The Science of Discworld II

it. Even searching for the Philosopher’s Stone could be considered subversive, just as searching for a cheap source of renewable energy now is apparently considered subversive by oil corporations and nuclear energy companies. In 1595 Dee’s companion Edward Kelley was imprisoned by Rudolf II and died trying to escape, and in 1603 Christian II of Saxony imprisoned and tortured the Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton. A dangerous thing, a clever man.
    The story of the Philosopher’s Stone never reached its climax. The alchemists never did turn lead into gold. But the story took a long time to die. Even around 1700, Isaac Newton still thought it was worth having a go, and the idea of turning lead into gold by chemical means was finally killed off only in the nineteenth century. Nuclear reactions, mind you, are another matter: the transmutation can be done, but it is wildly uneconomic. And unless you’re very careful, the gold is radioactive (although, of course, this will keep the money circulating quickly, and we might see a sudden upsurge of philanthropy).
    How did we get from alchemy to radioactivity? The pivotal periodof Western history was the Renaissance, roughly spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when ideas imported from the Arab world collided with Greek philosophy and mathematics, and Roman artisanship and engineering, leading to a sudden flowering of the arts and the birth of what we now call science. During the Renaissance, we learned to tell new stories about ourselves and the world. And those stories changed both.
    In order to understand how this happened, we must come to grips with the real Renaissance mentality, not the popular view of a ‘Renaissance man’. By that phrase, we mean a person with expertise in many areas – like Roundworld’s Leonardo da Vinci, who bears a suspicious resemblance to the Disc’s Leonard of Quirm. We use this phrase because we contrast such people with what we call a ‘well-educated’ person today.
    In medieval Europe, and indeed long after that, the aristocracy considered ‘education’ to mean classical knowledge – the culture of the Greeks – plus a lot of religion, and not much else. The king was expected to be well informed about poetry, drama and philosophy, but he wasn’t expected to know about plumbing or brickwork. Some kings did in fact get rather interested in astronomy and science, either out of intellectual interest or the realisation that technology is power, but that wasn’t part of the normal royal curriculum.
    This view of education implied that the classics were all the validated knowledge that an ‘educated’ person needed, a view not far from that of many English ‘public’ schools until quite recently, and of the politicians they have produced. This view of what was needed by the rulers contrasted with what was needed by the children of the peasantry (artisan skills and, lately, the ‘three Rs’ 2 ).
    Neither the classics nor the three Rs formed the basis for the genuine Renaissance man, who sought a fusion of those two worlds. Pointing to the artisan as a source of worldly experience, of knowledgeof the material world and its tools such as an alchemist might use, led to a new rapprochement between the classical and the empirical, between intellect and experience. The actions of such men as Dee – even those of the occultist Paracelsus in his medical prescriptions – emphasised this distinction, and started the fusion of reason and empiricism that so impresses us today.
    As we’ve said, the word ‘Renaissance’ refers not just to rebirth, but to a specific rebirth, that of ancient Greek culture. This, however, is a modern view, based on a mistaken view of the Greeks, and of the Renaissance itself. In ‘classical’ education, no attention is paid to engineering. Of course not. Greek culture ran on pure intellect, poetry and philosophy. They didn’t have engineers.
    Oh, but they did. Archimedes constructed great cranes that could lift enemy ships out of the water, and we still don’t know exactly how he did it. Hero of Alexandria (roughly contemporary with Jesus) wrote many texts about engines and machines of various kinds of the previous three hundred years, many of which show that prototypes must have been made. His coin-operated machines were not too different from those that could be found on any city street in