The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

1

And in this short statement may be seen the very essence of wizardry.

2

This one was apparently the result of a curse some 1,200 years ago by a dying Archchancellor, which sounded very much like 'May you always teach fretwork!'

3

Lord Vetinari, the Patrician and supreme ruler of the city, took proper food labeling very seriously. Unfortunately, he sought the advice of the wizards of Unseen University on this one, and posed the question thusly: 'Can you, taking into account multi-dimensional phase space, meta-statistical anomaly and the laws of probability, guarantee that anything with absolute certainty contains no nuts at all?' After several days, they had to conclude that the answer was 'no'. Lord Vetinari refused to accept 'Probably does not contain nuts' because he considered it unhelpful.

4

And you'd be in the position of the horrible Discworld 'Auditors', who are anthropomorphic representations of the rules of the universe, who in Thief of Time reduce paintings and statues to their component atoms in a fruitless search for 'beauty'.

5

PET - Positron Emission Tomography, meaning that the machine picks up tiny particles emitted by the tissues of the brain and reconstructs a map of what's going on inside it.

6

And many things that there aren't, such as Dark.

7

It would have been an exit hole, but he didn't.

8

In the simplest picture of an atom, the nucleus is a relatively small central region made from protons and neutrons. Electrons 'orbit' the nucleus at a distance. The triple-alpha process takes place in a plasma, where the atoms have been stripped of their electrons, so only their nuclei are involved. Later, as the plasma cools, the nuclei can acquire the necessary electrons.

9

1 MeV is one million electron-volts. An electron-volt is a unit of energy, obviously, and for our current purposes it doesn't really matter what that unit is.

For the record, it's the energy of an electron when its potential is raised by one volt, and is equal to 1.6 x 10^-12 ergs. And the energy referred to here is the excess energy compared to the lowest energy state of the atom, its 'ground state'. What's an erg? Look it up if you really need to know.

10

Not hand and glove, the fit isn't that close.

11

Others found by research wizards include Objects In The Rear View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, No User Serviceable Parts Inside and, of course May Contain Nuts.

12

There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much because it's self-evidently a load of marsh-gas. [This footnote is a footnote in the original quotation. So this is a metafootnote.]

13

The bean-counters don't even know how to count beans sensibly. Are we surprised?

14

A tour of any airport bookshop will show that this is reasonable.

15

But Joycean scholars would be furious if we excluded Finnegan's Wake, which reads exactly like that.

16

See The Science of Discworld, 'A giant leap for moonkind'.

17

An extremely common and versatile substance, unfortunately not available in all universes.

18

The sad histories of these hitherto unknown civilisations, along with the tale of the two-mile limpet, can be found in The Science of Discworld.

19

Isn't 'Bombastus' a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.

20

Headers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic.

What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it...

21

Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.

22

Carers even encourage or berate the child: 'What's the magic word? You forgot the magic word!'

23

Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it -and should have, but the publisher got cold feet - was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)

24

A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala.

25

And new diseases, although it was quite hard to make bamboo models of these.

26

The Librarian, on the other knuckly hand, held the view that humans were apes who had given up trying. They were the ones who simply couldn't cut the mustard when it came to living in harmony with their environment, maintaining a workable social structure and, above all, sleeping while holding on.

27

On his first visit to England in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was asked 'What do y think of modern civilisation?' He is said to have replied 'That would be a good idea.'

28

A time measurement we developed in The Science of Discworld as a 'human' way of measuring large amounts of time. It's 50 years, a 'typical' age gap between grandparent and grandchild. Most of the really interesting bits of human development have taken place in the last 150 Grandfathers. Remember objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

29

Most of them being Grandfather bacteria, you appreciate. That's the trouble with metaphors.

30

Though they're monkeys, not apes.

31

It helps considerably to steal privilege from other species; for instance, all that food material in plant seeds, tubers and bulbs.

32

It happens all the time on Discworld!

33

But we eat sheep, too.

34

There's been a very cute discovery about elephants recently, and the only place we can find to put it is this footnote. (This, after all, is what footnotes are for.) It has been known since 1682 that elephants' lungs are unusual, without the 'pleural cavity', a space between the lungs and the chest wall that is filled with fluid, that most mammals have. Instead of fluid, elephants' lungs are surrounded by loose connective tissue. It now looks as if this type of lung exists because it lets elephants go snorkelling, breathing through their trunks. In 2001 the physiologist John West calculated that with a normal pleural cavity, the pressure of the water would burst the tiny blood vessels in the pleural membrane and snorkelling could be fatal. We're now wondering whether the trunk evolved in the ocean as a snorkel. Land vertebrates first evolved from fish that came up on to the seashore. Much later, a variety of mammals went back into the oceans and evolved into several kinds of sea-mammals, the most spectacular modern descendants being whales. We now see that somewhere along the way, some of those water-adapted mammals came back on to the land and turned into elephants. So the elephant is now on its second evolutionary journey out of the water and on to the land. It would be nice if it made up its mind.

35

See The Science of Discworld, chapter 38.

36

Peasants do cost.

37

David Brin fans will know what we mean here: in the Five Galaxies, no race (save for the long-defunct Progenitors) ever became extelligent without the aid of a sponsor race which already was. Save for humans, because even in an SF story we need to feel superior. We are, after all, the True Human Beings.

38

Always be careful of the twentieth-century 'story' of 'the natives who live in harmony with their environment'. It tends to gloss over the fact that back in history they killed off all the really big animals, and now it's a choice between harmony and death.

39

Mind you, Genesis does say that after Cain killed Abel he was exiled to the land of Nod, on the east of Eden, where he 'knew his wife' and Enoch was born. It doesn't tell us how the wife got to Nod in order to be known. She could have been one of those unmentioned servants, slaves or concubines. That, in turn, raises even more problems with the story of Adam and Eve.

40

This is why we have been forced to invent differences of religious belief, which give us an excuse to kill each other because They are so dramatically different from us True Human Beings -they don't even know that spilling salt, and then failing to hop three time around the table, invites a demon into your home. So it's all right to wipe the False Humans, Them, from the face of the planet.

41

The ! is a symbol denoting a particular clicking sound.

42

A meal that should see you through the week, as the old music hall joke reminds us.

43

Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika still have their cichlid species flocks; your local tropical-fish shop will have representatives.

44

'Going walkabout' seems to have been a way to avoid this torture for at least some Australian tribes.

45

Yes, we know you don't believe this, but ... The first reliable data are in Elliott Philipp's analysis of blood-groups from families in high-rise apartments in Liverpool in the late 1960s, published in 1973. There, 10 per cent of the 'legal paternities' were biologically impossible. So, correcting for the cases where the milkman had the same blood-group as the legal father, about 13—17 per cent were 'discrepant paternities', as the coy phrase goes. Hundreds of births in Maidenhead, in the stockbroker-belt, yielded the same proportions. American figures for the 1980s were about 10 per cent, but these were underestimates because they were not corrected as above. That's the thing about science: it tells you stuff you didn't expect. It gets worse. Or maybe you feel it gets better. At any rate many animals that until recently were famed for their fidelity, such as swans, turn out to be partial to a bit on the side. That ubiquitous beast, the monogamus, is rapidly going extinct.

46

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.

47

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.

48

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.

49

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.

50

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.

51

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

52

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.

53

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

54

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.

55

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.

56

... 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.

57

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

58

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'.

59

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

60

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.

61

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

62

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.

63

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.

64

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.

65

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?

66

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

67

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

68

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.

69

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.

70

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.

71

Discworld runs this far more sensibly. Heroes will have adventures.

72

Recall that Yossarian is a pilot in Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

73

We use this word because it's standard in science fiction, but UK English would require 'alternative'.

74

Named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. See Evolving the Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.

75

It then comes as quite a jolt when we discover that the animal is a chihuahua.

76

The 'Shema' prayer, which orthodox Jews must say at least three times a day, includes 'And these words, which I command you this day. shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk upon the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.'

77

Of course it ceases to be laughable if, despite its bizarre appearance, it happens to be true. And we've already agreed that all religions are true, for a given value of 'true'.

78

Revelation xxi.16 gives it as 12,000 furlongs in length, breadth and height, or a cube 1,500 miles on a side. Noticeably smaller than the Moon.