The Science Of Discworld Quotes
"If no one will know if it happens, then in a very real sense it wouldn’t have happened."
"We have always had a drive to paint stories onto the Universe."
"Science doesn’t just exist in the abstract. You could grind the universe into its component particles without finding a single trace of Science."
"With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D and you still have the frog you started with."
"The universe into which we were born, and in which our species evolved, runs by rules – and science is our way of trying to work out what the rules are."
"The more advanced our technologies become, the less possible it is for the everyday user to have any idea of how they work."
"Every so often, you have to unlearn what you thought you already knew, and replace it by something more subtle."
"Life is like a space elevator. What life self-sustains is not energy, but organization."
"The main message that biologists have derived from these exercises has been a deep scepticism about the relevance of physics to biology."
"The universe came into being as a tiny speck of space and time."
"Everything that there is, today, right out into the furthest depths of space, stems from that astonishing ‘beginning’."
"Space, time, and matter are the products of that explosion: they played no part in its cause."
"It’s just that the space inside the universe is growing."
"If we accept that the universe is growing we can work out where it came from by running time backwards."
"We are ambivalent, then, about beginnings – their ‘creation myth’ aspect appeals to our sense of narrative imperative."
"Our minds attach labels to things in the surrounding world, and we interpret those labels as discontinuities."
"The universe, however, runs on processes rather than things."
"The Big Bang theory is a beautiful bit of science – very nearly consistent with the picture we now have of the atomic and the subatomic world."
"Simple rules may lead to large, complex patterns."
"The issue here is not what the universe ‘really does’. It is how we understand things and how we structure them in our minds."
"Emergent phenomena, which you can’t predict ahead of time, are just as causal as the non-emergent ones."
"Human beings never understand things that way. They understand things by keeping them simple."
"A ‘geographical’ image is useful here. The ‘phase space’ of a system is the space of all possible states or behaviours."
"You may have pinned down the micro-rules, but that doesn’t mean that you understand their macro-consequences."
"Solving that equation is even harder. And it might not even be the only fruit they buy."
"A lot of philosophers seem to have got the idea that in an emergent phenomenon the chain of causality is broken."
"One set of modern physical rules poses more philosophical questions than all the others combined: Quantum Mechanics."
"Quantum objects obey Schrödinger’s Equation, a rule named after Erwin Schrödinger which describes how ‘wave functions’ propagate through space and time."
"Light reflected off it in odd ways. The helmet was far too large and completely covered the face."
"Because there will be if a huge toothed beast comes galloping towards me."
"You might as well try to tune a piano by throwing rocks at it. Life does not turn up out of nowhere, sir."
"The story of the Earth’s atmosphere is inextricably intertwined with that of its oceans."
"The Earth and its atmosphere condensed together out of the primal gas cloud."
"If some disaster occurred which killed off all the plants but left all the animals, then the proportion of oxygen would halve in about 500 years."
"So while it is entirely believable that evolution took advantage of the existence of salt in the sea, it need not be stuck with the same proportion."
"You’ve got clouds again. And there’s lots of volcanoes."
"It’s always been believed that the sea is in some way attracted to the moon."
"‘What use is that?’ ‘Er… in this universe, that’s as fast as you can go.’"
"The damn great sun looks pretty big even though it’s a long way away. Put the moon nearer."
"‘We’ve moved you forward in time a little,’ said Ponder."
"‘So we can’t just magic life into the Project?’ said the Dean."
"‘Blobs,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Can they pray? Can they build temples? Can they wage holy war on less enlightened blobs?’"
"‘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’."
"But everywhere we look on Earth we find living creatures, often in environments that we would have expected to be impossibly hostile."
"‘What is the elevator for life? Let’s try to be general here, and look at the common features of all the different proposals for ‘the’ origin of life.’"
"Triploblasts played a crucial role in evolution, precisely because they did have internal organs, and in particular they could ingest food and excrete it."
"Over longer periods of time, the axis changes direction. Just as a top wobbles when it spins, so does the Earth, and over 26,000 years its axis completes one full circle of wobble."
"‘It is interesting to note that back in the Cretaceous, when the seas were a lot warmer than now, these hot plumes could even have risen to the ocean’s surface, where they may have caused ‘hypercanes’."
"There must be at least thirty of them. It’s hard to decide which, if any, was the actual route taken, because later lifeforms have destroyed nearly all the evidence."
"Evolution was a demonstration of narrativium in action. Things improved."
"You couldn’t start off with bananas and get fish."
"The author, pen still in hand, was staring at the Librarian as if he’d seen a ghost."
"‘Tell me, then,’ he said, ‘is Man an ape, or is he an angel?’"
"‘Ook,’ he said, which meant: ape is best, because you don’t have to fly and you’re allowed sex."
"Everything was context. There was too much to learn."
"The title brought back by the Librarian was The Young Person’s Guide to Evolution."
"‘This is a very strange book,’ said Ridcully."
"Assuming the universe to be a negatively curved non-Paramidean manifold – you could deduce its topology by observing the same galaxies in several different directions."
"The Moon, Mercury, Mars, and various satellites are covered in circular craters."
"An atmosphere helps: smaller bodies burn up before they hit the ground."
"In Quebec, there is a lake called Manicouagan."
"More than 150 impact structures – remnants of craters – have been found on the Earth’s land-masses."
"Rare, isolated events usually obey the so-called ‘Poisson distribution’ of probabilities."
"The most recent well-known impact on Earth was the Tunguska meteorite."
"Where do all these rocks (and other junk, like ice) come from?"
"The biggest collection of these is the Oort Cloud."
"Every year, we sweep up about 80,000 tones (tonnes) of it."
"Every fossil that we find is proof positive that the corresponding species did actually exist; moreover, we can get a pretty accurate impression of the grand flow of Life from an incomplete sample."
"If a meteorite that size were to hit the Earth, travelling at a typical 10 miles per second, it would leave an impact crater 40 miles in diameter."
"To live in harmony with nature, we must know how to sing the same song as nature. To do that, we must understand nature."
"Insects would on the whole fare a little better, as would insect-eaters."
"The fossil record agrees that there were mammals then – but not those."
"Human DNA differs from the DNA of either chimpanzee by a mere 1.6% – we have 98.4% of our DNA sequences in common with theirs."
"The ability to process incoming information in ways that extract an interesting feature of the outside world, react to it, and thereby make it easier to evade a predator or to spot food, gets reinforced."
"Intelligence is the ability of the brain to process information. But intelligence is only part of what is needed to make a mind."
"Once the loop is broken, parts of the culture cease to be transmitted to the next generation: they drop out of the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit."
"Another important but apparently mundane function of writing in human society is taxes, accounts, keeping track of property."
"With printing came the possibility of disseminating information far more widely, and in quantity."
"But what the kings didn’t realize, to start with, is that when they put their rights and obligations down on paper, they were implicitly constraining their own actions."
"All words had power. But written words had a lot more. They still do."
"Your interface to extelligence used to be very predictable: your parents, teachers, relatives, friends, village, tribe."
"Today’s extelligence doesn’t have a single world view, like a sect does. It doesn’t really have a world view at all."
"We can’t destroy the Earth. We can destroy ourselves."
"We’d better say right now that none of this is science fiction."
"The other ‘choice’ is to stay. We may be lucky – we tend to be. But we won’t be lucky forever."
"Most of us don’t think like scientists. We think like the wizards of Discworld."
"This is our Discworld. In its little cup of spacetime, humanity has invented gods, philosophies, ethical systems, politics."
"It’s a circular argument, but in our little round human world we’ve managed to live on circular arguments for millennia."