The Science of Discworld IV

selection are making up the future by evolving from rocket-ships into future space elevators, almost everywhere. We should perhaps be surprised that Moore’s Law has worked for so long, but when we examine the changes in computing technology over the last decades we see that, just as in the recent mammal story, the improvements were always inconceivable at the earlier step.
    This is why blinkered applications of laws of nature, such as conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics, can be misleading. As well as content, laws have contexts. A law of nature may appear to pose an insuperable barrier, but if you have applied the law in an inappropriate context, you may have left a way for nature to sneak round it. And it will.
    fn1 In 1841 Richard Owen, a leading palaeontologist, found an incomplete fossil that he thought was a hyrax (because of its teeth) and assigned it to a new genus,
Hyracotherium
. In 1876 Othniel Marsh discovered a complete skeleton, obviously horse-like, and assigned it to another new genus,
Eohippus
(dawn horse). Later it became clear that the two fossils belonged to the same genus, and by the rules of taxonomy, the name that was the first to be published won. So the evocative ‘dawn horse’ was lost, and a scientific misconception was preserved.
    fn2 Since 1881, fossil discoveries have inserted a whole series of intermediates between fish and amphibians:
Osteolepis
,
Eusthenopteron
,
Panderichthys
,
Tiktaalik
,
Elginerpeton
,
Obruchevichthys
,
Ventastega
,
Acanthostega
,
Ichthyostega
,
Hynerpeton
,
Tulerpeton
,
Pederpes
,
Eryops
.
    fn3 Jack recalls a bright Irish student who, in an exam question about convergent evolution, defined it as ‘where the organs of two descendants are more alike than they were in the common ancestor’.
    fn4 See Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart,
What Does a Martian Look Like?
    fn5 We say ‘the’ motor, because everyone does, but different bacteria have different motors. Darwin was puzzled why the deity would design hundreds of very similar barnacles, all of different species; we may similarly wonder why an intelligent designer would intervene in the normal process of evolution to equip dozens of bacteria with individually designed motors.
    fn6 N.J. Matzke, Evolution in (Brownian) space: a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum, www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html .
    fn7 The name means ‘dark belly’, because when it swims upside down, its back has become light like most fishes’ bellies, and its belly dark.

FIFTEEN
----
CASE FOR THE PLAINTIFFS

    The Great Hall in the palace had been opened to all-comers with, of course, a podium for Lord Vetinari and desks for the lawyers. A number of guards surrounded his Lordship, and everyone heard him tell them loudly, ‘No, I am in my own palace, in a court of law at the moment, and since we are not talking about a murder or a dreadful crime I see no reason to introduce weaponry into what is, when all is said and done, a philosophical debate.’
    Marjorie watched the unhappy hangers-on disappear into the body of the hall, and then was further impressed by the way Lord Vetinari achieved
silence
. It was a masterclass; he simply sat silent and immobile with his hands spread out in front of him, oblivious to all the laughter, chattering, gossiping and arguing. It seemed that the air was just full of fragments of nothing whatsoever, fractured words breaking up and fading, until the final chattering fool suddenly found a great hush filling the room, in the centre of which there was his last stupid, idiotic remark, evaporating in his Lordship’s dreadful, patient silence.
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot conceive of a more interesting case than the one we have today. The dispute is over a mere artefact: shiny, I grant you, and attractive in its way. I am given to believe by the wizards and natural scientists of Unseen University and elsewhere that, reasonably small though it be, it is in fact larger by many orders of magnitude than all of our own world.
    ‘I intend to seek evidence of this during the deliberations of this very
unusual
tribunal, which has been brought into being because there are two parties who both profess to believe that the artefact is theirs. For my part, I intend to test this assumption.’ Lord Vetinari sighed, and said, ‘I rather fear the term “quantum” will make an appearance; but these are, after all, modern times.’
    Marjorie had to put her hand over her mouth to stop