The Science of Discworld II

recognised the power of a good story. Miracles run better at the box-office than mundane good actions. Helping an old lady across the road isn’t much of a story, but raising the dead most certainly is. Science is riddled with stories. In fact, if you can’t tell a convincing story about your research, nobody will let you publish it. And even if they did, nobody else would understand it. Newton’s laws of motion are simple little stories about what happens to lumps of matter when they are given a push – stories only a little more precise than ‘if you keep pushing, it will go faster and faster’. And ‘Everything moves in circles’, as Ponder would insist.
    Why are we so wedded to stories? Our minds are too limited to grasp the universe for what it is. We’re very small creatures in a very big world, and there is no way that we could possibly represent that world in full, intricate detail inside our own heads. Instead, we operate with simplified representations of limited parts of the universe. We find simple models that correspond closely to reality extremely attractive. Their simplicity makes them easy to comprehend, but that’s not much use unless they also work . When we reduce a complex universe to a simple principle, be it The Will of God or Schrödinger’s Equation, we feel that we’ve really accomplished something. Our models are stories, and conversely, stories are models of a more complex reality. Our brains fill in the complexity automatically. The story says ‘dog’ and we immediately have a mental picture of the beast: a big, bumbling Labrador with a tail like a steam-hammer, tongue lolling, ears flopping. 1 Just as our visual system fills in the blind spot.
    We learn to appreciate stories as children. The child’s mind is quick and powerful, but uncontrolled and unsophisticated. Stories appeal to it, and adults rapidly discovered that a story can put an idea into a child’s head like nothing else can. Stories are easy to remember, bothfor teller and listener. As that child grows to adulthood, the love of stories remains. An adult has to be able to tell stories to the next generation of children, or the culture does not propagate. And an adult needs to be able to tell stories to other adults, such as their boss or their mate, because stories have a clarity of structure that does not exist in the messiness of the real world. Stories always make sense: that’s why Discworld is so much more convincing than Roundworld.
    Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture’s Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one’s culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence.
    Some stories are just entertainment, but even those usually have a hidden message on a deeper, possibly more earthy, level – as with Rumpelstiltskin. Some stories are Worlds of If, a way for minds to try out hypothetical choices and imagine their consequences. Word-play in the Nest of the Mind. And some of those stories have such a compelling logic that narrative imperative takes over, and they transmute into plans. A plan is a story together with the intention of making it come true.
    Inside Roundworld, as it sits in its glass globe within the confining walls of the library of Unseen University, our story is coming to its climax. Will Shakespeare has written a play (it is, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream ), a play that the elves believe will consolidate their power over human minds. The narrative of this play has collided with Rincewind’s mental model of what he wants to do, and the flying sparks have ignited a plot. How will it all end? That is one of the compulsive aspects of a story. You’ll just have to wait and see.
    We have seen how history unfolds an emergent dynamic, so that even though everything is following rigid rules, even history itself has to wait and see how it all turned out. Yes, everything is following the rules, but there is no short cut that will take you to the destination before the rules themselves get there. History is not a story that exists in a book, the fatalistic ‘it is written’. It is a story that makes itself up as it goes along, like a story that someone is reading