The Science of Discworld II

yourself – but we still want food. And companionship and sex and love and security and lots of other familiar things.
    The biggest significant change, one that really does alter what it is like to be human, may well be modern communication and transportation.The old geographical barriers that kept separate cultures separate have become almost irrelevant. Cultures are merging and reforming into a global multiculture. It’s hard to predict what it will look like, because this is an emergent process and it hasn’t finished emerging yet. It may be something quite different from the giant US shopping mall that is generally envisaged. That’s what makes today’s world so fascinating – and so dangerous.
    Ultimately, the idea that we are controlling our universe is an illusion. All we know is a relatively small number of tricks, plus one great generic trick for generating more small tricks. That generic trick is the scientific method. It pays off.
    We have also the trick of telling stories that work. By this stage in our evolution, we are spending most of our lives in them. ‘Real life’ – that is, the real life for most of us, with its MOT tests and paper wealth and social systems – is a fantasy that we all buy into, and it works precisely because we all buy into it.
    Poor old Phocian tried hard, but found that the old stories weren’t true when he hadn’t quite got as far as constructing a new one. He performed a reality check, and found that there wasn’t one – at least, not one he’d like to believe was real. He suddenly saw a universe with no map. We’ve got quite good at mapping, since then.
    1 Other recorded spellings are cience, ciens, scians, scyence, sience, syence, syens, syense, scyense. Oh, and science. Naturally, the wizards have invented another one.
    2 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’.
    3 The symbols have the following meanings: © = Sun, i = Moon, § = Mercury.
    4 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.
    5 In this, he is acting exactly like a scientist. Especially if it’s very expensive apparatus.
    6 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.
    7 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.
    8 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.
    9 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?
    10 Yes, in some cases, it is claimed,