The Science of Discworld
by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
The Rules
- Things fall apart, but centres hold
- Everything moves in curves
- You get balls
- Big balls tell space to bend
- There are no turtles anywhere (except ordinary ones)
- Life turns up everywhere it can
- Life turns up everywhere it can't
- There is something like narrativium
- There may be something called bloodimindium (see rule 7)
- . . .
Of course you have read some of the Discworld novels, else how would you have found this page? So I can skip most of the exposition and tell you right off that Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen (PSC) are aiming to Do You a Bit of Good in these two volumes (the second subtitled The Globe). You'll get an Unseen University story, perhaps the only one in which the Librarian and the Luggage disguise themselves as a Spanish lady, plus a full discussion of Roundworld science.
Ponder Stibbons splits the thaum, and the energy that the reactor generates has to be focused in a small volume. Discworld magic doesn't work in the little sphere, but Hex can transport observers—meaning, of course, Rincewind—from the lab to the surface of a tiny ball inside. (And back.) Time proceeds a bit faster in the test environment, and in a matter of days the wizards watch the Big Bang, the coalescence of planetary bodies, the evolution of life, the growth of a world civilization, its extinction by a comet that puts an end to the Great Leap Sideways, and the apparent departure of a dominant species shortly before another comet strikes. Looping back in time, the experimenters seek to foil an occupation of Roundworld by Elves. Mustrum Ridcully is revealed as a powerful reader of blank verse and Arthur J. Nightingale as a playwright of no power at all.
These books don't really deal with the "science" of Discworld, for aside from Stibbons no one believes there is any. Just consider the event that starts Night Watch: If Discworld had science, the first thing it would do would be to forbid displacement in time, especially as the result of a random electrical storm. Don't come to this work expecting to learn how the Fifth Elephant's crash formed huge deposits of fat and gristle.
(That's not quite right. PSC do explain the mechanism of time travel and BCB formation. It happens because of narrativium. What makes a good story, what has to come about to keep the tale moving, that's what does happen. Not an explanation? Someone who had just read Treasure Island once objected, "It isn't realistic. No widow would let her boy Jim sail away with those thugs to find a chest of gold." The answer, a fine one, was this: "Wouldn't be much of a story if she didn't." That pretty well defines what narrativium does for the Discworld universe; as far as Discworld goes, it's the sum of science.)
The Science of Discworld is really about the science of Roundworld, a place governed by rules. (See the top of this page for Stibbons' attempt to write down the rules.) A chapter of the story leads into a chapter of topical science: how our universe came into being, how we know or don't know anything about the past, why human beings tell stories to one another. Sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill pop science, right?
Wrong.(*) For the authors work out a theme, stated crudely in rule 8. Roundworld does have "something" like narrativium; at least it does now. Think of how you learned about the theory of relativity: The professor didn't just write down the formulas but told a tale, starting with Democritus or one of that crowd, treating Newton, the "luminiferous aether" and 19th-century physics, and only then coming to Einstein. And what key facts do you know about Einstein? Mediocre grades, family troubles, a famous warning about the A-bomb, general relativity. You learned some science because you heard a story. It's all like that. What, most of all, keeps you from understanding the Big Bang? Right, you can't see what happened before the story began. And what drove us to travel to the Moon? It was part of the story we'd been telling ourselves since, um, maybe for the past twelve thousand years. The better part of The Globe deals with how we evolved a brain that isn't just able to make stories but demands to be told one and takes steps to make stories come true. In Discworld you get results by reciting the spells; in Roundworld, by solving the equations. It's quite a good theme, and if you persist through, frankly, some slow patches in the first half of Volume 2, you'll appreciate the skill with which PSC constructed it.
The Science of Discworld will perplex anyone who hasn't read, say, half a dozen of the novels. You are a fan already, and you will thoroughly enjoy the book.
(*)You knew I had to say that.
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Science of Discworld