The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

appeared that every wizard apart from, possibly, the Professor of Eldritch Lacemaking, had decided he was working on something that would benefit immensely from access to the Project. There was certainly room. While the Project was indeed about a foot wide, the space inside seemed to be getting bigger by the second. A universe offers lots of space, after all.
    And while ignorant laymen objected to magical experiments that were by no means dangerous, there being less than one chance in five of making a serious breach in the fabric of reality, there was no one in there to object to
anything
.
    There were, of course, accidents …
    ‘Will you two stop shouting!’ yelled the Senior Wrangler. Two student wizards were arguing vehemently, or at least repeatedly stating their point of view in a loud voice, which suffices for argument most of the time.
    ‘I’d spent ages putting together a small icy ball and
he
sent that wretched great rock smack into it, sir.’
    ‘I wasn’t trying to!’ said the other student. The Senior Wrangler stared at him, trying to remember his name. As a general rule, he avoided getting to know the students, since he felt they were a tedious interruption to the proper running of college life.
    ‘What
were
you trying to do, then … boy?’ he said.
    ‘Er … I was trying to hit the big ball of gas, sir. But it just sort of swung around it, sir.’
    The Senior Wrangler looked around. The Dean was not present. Then he looked into the Project.
    ‘Oh, I see. That one. Quite pretty. All those stripes. Who built that?’
    A student raised his hand.
    ‘Ah, yes … you,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘Good stripes. Well done. What’s it made of?’
    ‘I just dragged a lot of ice together, sir. But it got hot.’
    ‘Really? Ice gets hot in a ball?’
    ‘In a
big
ball, sir.’
    ‘Have you told Mister Stibbons? He likes to know that sort of thing.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    The Senior Wrangler turned to the other student.
    ‘And why were
you
throwing rocks at his big ball of gas?’
    ‘Er … because you score ten for hitting it, sir.’
    The Senior Wrangler looked owlishly at the students. It all became clear. He’d wandered into the HEM one night when he couldn’t sleep and a mob of students had been hunched over the keyboards of H EX and shouting things like ‘I’ve got the battering ram! Hah, eat hot naphtha, evil dog!’ Doing that sort of thing in a whole new universe seemed … well, impolite.
    On the other hand, the Senior Wrangler shared with some of his colleagues an unformed thought that pushing back the boundaries of knowledge was not quite … well, polite. Boundaries were there for a reason.
    ‘Are you meaning to tell me,’ he said, ‘that faced with the multitudinous possibilies of the infinity that is the Project you are using it to play some sort of
game
?’
    ‘Er … yes, sir.’
    ‘Oh.’ The Senior Wrangler looked closely at the big ball of gas. A number of small rocks were already spinning slowly around it. ‘Well, then … can I have a go?’

TEN
THE SHAPE OF THINGS

    WHEN WIZARDS FIND a new thing, they play with it.
    So do scientists. They play with ideas so wild that often they seem to defy common sense – and then they insist that those ideas are
right
, and common sense isn’t. They often make out a surprisingly good case. Einstein once said something nasty about common sense being akin to nonsense, but he went too far. Science and common sense
are
related, but indirectly. Science is something like a third cousin of common sense twice removed. Common sense tells us what the universe
seems
like to creatures of our particular size, habits, and disposition. For instance, common sense tells us that the Earth is flat. It
looks
flat – leaving out the hills, valleys, and other bumps and dents … If it wasn’t flat, things ought to roll around or fall off. Despite this, the Earth
isn’t
flat. On Discworld, in contrast, the relation between common sense and reality is usually very direct indeed. Common sense tells the wizards of Unseen University that Discworld is flat – and it is. To prove it, they can go to the Edge, as Rincewind and Twoflower do in
The Colour of Magic
, and watch stuff disappearing over it in Rimfall: ‘The roaring was louder now. A squid bigger than anything Ricewind had seen before broke the surface a few hundred yards away and thrashed madly with its tentacles before sinking away … They were running out of world.’ Then they can be