Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  A difficult but stubborn feature of human thinking is involved in all this: it’s known as ’reifying’: making real. Imagining that because we have a word for something, then there must exist a ’thing’ that corresponds to the word. What about ’bravery’ and ’cowardice’? Or ’tunnel’? Indeed, what about ’hole’?

  Many scientific concepts refer to things that are not real in the everyday sense that they correspond to objects. For instance, ’grav­ity’ sounds like an explanation of planetary motion, and you vaguely wonder what it would look like if you found some, but actually it is only a word for an inverse square law attractive relationship. Or more recently, thanks to Einstein, for a tendency of objects not to move in straight lines, which we can reify as ’curved space’.

  For that matter, what about ’space’? Is that a thing, or an absence?

  ’Debt’ and ’overdraft’ are very familiar privatives, and the think­ing problems they cause are quite difficult. After all, your overdraft pays your bank manager’s salary, doesn’t it? So how can it fail to be real? Today’s derivatives market buys and sells debts and promises as if they were real -and it reifies them as words and numbers on pieces of paper, or digits in a computer’s memory. The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn’t actually exist at all.

  Some years ago, at a science-fiction convention held in The Hague, four writers who made lots of money from their books sat in front of an audience of mostly impecunious fans to explain how they’d made huge income from their books (as if any of them really knew). Each of them said that ’money isn’t important’, and the fans became quite rude at this perfectly accurate statement. It was nec­essary to point out that money is like air or love - unimportant if you’ve got enough of it, but desperately important if you haven’t,[30] Dickens recognized this: in David Copperfield Mr Micawber remarks ’Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nine­teen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’

  There’s no symmetry between having money and not having it - but the discussion had gone off the rails because everyone had assumed that there was, so that ’having money’ was the opposite of ’having no money’. If you must find an opposite, then ’having money’ is opposite to ’being in debt’. In that case, ’rich’ is like ’knurd’. In any event, making the comparison between money, love, and air lowered the debating temperature considerably. Air isn’t important if you’ve got it, only if you haven’t; the same goes for money.

  Vacuum is an interesting privative. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could sell vacuum-on-a-stick. Vacuum in the right place is valuable,

  Many people on Earth sell cold-on-a-stick.

  Discworld does a marvellous job of revealing the woolly think­ing behind our assumptions about absence, because in Discworld privatives really do exist. The dark/light joke in Discworld is silly enough that everyone gets the point - we hope. Other Discworld uses of privatives, however, are more subtle. The most dramatic, of course, is Death, many people’s favourite Discworld character, who SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Death is a seven-foot-tall skeleton, with tiny points of light in his eye sockets. He carries a scythe with a blade so thin that it’s transparent, and he has a flying horse called Binky. When Death appears to Olerve, king of Sto Lat, in Mort, it takes the king a few moments to catch up on current events:

  ’Who the hell are you?’ said the king. ’What are you doing here?

  Eh? Guards! I deman-’

  The insistent message from his eyes finally battered through to his brain. Mort[31] was impressed. King Olerve had held on to his throne for many years and, even when dead, knew how to behave.

  ’Oh,’ he said. ’I see. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.’

  YOUR MAJESTY, said Death, bowing, FEW DO.

  The king looked around. It was quiet and dim in this shadow world, but outside there seemed to be a lot of excitement.

  ’That’s me down there, is it?’

  I’M AFRAID SO, SIRE.

  ’Clean job. Crossbow, was it?’

  Our earthly fears about death have led to some of our strangest reifi-cations. Inventing the concept ’death’ is giving a name to a process

  -dying - as if it’s a ’thing’. Then, of course, we endowthe thing with a whole suite of properties, whose care is known only to the priests. That thing turns up in many guises. It may appear as the ’soul’, a thing that must leave the body when it turns it from a live body into a dead one. It is curious that the strongest believers in the soul tend to be people who denigrate material things; yet they then turn their own philosophy on its head by insisting that when an evi­dent process -life - comes to an end, there has to be a thing that continues. No. When a process stops, it’s no longer ’there’. When you stop beating an egg, there isn’t some pseudo-material essence-of-eggbeater that passes on to something else. You just aren’t turning the handle any more.

  Another ’thing’ that arises from the assumption that death exists is whatever must be instituted in the egg/embryo/foetus in order to turn it into a proper human being, who can die when required. Note that in human myth and Discworld reality it is the soulless ones, vampires and their ilk, who cannot die. Long before ancient Egypt and the death-god Anubis, priests have made capital out of this verbal confusion. On Discworld, it’s entirely proper to have ’unreal’ things, like Dark, or like the Tooth Fairy in Hogfather, which play their part in the plot.[32] But it’s a very strange idea indeed on planet Earth.

  Yet it may be part of some process that makes us human beings. As Death points out in Hogfather, humans seem to need to project a kind of interior decoration on to the universe, so that they spend much of the time in a world of their own making. We seem - at least, at the moment

  - to need these things. Concepts like gods, truth[33] and soul appear to exist only in so far as humans consider them to do so (although elephants are known to get uneasy and puzzled upon finding elephant bones in the wild - whether this is because of some dim concept of the Big Savannah In The Sky or merely because it’s manifestly not a good idea to stay in a place where ele­phants get killed is unknown). But they work some magic for us. They add narrativium to our culture. They bring pain, hope, despair, and comfort. They wind up our elastic. Good or bad, they’ve made us into people.

  We wonder if the users thought that that cold-focusing mirror worked some magic for them. We can think of several ways in which it might appear to. And some very clever friends of ours are per­suaded that souls might exist, too. Nearly everything is a process on some level. To a physicist, matter is a process carried out by a quan­tum wave function. And quantum wave functions exist only when the person you’re arguing with asserts that they don’t - so maybe souls exist in the same way.

  In this area, we have to admit the science doesn’t know every­thing. Science is based on not knowing everything. But it does know some things.

  TWENTY-THREE

  NO POSSIBILITY OF LIFE

  IT WAS DIFFICULT EATING SANDWICHES that you couldn’t see. Rincewind was aware that back in the real world the Librarian was handing them to him, and he had to take it on trust that they were going to be cheese and chutney. As it turned out, he detected a hint of banana, too.

  The wizards were shocked. It’s terrible to find that you can’t do what you like with your own universe.

  ’So we can’t just magic life into the Project?’ said the Dean.

  Tin afraid not, sir,’ said Ponder. ’We have quite a lot of control over things, but only in a very subtle way. I have gone into this’

  ’I don’t call moving huge worlds very subtle,’ said the Dean.

  ’In Project terms, even moving the moon into place took a hun­dred thousand years,’ said Ponder. ’Time prefers to move faster in there. It’s amazing what you can move if you give it a little push for that long.’

  ’But we’ve done so many things -’

/>   ’Just moved things around, sir.’

  ’Seems a shame to have made a world and there’s no one to live on it,’ said the Senior Wrangler.

  ’When I was small, I had a model farmyard,’ said the Bursar, looking up from his reading.

  ’Thank you, Bursar. Very interesting,’ said the Archchancellor. ’All right, let’s play by the rules. What do you have to move around to get people?’

  ’Well ... bits of other people, my father told me,’ said the Dean.

  ’Bad taste there, Dean.’

  ’Many religions start with dust,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ’And then you bring it alive in some way.’

  ’That’s pretty hard even with magic,’ said the Archchancellor. ’And we can’t use magic.’

  ’Up in Nothingfjord they believe that all life was

  created when the god Noddi cut off his ...

  unmentionables and hurled them at the sun, who was

  his father,’ said the Senior Wrangler.

  ’What, you mean his ... underwear?’ said the Lecturer in

  Recent Runes, who could be a bit slow.

  ’First of all we can’t physically exist inside the Project,

  secondly that sort of thing is unhygienic, and thirdly I

  doubt very much if you’ll find a volunteer,’ said the

  Archchancellor sharply. ’Anyway, we’re men of magic.

  That is superstition.’

  ’Can we make weather, then?’ said the Dean.

  ’I think HEX can let us do that,’ said Ponder. ’Weather

  is only pushing stuff around.’

  ’So we can aim lightning at anyone we don’t like?’

  ’But there isn’t anyone on the world, whether we like

  them or not,’ said Ponder wearily. ’That’s the point.’

  ’And while the Dean can make enemies anywhere, I

  think that, ah, Roundworld would test even his powers,’

  said Ridcully.

  ’Thank you, Archchancellor’

  ’Happy to oblige, Dean.’

  HEX’s keyboard clattered. The quill pen began to write.

  It began:

  +++ I Don’t Think You Are Going To Believe This

  +++

  Thunderstorms tore the air apart, far out to sea.

  The air blinked. The storm was gone. The shoreline

  looked dif­ferent.

  ’Hey, what happened?’ said Rincewind.

  ’Everything all right?’ said Ponder Stibbons in his ear.

  ’What happened just then?’

  ’We’ve moved you forward in time a little,’ said Ponder

  The tone of his voice suggested that he dreaded being asked why.

  ’Why?’ said Rincewind.

  ’You’ll laugh when I tell you this ...’

  ’Oh, good. I like a laugh.’

  ’HEX says he’s detecting life all round you. Can you

  see any­thing?’

  Rincewind looked around warily. The sea was sucking

  at the shore, which had a bit of sand on it now. Scum

  rolled in the waves.

  ’No,’ he said.

  ’Good. You see, there can’t be any life where you are,’

  Ponder went on.

  ’Where am I exactly?’

  ’Er ... a sort of magical world with no one in it but

  yourself

  ’Oh, you mean the sort everyone lives in,’ said

  Rincewind bit­terly. He glanced at the sea again, just in

  case.

  ’But if you wouldn’t mind having a look ...’ Ponder

  went on.

  ’For this life that can’t possibly exist?’

  ’Well, you are the Professor of Cruel and Unusual

  Geography.’

  ’It’s the cruel and unusual geography that’s bothering

  me,’ said Rincewind. ’Incidentally, have you looked at

  the sea lately? It’s blue.’

  ’Well? The sea is blue.’

  ’Really?’

  The omniscope was once again the centre of attention.

  ’Everyone knows the sea is blue,’ said the Dean. ’Ask

  anyone.’ ’That’s right,’ said Ridcully. ’However, while everyone knows the sea is blue, what everyone usually sees is a sea that’s grey or dark green. Not this colour. This is virulent!’

  ’I’d say turquoise,’ said the Senior Wrangler.

  ’I used to have a shirt that colour,’ said the Bursar.

  ’I thought it might be copper salts in the water,’ said

  Ponder Stibbons. ’But it isn’t.’

  The Archchancellor picked up HEX’s latest write-out. It

  read:

  +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++

  ’Not helpful,’ he muttered.

  ’Thank goodness he’s still operating the Project,’ said

  Ponder, joining him. ’I think he’s got confused.’

  ’It’s not his job to be confused,’ said Ridcully. ’We

  don’t need a machine for being confused. We’re

  entirely capable of confusin’

  ourselves. It is a human achievement, confusion, and

  right at this minute I feel I am winning a prize. You, Mister Stibbons, said there was no possibility of life turnin’ up inside the Project.’

  Ponder waved his hands frantically. ’There’s no way that it can! Life isn’t like rocks and water. Life is special!’

  The breath of gods, that sort of thing?’ said Ridcully.

  ’Not gods as such, obviously, but -’

  ’I suppose from the point of view of rocks, rocks are

  special,’ said Ridcully, still reading HEX’s output.

  ’No, sir. Rocks don’t have a point of view.’

  Rincewind lifted up a shard of rock, very carefully,

  ready to drop it immediately at the merest suggestion of

  tooth or claw.

  ’This is silly,’ he said. ’There’s nothing here.’

  ’Nothing?’ said Ponder, inside the helmet.

  ’Some of the rocks have got all kind of yuk on them, if

  that’s your idea of a good time.’

  ’Yuk?’

  ’You know ... gunge.’

  ’HEX seems to be suggesting now that whatever is showing up is, and is not, life,’ said Ponder, a man whose interest in slime was lim­ited.

  ’That’s very cheering.’

  ’There seems to be a particular concentration not far from you ... we’re just going to move you so that you can have a look at it...’

  Rincewind’s head swam. A moment later, the rest of his body wanted to join it. He was underwater.

  ’Don’t worry,’ said Ponder, ’because although you’re at a very great depth, the pressure can’t possibly hurt you.’

  ’Good.’

  ’And the boiling water should feel merely tepid.’

  ’Fine.’

  ’And the terrible upflow of poisonous minerals can’t harm you because of course you’re not really there.’

  ’So, all in all, I’m laughing,’ said Rincewind gloomily, peering at the dim glow ahead of him.

  ’It’s gods, definitely,’ said the Archchancellor. ’Gods have turned up while our back was turned. There can be no other explanation.’

  ’Then they seem rather unambitious,’ sniffed the Senior Wrangler. ’I mean, you’d expect humans, wouldn’t you? Not ... blobs you can’t see. They’re not going to bow down and worship anyone, are they?’

  ’Not where they are,’ said Ridcully. ’The planet’s full of cracks! You shouldn’t get fire under water. That’s against nature!’

  ’Everywhere you look, little blobs,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ’Everywhere.’

  ’Blobs,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ’Can they pray? Can they build temples? Can they wage holy war on less enlightened blobs?’

  Ponder shook his head sadly. hex’s results were quite clear. Nothing solid could
cross the barrier into Roundworld. It was pos­sible, with enough thaumic effort, to exert tiny pressures, but that was all. Of course, you could speculate that thought might get in there, but if that was the case the wizards were thinking some very dull thoughts indeed. ’Blobs’ wasn’t really a good word for what were currently floating in the warm

  seas and dribbling over the rocks. It had far too many

  overtones of feverish gaiety and excite­ment.

  ’They’re not even moving,’ said Ridcully. ’Just bobbing

  about.’

  ’Blobbing about, haha,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ’Could we ... help them in some way?’ said the Lecturer

  in Recent Runes. ’You know ... to become better blobs?

  I fear we have some responsibility.’

  ’They may be as good as blobs get,’ said Ridcully.

  ’What’s up with that Rincewind fellow?’

  They turned. In its circle of smoke, the suited figure

  was mak­ing frantic running motions.

  ’Do you think, on reflection, that it might not have good

  idea to miniaturize his image in Roundworld?’ said

  Ridcully.

  ’It was the only way we could get him into that little

  rock pool HEX wanted us to look at, sir,’ said Ponder.

  ’He doesn’t have to be any particular size. Size is