The Science of Discworld II

description of what the world is about.
    They often are, of course. A lot depends on context and intention. In Chapter 4 of The Science of Discworld we called these helpful untruths and half-truths ‘lies-to-children’. They must be distinguished from the much less benevolent ‘lies-to-adults’, another word for which is ‘politics’. Lies-to-adults are constructed with the express purpose of concealing intentions; their aim is to mislead. Some newspapers tell lies-to-adults; others do their best to tell truths-to-adults, although theyalways end up by telling adult versions of lies-to-children.
    In the twenty-fifth Discworld novel The Truth , journalism comes to the Disc, in the form of William de Worde. His career begins with a monthly newsletter sent to various Discworld notables, usually for five dollars each month, but in the case of one foreigner for half a cartload of figs twice per year. He writes one letter, and pays Mr Cripslock the engraver in the Street of Cunning Artificers to turn it into a woodcut, from which he prints five copies. From these small beginnings emerges Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, when de Worde’s ability to sniff out a story is allied to the dwarves’ discovery of movable type. It is rumoured that the dwarves have found a way to turn lead into gold – and since the type is made of lead, in a way they have.
    The main journalistic content of the novel is a circulation battle between de Worde’s Ankh-Morpork Times , with its banner ‘THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE’, and the Ankh-Morpork Inquirer (THE NEWS YOU ONLY HEAR ABOUT). The Times is an upmarket broadsheet, running stories with headlines like ‘Patrician Attacks Clerk With Knife (He had the knife, not the clerk)’, and checking its facts before publishing them. The Inquirer is a tabloid, whose headlines are more of the ‘ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND’ kind, and it saves money by making all the stories up. As a result, it can undercut its upmarket competitor when it comes to price, and the stories are much more interesting. Truth eventually prevails over cheap nonsense, however, and de Worde learns from his editor Sacharissa a fundamental principle of journalism:
    â€˜Look at it like this,’ said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. ‘Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.’
    â€˜Yes, but that’s not very—’
    Sacharissa glanced up and flashed him a smile. ‘Sometimes they’re the same person,’ she said.
    This time it was William who looked down, modestly.
    â€˜You think that’s really true?’ he said.
    She shrugged. ‘Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.’
    Lies-to-children, even the broadsheet newspaper sort, are mostly benign and helpful, and even when they are not, they are intended to be that way. They are constructed with the aim of opening a pathway that will eventually lead to more sophisticated lies-to-children, reflecting more of the complexities of reality. We teach science and art and history and economics by a series of carefully constructed lies. Stories, if you wish … but then, we’ve already characterised a story as a lie.
    The science teacher explains the colours of the rainbow in terms of refraction, but slides over the shape of the rainbow and the way those colours are arranged. Which, when you come to think of it, are more puzzling, and more what we want to know about when we ask why rainbows look like they do. There’s a lot more to the physics than a raindrop acting as a prism. Later, we may develop the next level of lie by showing the child the elegant geometry of light rays as they pass through a spherical raindrop, refracting, reflecting, and refracting back out again, with each colour of light focused along a slightly different angle. Later still, we explain that light does not consist of rays at all, but electromagnetic waves. By university, we are telling undergraduates that those waves aren’t really waves at all, but tiny quantum wave-packets, photons. Except that the ‘wave-packets’ in the textbooks don’t actually do the job … And so on. All of our understanding of nature is like this; none of it is Ultimate Reality.

TWENTY-SEVEN
LACK OF WILL
    T HE WIZARDS WERE NEVER QUITE CERTAIN where they were. It wasn’t their history. History gets named afterwards: The Age of