The Science of Discworld II

roll of cloth, the Endless Road, move at a speed that is non-zero, but is also different from the natural speed with which the horse would move if its feet were actually hitting solid ground. 6 You might care to think about that, and you might even decide that we’re wrong. And you might even be right.
    We also acknowledge that Phocian’s final experiment is open to many objections. And because the hooves of a trotting horse hit the ground in pairs, it is actually necessary to halve the total length of the charcoal smears before comparing them with the length of the cloth.No matter, these are mere elaborations of what would otherwise be an entirely transparent story: you understand what we’re getting at.
    Taking all this into account, was Phocian a scientist?
    No. Hex has bungled again, for despite Phocian’s years of visibly ‘scientific’ activity, he falls down in two respects. One, open to dispute, is not his fault: he has no peers, no colleagues. There are no other ‘scientists’ for him to work with, or to criticise him. He’s on his own and ahead of his time. 7 Just as there cannot be just one wizard, there cannot be just one scientist. Science has a social dimension. 8 The second reason, though, is decisive. He is mortified when his work proves that Antigonus, the great authority, is wrong.
    Any genuine scientist would give their right arm to prove that the great authority is wrong.
    That’s how you make your reputation, and it’s also the most important way to contribute to the scientific endeavour. Science is at its best when it changes people’s minds. Very little of it does that, in part because our minds have been built by a culture that is pervaded by science anyway. If a scientist manages to spend 1 per cent of the time discovering things that are not what they expected, they are doing amazingly well. But boy, does that 1 per cent count for a lot.
    This, then, is science. Questioning authority. Complicity between theory and experiment. And being within a community of like-minded people to question your work. Preferably accompanied by a conscious awareness of all of the above, and gratitude to your friends and colleagues for their criticisms. And what’s the aim? To find timeless truths? No, that’s asking too much. To stop frail humans from falling forplausible falsehoods? Yes – including those of people who at least look and sound just like you. And to protect people from their willingness to believe a good story, just because it sounds right and doesn’t upset them. And to protect them from the firm smack of authority, too.
    It took humanity a long time to arrive at the scientific method. No doubt the reason for the delay was that if you do science properly, you often find yourself overturning entrenched, well-established beliefs, including your own entrenched, well-established beliefs. Science is not a belief system, but many areas of human activity are, so it is not surprising to find that the early developers of science often found themselves in conflict with authority. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Galileo, who ran into trouble with the Inquisition because of his theories about the solar system. Sometimes science exposes you to the firm smack instead.
    Science, then, is not just a body of teachable facts, and techniques. It is a way of thinking. In science, established ‘facts’ are always open to question, 9 but few scientists will listen to you unless you can offer some evidence that the old ideas are wrong. If the people who invented those ideas are dead, then alternatives can quickly gain acceptance, and the scientific method is working well. If the people who invented those ideas are still around, in influential positions, then they can put a lot of obstacles in the way of the new suggestion and the people who proposed it. Then science is working badly, because people are behaving like people. Even so, the new idea still can displace the accepted wisdom. It just takes longer and needs really solid evidence.
    Let’s contrast science with alternative ways of thinking about the universe. The Discworld worldview is that the universe is run bymagic: things happen because people want them to happen. You still have to find the right spell, or the narrative imperative has to be so strong that those things will happen anyway even if people don’t want them to, but the universe exists in order to be there for