The Science of Discworld II

people.
    On Discworld and Roundworld, the worldview of the priesthood is similar, but with one important difference. They believe that the universe is run by gods (or a god): things happen because the gods want them to happen, don’t care if they happen, or have some ineffable long-term aim in view. However, it is possible for people to ask the priests to intercede with the gods, on their behalf, in the hope of influencing the gods’ decisions, at least in minor ways.
    The philosophical worldview, exemplified by Antigonus, is that the nature of the world can be deduced by pure thought, on the basis of a few deep, general principles. Observation and experiment are secondary to verbal reasoning and logic.
    The scientific worldview is that what people want has very little to do with what actually happens, and that it is unnecessary to invoke gods at all. Thought is useful, but empirical observations are the main test of any hypothesis. The role of science is to help us find out how the universe works. Why it works, or what manner of Being ultimately controls it, if any, is not a question that science is interested in. It is not a question to which anyone can give a testable answer.
    Oddly enough, this hands-off approach to the universe has given us far more control over it than magic, religion or philosophy have done. On Roundworld, magic doesn’t work, so it offers no control at all. Some people believe that prayer can influence their god, and that in this way human beings can have some influence over the world in which they live, like a courtier at a king’s ear. Other people have no such beliefs, and consider the role of prayer to be largely psychological. It can have an effect on people , but not on the universe itself. And philosophy has a tendency to follow rather than lead.
    Science is a form of narrativium. In fact, all four approaches to the universe – magic, religion, philosophy and science – involve the construction of stories about the world. Oddly enough, these different kinds of story often have many parallels. There is a distinctresemblance between many religious creation myths and the cosmol-ogists’ ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the universe. And the monotheistic idea that there is only one God, who created everything and runs everything, is suspiciously close to the modern physicists’ idea that there should be a single Theory of Everything, a single fundamental physical principle that unites both relativity and quantum mechanics into a satisfying and elegant mathematical structure.
    The act of telling stories about the universe may well have been more important to the early development of humanity, and for the initial growth of science, than the actual content of the stories themselves. Accurate content was a later criterion. When we start telling stories about the universe, the possibility arises of comparing those stories with the universe itself, and refining how well the stories fit what we actually see. And that is already very close to the scientific method.
    Humanity seems to have started from a rather Discworldly view, in which the world was inhabited by unicorns and werewolves and gods and monsters, and the stories were used not so much to explain how the world worked, but to form a crucial part of the cultural Make-a-Human kit. Unicorns, werewolves, elves, fairies, angels, and other supernatural were not real. But that didn’t actually matter very much: there is no problem in using unreal things to programme human minds. 10 Think of all those talking animals.
    The models employed by science are very similar in many respects. They, too, do not correspond exactly to reality. Think of the old model of an atom as a kind of miniature solar system, in which tiny hard particles called electrons whirl around a central nucleus consisting of other kinds of tiny hard particles: protons and neutrons. The atom is not ‘really’ like that. But many scientists still use this picture today as the basis for their investigations. Whether this makes sense depends upon what problem they are working on, and when it doesn’t make sense, they use something more sophisticated, like the description of an atom as a probable cloud of ‘orbitals’ which represent not electrons, but places where electrons could be. That model is more sophisticated, andit fits reality more closely than a mini solar system, but it still isn’t