The Science of Discworld II Read online

  ‘You’ve detected elves?’ said Ridcully, forcing enough wizards apart to give them seats.

  ‘The place is lousy with glamour, sir,’ said Ponder, sitting down.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Ridcully. He glanced along the table. ‘Oh, yes. We’ve found a friend. Dee, this is Mister Stibbons. Remember we told you about him?’

  It was then that Ponder realised there were a couple of non-wizards in the party. It was quite hard to spot one, though, since for all practical purposes he fitted in well. He even had the right kind of beard.

  ‘Er … the noddlepate?’ said Dee.

  ‘No, that’s Rincewind,’ said Ridcully. ‘Ponder is the clever one. And this …’ he turned to the Librarian, and words failed even him, ‘is … a … friend of theirs.’

  ‘From Spanish,’ said Rincewind, who didn’t know what noddlepate meant but had formed a pretty good idea.

  ‘Dee here is a sort of local wizard,’ said Ridcully, in the loud voice he thought was a confidential whisper. ‘Sharp as a tack, mind like a razor, but spends all his spare time trying to do magic!’

  ‘Which doesn’t work here,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Right! But everyone believes it does, despite everything. Amazing! That’s what elves can do to a place.’ Ridcully leaned forward, conspiratorially. ‘They came straight through our world and straight on into this one and we got caught up in the … what’s it you call it when it’s all swirly and chilly as hell?’

  ‘Trans-dimensional flux, sir,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Right. We’d have been totally lost if our friend Dee here hadn’t been working a magic circle at the time.’

  There was silence from Rincewind and Ponder. Then Rincewind said: ‘You said magic doesn’t work here.’

  ‘As with this crystal sphere,’ said a voice from Rincewind’s pocket, ‘this world is quite capable of maintaining a passive receptor.’

  Rincewind removed the scrying stone from his pocket.

  ‘But that is mine,’ said Dee, staring at it.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rincewind. ‘We just sort of found it and sort of picked it sort of up.’

  ‘But it speaks!’ gasped Dee. ‘An ethereal voice!’

  ‘No, it’s just from another world that is much bigger than this one and can’t be seen,’ said Ridcully. ‘There’s nothing mysterious about it at all.’

  With trembling fingers, Dee took the sphere from Rincewind and held it in front of his eyes.

  ‘Speak!’ he commanded.

  ‘Permission denied,’ said the crystal. ‘You do not have the rights to do this.’

  ‘Where did you tell him you came from?’ Rincewind whispered to Ridcully, as Dee tried to polish the ball with the sleeve of his robe.

  ‘I just said we’d dropped in from another sphere,’ said Ridcully. ‘After all, this universe is full of spheres. He seemed to be quite happy about that. I didn’t mention the Discworld at all, in case it confused him.’

  Rincewind looked at Dee’s shaking hands and the manic glint in his eye.

  ‘I just want to be clear,’ he said slowly. ‘You appeared in a magic circle, you told him you’re from another sphere, he’d just spoken to a crystal ball, you’ve explained to him that magic doesn’t work and you don’t want to confuse him?’

  ‘Make him any more confused than he is already, you mean,’ said the Dean. ‘Confusion is the natural state of mind here, believe us. Do you know they think numbers are magical? Doing sums can get a man into real trouble in these parts.’

  ‘Well, some numbers are magi—’ Ponder began.

  ‘Not here they’re not,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘Here I am, out in the open air, no magical protection and I’m going to say the number that comes after seven. Here it comes: eight. There. Nothing happened. Eight! Eighteen! Two fat ladies in very tight corsetry, eighty-eight! Oh, someone pull Rincewind out from under the table, will you?’

  While the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography was having some of it brushed off his robes, Ridcully continued: ‘It’s a mad world. No narrativium. People makin’ up history as they go along. Brilliant men spendin’ their time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—’

  ‘Sixteen,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Yes, we know that because we can go and look, but here it’s just another silly question,’ said Ridcully. ‘It’d make you cry. The history of this place goes backwards half the time. It’s a mess. A parody of a world.’

  ‘We made it,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  ‘We didn’t make it this badly,’ said the Dean. ‘We’ve seen the history books here. There were some great civilisations thousands of years ago. There was a place like Ephebe that was really beginning to find things out. The wrong things, mostly, but at least they were making an effort. Even had a decent pantheon of gods. All gone now. Our chum here and his friends think everything worth knowing has been discovered and forgotten and, frankly, they’re not totally wrong.’

  ‘What can we do about it?’ said Ponder.

  ‘You can talk to Hex on that thing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then Hex can do the magic back at UU and we’ll find out what the elves did,’ said Ridcully.

  ‘Er,’ Rincewind began, ‘do we have the right to interfere?’ They all stared at him.

  ‘I mean, we never did it before,’ he went on. ‘Remember all those other creatures that evolved here? The intelligent lizards? The intelligent crabs? Those dog things? They all got completely wiped out by ice ages and falling rocks and we never did anything to stop it.’2

  They went on staring.

  ‘I mean, elves are just another problem, aren’t they?’ said Rincewind. ‘Maybe … maybe they’re just another form of big rock? Maybe … maybe they always turn up when intelligence gets going? And the species is either clever enough to survive them or it ends up buried in the bedrock like all the others? I mean, perhaps it’s a kind of, a kind of test? I mean …’

  It dawned on Rincewind that he was not carrying the meeting. The wizards were glaring at him.

  ‘Are you suggesting that someone somewhere is awarding marks, Rincewind?’ said Ponder.

  ‘Well, obviously there is no—’

  ‘Good. Shut up,’ said Ridcully. ‘Now, lads, let’s get back to Mortlake and get started.’

  ‘Mort Lake?’ said Rincewind. ‘But that’s in Ankh-Morpork!’

  ‘There’s one here, too,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, beaming. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? We never guessed. This world is a cheap parody of our own. As Above, So Below and all that.’

  ‘But without magic,’ said Ridcully. ‘And with no narrativium. It doesn’t know where it’s going.’

  ‘But we do, sir,’ said Ponder, who had been scribbling in his notebook.

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Remember? In about a thousand years’ time it’s going to be hit by a really big rock. I keep looking at the numbers, sir, and that’s what it means.’

  ‘But I thought we found there’d been a race that built huge structures to get off the place?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Can a new species turn up in a thousand years?’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘You mean these are the ones that leave?’

  ‘It seems like it, sir,’ said Ponder.

  The wizards looked at the people in the courtyard. Of course, the presence of beer always greases the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, but even so …

  At a nearby table, one man threw up on another one. There was general applause.

  ‘I think,’ said Ridcully, summing up the general mood, ‘that we are going to be here for some time.’

  1 An extremely common and versatile substance, unfortunately not available in all universes.

  2 The sad histories of these hitherto unknown civilisations, along with the tale of the two-mile limpet, can be found in The Science of Discworld.

  SIX

  THE LENS-GRINDE
R’S PHILOSOPHY

  JOHN DEE, WHO LIVED from 1527 to 1608, was court astrologer to Mary Tudor. At one point he was imprisoned for being a magician, but in 1555 they let him out again, presumably for not being one. Then he became astrologer for Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the occult, both alchemy and astrology. On the other hand, he was also the author of the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements, the renowned treatise on geometry. Actually, if you believe the printed word, the book is attributed to Sir Henry Billingsley, but it was common knowledge that Dee did all the work, and he even wrote a long and erudite preface. Which may be why it was common knowledge that Dee did all the work.

  To the modern mind, Dee’s interests seem contradictory: a mass of superstitious pseudoscience mixed up with some good, solid science and mathematics. But Dee didn’t have a modern mind, and he saw no particular contradiction in the combination. In his day, many mathematicians made their living by casting horoscopes. They could do the sums that foretold in which of the twelve ‘houses’ – the regions of the sky determined by the constellations corresponding to the signs of the zodiac – a planet would be.

  Dee stands at the threshold of modern ways of thinking about causality in the world. We call his time The Renaissance, and the reference is to the rebirth of the philosophy and politics of ancient Athens. But perhaps this view of his times is mistaken, both because Greek society was not then as ‘scientific’ or ‘intellectual’ as we’ve been led to believe, and because there were other cultural currents that contributed to the culture of his times. Our ideas of narrativium may derive from the melding of these ideas into later philosophies, such as that of Baruch Spinoza.

  Stories encouraged the growth of occultism and mysticism. But they also helped to ease the European world out of medieval superstition into a more rational view of the universe.

  Belief in the occult – magic, astrology, divination, witchcraft, alchemy – is common to most human societies. The European tradition of occultism, to which Dee belonged, is based on an ancient, secret philosophy; it derives from two main sources, ancient Greek alchemy and magic, and Jewish mysticism. Among the Greek sources is the Emerald Tablet, a collection of writings associated with Hermes Trismegistos (‘thrice master’), which was particularly revered by later Arab alchemists; the Jewish source is the Kabbala, a secret, mystical interpretation of a sacred book, the Torah.

  Astrology, of course, is a form of divination based on the stars and the visible planets. It may, perhaps, have contributed to the development of science by supporting people who wanted to observe and understand the heavens. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that planetary orbits are ellipses, made his living as an astrologer. Astrology still survives in watered-down form in the horoscope columns of tabloid newspapers. Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer during his time as American President. That stuff certainly hangs around.

  Alchemy is more interesting. It is often said to be an early forerunner of chemistry, although the principles underlying chemistry largely derive from other sources. The alchemists played around with apparatus that led to useful chemists’ gadgets like retorts and flasks, and they discovered that interesting things happen when you heat certain substances or combine them together. The alchemists’ big discoveries were sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), which can be made to react with metals, and the mineral acids – nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric.

  The big goal of alchemy would have been much bigger if they’d ever achieved it: the Elixir of Life, the source of immortality. The Chinese alchemists described this long-sought substance as ‘liquid gold’. The narrative thread here is clear: gold is the noble metal, incorruptible, ageless. So anyone who could somehow incorporate gold into his body would also become incorruptible and ageless. The nobility shows up differently: the noble metal is reserved for the ‘noble’ humans: emperors, royalty, the people on top of the heap. Much good did this do them. According to the Chinese scholar Joseph Needham, several Chinese emperors probably died of elixir poisoning. Since arsenic and mercury were common constituents of supposed elixirs, this is hardly a surprise. And it is all too plausible that a mystic quest for immortality would shorten life, not prolong it.

  In Europe, from about 1300 onwards, alchemy had three main objectives. The Elixir of Life was still one, and a second was finding cures for various diseases. The alchemical search for medicines eventually led somewhere useful. The key figure here is Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus1 von Hohenheim, mercifully known as ‘Paracelsus’, who lived from 1493 to 1541.

  Paracelsus was a Swiss physician whose interest in alchemy led him to invent chemotherapy. He placed great store in the occult. As a student aged 14 he wandered from one European university to another, in search of great teachers, but we can deduce from what he wrote about the experience, somewhat later, that he was disappointed. He wondered why ‘The high colleges managed to produce so many high asses’, and clearly wasn’t the kind of student to endear himself to his teachers. ‘The universities,’ he wrote, ‘do not teach all things. So a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.’ He would have had a high old time on Discworld, but would have learned a lot.

  After ten years’ wandering, he returned home in 1524 and became lecturer in medicine at the university of Basel. In 1527 he publicly burned the classic books of earlier physicians, the Arab Avicenna and the Greek Galen. Paracelsus cared not a whit for authority. Indeed his assumed name, ‘para-Celsus’, means ‘above Celsus’, and Celsus was a leading Roman doctor of the first century.

  He was arrogant and mystical. His saving grace was that he was also very bright. He placed great importance on using nature’s own powers of healing. For example, letting wounds drain instead of padding them with moss or dried dung. He discovered that mercury was an effective treatment for syphilis, and his clinical description of that sexually transmitted disease was the best available.

  The main objective for most alchemists was far more selfish. Their sights were set on just one thing: transmuting base metals like lead into gold. Again, their belief that this was possible rested on a story. They knew from their experiments that sal ammoniac and other substances could change the colour of metals, so the story ‘Metals can be transmuted’ gained ground. Why, then, should it not be possible to start with lead, add the right substance, and end up with gold? The story seemed compelling; all that they lacked was the right substance. They called it the Philosopher’s Stone.

  The search for the Philosopher’s Stone, or rumours that it had been found, got several alchemists into trouble. Noble gold was the prerogative of the nobility. While the various kings and princes wouldn’t have minded getting their hands on an inexhaustible supply of gold, they didn’t want their rivals to beat them to it. Even searching for the Philosopher’s Stone could be considered subversive, just as searching for a cheap source of renewable energy now is apparently considered subversive by oil corporations and nuclear energy companies. In 1595 Dee’s companion Edward Kelley was imprisoned by Rudolf II and died trying to escape, and in 1603 Christian II of Saxony imprisoned and tortured the Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton. A dangerous thing, a clever man.

  The story of the Philosopher’s Stone never reached its climax. The alchemists never did turn lead into gold. But the story took a long time to die. Even around 1700, Isaac Newton still thought it was worth having a go, and the idea of turning lead into gold by chemical means was finally killed off only in the nineteenth century. Nuclear reactions, mind you, are another matter: the transmutation can be done, but it is wildly uneconomic. And unless you’re very careful, the gold is radioactive (although, of course, this will keep the money circulating quickly, and we might see a sudden upsurge of philanthropy).

  How did we get from alchemy to radioactivity? The pivotal period of Western history was the Renaissance, roughly spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when ideas imported from the Arab world collide
d with Greek philosophy and mathematics, and Roman artisanship and engineering, leading to a sudden flowering of the arts and the birth of what we now call science. During the Renaissance, we learned to tell new stories about ourselves and the world. And those stories changed both.

  In order to understand how this happened, we must come to grips with the real Renaissance mentality, not the popular view of a ‘Renaissance man’. By that phrase, we mean a person with expertise in many areas – like Roundworld’s Leonardo da Vinci, who bears a suspicious resemblance to the Disc’s Leonard of Quirm. We use this phrase because we contrast such people with what we call a ‘well-educated’ person today.

  In medieval Europe, and indeed long after that, the aristocracy considered ‘education’ to mean classical knowledge – the culture of the Greeks – plus a lot of religion, and not much else. The king was expected to be well informed about poetry, drama and philosophy, but he wasn’t expected to know about plumbing or brickwork. Some kings did in fact get rather interested in astronomy and science, either out of intellectual interest or the realisation that technology is power, but that wasn’t part of the normal royal curriculum.

  This view of education implied that the classics were all the validated knowledge that an ‘educated’ person needed, a view not far from that of many English ‘public’ schools until quite recently, and of the politicians they have produced. This view of what was needed by the rulers contrasted with what was needed by the children of the peasantry (artisan skills and, lately, the ‘three Rs’2).

  Neither the classics nor the three Rs formed the basis for the genuine Renaissance man, who sought a fusion of those two worlds. Pointing to the artisan as a source of worldly experience, of knowledge of the material world and its tools such as an alchemist might use, led to a new rapprochement between the classical and the empirical, between intellect and experience. The actions of such men as Dee – even those of the occultist Paracelsus in his medical prescriptions – emphasised this distinction, and started the fusion of reason and empiricism that so impresses us today.