Science of Discworld III

or, rather, flowed through itself to face the other way.
    The lid of the Luggage closed with a ‘clop’ like the sound of a trout taking an unwary mayfly.
    I wonder if it found out what fear really is, Rincewind thought.
    But more grey shapes were distilling out of the air.
    Now it was time to run.

EIGHTEEN
STEAM ENGINE TIME
    T HERE WAS D ARWIN, SITTING ON a bank, watching the bees, the wasps, the flowers … In the last paragraph of The Origin we find a beautiful and important passage that hints at afternoons of that kind:
    It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
    Go ahead Paley, make my day .
    All that wizardly effort to get him to write The Origin , not The Ology . It mattered to Darwin, of course, and it matters to those who chart the course of history. But, just as we can ask whether Lincoln’s assassination really had much effect on subsequent events, so we can ask the same about Darwin’s life’s work. Would it really have mattered if the wizards had failed?
    Metaphorical wizards, you appreciate. Yes, those happy coincidences that got Charles on board the Beagle and kept him there do look a tad suspicious, but wizards ?
    Let’s ask the question in a more respectable way. How radical was Darwin’s theory of natural selection, really? Did he have insights that no one before him had considered? Or did he just happen to be theperson who caught the public eye, with an idea that had been floating around for some time? How much credit should he be given?
    The same can be – and has been – asked of many ‘revolutionary’ scientific concepts. Robert Hooke got the idea of inverse square-law gravity before Newton did. Minkowski, Poincaré, and others worked out much of special relativity before Einstein did. Fractals were around, in some form, for at least a century before Benoît Mandelbrot energetically promoted them and they developed into a major branch of applied mathematics. The earliest sniff of chaos theory can be found in Poincaré’s prize-winning memoir on the stability of the solar system in 1890, probably 75 years before the subject was perceived as ‘taking off’.
    How do scientific revolutions get started, and what decides who gets the credit? Is it talent? A flair for publicity? A lottery?
    Part of the answer to these questions can be found in Robert Thurston’s 1878 study of another important Victorian innovation, which Ponder Stibbons unerringly homed in on in Chapter 3 . The book is A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine . The second paragraph says:
    History illustrates the very important truth: inventions are never, as great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really either an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step in a progression. It is not a creation, but a growth as truly so as is that of the trees in the forest. The same invention is frequently brought out in several countries, and by several individuals, simultaneously.
    Thurston’s topic reminds us of a common metaphor for this kind of apparently simultaneous invention: steam engine time . When it’s steam engine time, suddenly everyone is making steam engines. When it’s evolution time, everyone is inventing a theory of evolution. When it’s VCR time, everyone is making video cassetterecorders. When it’s Dotcom time, everyone is setting up Internet trading systems. And when it’s Dotcom-going-bust time, all the Dotcoms are going bust.
    There are times when human affairs really do seem to run on pre-constructed tracks. Some development becomes inevitable, and suddenly it’s everywhere. Yet, just before that propitious moment, it wasn’t inevitable at all, otherwise it would have happened already. ‘Steam engine time’ is a convenient metaphor for this curious process. The invention of the steam engine wasn’t the first example, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but it is one of the best known, and it’s quite well documented.
    Thurston distinguishes invention from discovery. He says that inventions are never the creation of a single individual, whereas great discoveries seldom are. However, the distinction