Science of Discworld III

to the Great Hall, please.’
    Nothing happened. An important part of transferring matter across the world is the moving of an equivalent mass the other way. This can take a while.
    Then an oak table, three chairs and two spoons crashed into the beach. A moment later, the wizards vanished.
    1 The University’s proctors were known as lobsters because they went very red when hot and had a grip that was extremely hard to shake off. They were generally ex-army sergeants, had depths of cynicism unplumbable by any line, and were fuelled by beer.

TWENTY-TWO
FORGET THE FACTS
    … I T’S THEORIES THAT MATTER .
    Discworld does not have science as such. But it does have a variety of systems of causality, ranging from human intentions (‘I’ll just go out for a drink in the Mended Drum’) to magical spells to a generalised narrativium that keeps local and general history close to the lines of ‘story’. Roundworld does have science, but it’s difficult to discover the extent to which it determines, modifies, affects people’s actions – technology does, of course, but does science? Science does affect what we do, what we think, but it doesn’t change what we do and think because so much of our basic knowledge is simply accepted scientific ‘fact’.
    Well, actually not ‘fact’, but theory.
    We search for theories because they organise facts. We do this, according to The Science of Discworld II , because we are really Pan narrans , the storytelling ape, not Homo sapiens , the wise man. We invent our own stories to help ourselves to live. For this reason we are not reliable when we collect ‘facts’ for scientific purposes. Even the best scientists, and certainly the paid help and the student employees, are so full of what they want to find that there’s no way that what they do find can relate to the real world more than to their own prejudices, biases, and wishes. However, we were all told atschool that ‘science’s facts are reliable’, but that its theories – and even more so its working hypotheses – are and were constantly subject to criticism, and therefore to change. It was explained to us that Newton had been supplanted by Einstein, Lamarck by Darwin, Freud by Skinner … So we were told that theories were constantly being supplanted, but that the observations on which they were based were reliable.
    This is the reverse of the truth.
    No teacher pointed out that many, perhaps most, of the basic assumptions of our intellectual world were scientific theories that had survived criticism … from the place of Earth and Sol in the Milky Way galaxy to the fertilisation theory of human conception to subatomic physics producing atom bombs … to Ohm’s Law and the electrical energy grid, to medical tricks like the germ theory of disease, all the way to X-rays and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), not to mention chemical theories that reliably gave us nylon, polythene and detergents. These theories go unnoticed because they have become defaults, so completely accepted as ‘true’ that we fail to paint them with emotional tags, and simply, build them into our intellectual toolkit. Even though no teacher pointed out that they were scientific successes, they constitute much of the (regrettably but unavoidably) uninspiring parts of school science.
    On these foundation beliefs we hang such glittering flesh as visits to Mars, new fertility techniques like ICSI, fusion power, new bactericides for kitchen surfaces – and for a minority of the more imaginative children, the wide and wonderful worlds of science fiction.
    The theories of science, then, particularly the totally accepted ones like sperm-egg conception, polythene, and Earth-orbits-Sun, are good reliable science. They are continually tested against the real world when babies are conceived in fertility clinics, when people do the washing-up, or when astronauts circle the Earth in sunlight and shadow. An enormous mass of Roundworld science is built into our everyday world, and it’s mostly reliable.
    But there is also a whole mass of science that is incomprehensible to nearly everybody, which pretends that it’s The Answer for all kinds of technical or philosophical issues, and which supports experts. Quantum theory is the classic case, relativity is a touch more accessible, but subatomic physics and most of medicine, aeronautics and automobile engineering, soil chemistry and biology, statistics, and the higher reaches of economics, are all subjects