was on about, and come up with the concept of 'decoherence', which shows that superpositions of quantum states rapidly change into single states unless they are protected from interaction with the surrounding environment. And the universe doesn't need us to make it hold together, sorry. See The Science of Discworld, with a cameo appearance of Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo.