Oddly enough, this hands-off approach to the universe has given us far more control over it than magic, religion or philosophy have done. On Roundworld, magic doesn't work, so it offers no control at all. Some people believe that prayer can influence their god, and that in this way human beings can have some influence over the world in which they live, like a courtier at a king's ear. Other people have no such beliefs, and consider the role of prayer to be largely psychological. It can have an effect on people, but not on the universe itself. And philosophy has a tendency to follow rather than lead.
Science is a form of narrativium. In fact, all four approaches to the universe -magic, religion, philosophy and science -involve the construction of stories about the world. Oddly enough, these different kinds of story often have many parallels. There is a distinct resemblance between many religious creation myths and the cosmologists' 'Big Bang' theory of the origin of the universe. And the monotheistic idea that there is only one God, who created everything and runs everything, is suspiciously close to the modern physicists' idea that there should be a single Theory of Everything, a single fundamental physical principle that unites both relativity and quantum mechanics into a satisfying and elegant mathematical structure.
The act of telling stories about the universe may well have been more important to the early development of humanity, and for the initial growth of science, than the actual content of the stories themselves. Accurate content was a later criterion. When we start telling stories about the universe, the possibility arises of comparing those stories with the universe itself, and refining how well the stories fit what we actually see. And that is already very close to the scientific method.
Humanity seems to have started from a rather Discworldly view, in which the world was inhabited by unicorns and werewolves and gods and monsters, and the stories were used not so much to explain how the world worked, but to form a crucial part of the cultural Make-a-Human kit. Unicorns, werewolves, elves, fairies, angels, and other supernatural were not real. But that didn't actually matter very much: there is no problem in using unreal things to programme human minds.66 Think of all those talking animals.
The models employed by science are very similar in many respects. They, too, do not correspond exactly to reality. Think of the old model of an atom as a kind of miniature solar system, in which tiny hard particles called electrons whirl around a central nucleus consisting of other kinds of tiny hard particles: protons and neutrons. The atom is not really like that. But many scientists still use this picture today as the basis for their investigations. Whether this makes sense depends upon what problem they are working on, and when it doesn't make sense, they use something more sophisticated, like the description of an atom as a probable cloud of 'orbitals' which represent not electrons, but places where electrons could be. That model is more sophisticated, and it fits reality more closely than a mini solar system, but it still isn't 'true'.
Science's models are not true, and that's exactly what makes them useful. They tell simple stories that our minds can grasp. They are lies-to-children, simplified teaching stories, and none the worse for that. The progress of science consists of telling ever more convincing lies to ever more sophisticated children.
Whether our worldview is magical, religious, philosophical or scientific, we try to alter the universe so that we can convince ourselves that we're in charge of it. If our worldview is magical, we believe that the universe responds to what we want it to do. So control is just a matter of finding the right way to instruct the universe about what our wishes are: the right spell.
If our worldview is religious, we know that the gods are really in charge, but we hold out the hope that we can influence their decisions and still get what we want (or influence ourselves to accept whatever happens ...). If our worldview is philosophical, we seldom tinker with the universe ourselves, but we hope to influence how others tinker. And if our worldview is scientific, we start with the idea that controlling the universe is not the main objective. The main objective is to understand the universe.
The search for understanding leads us to construct stories that map out limited parts of the future.
It turns out that this approach works best if the map does not foretell the future like a clairvoyant, predicting that certain things will happen on certain days or in certain years. Instead, it should predict that if we do certain things, and set up a particular experiment in particular circumstances, then certain things should happen. Then we can do an experiment, and check the reasoning. Paradoxically, we learn most when the experiment fails.
This process of questioning the conventional wisdom, and modifying it whenever it seems not to work, can't go on indefinitely. Or can it? And if it stops, when does it stop?
Scientists are used to constant change, but most changes are small: they refine our understanding without really challenging anything. We take a brick out of the wall of the scientific edifice, polish it a bit, and put it back. But every so often, it looks as if the edifice is actually finished.
Worthwhile new questions don't seem to exist, and all attempts to shoot down the accepted theory have failed. Then that area of science becomes established (though still not 'true'), and nobody wastes their time trying to change it any more. There are always other sexier and more exciting areas to work on.
Which is much like putting a big plug in a volcano. Eventually, as the pressure builds up, it will give way. And when it does, there will be a very big explosion. Ash rains down a hundred miles away, half the mountain slides into the sea, everything is altered ...
But this happens only after a long period of apparent stability, and only after a huge fight to preserve the conventional ways of thinking. What we then see is a paradigm shift, a huge change in thought patterns; examples include Darwin's theory of evolution and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Changes in scientific understanding force changes in our culture. Science affects how we think about the world, and it leads to new technologies that change how we live (and, when misunderstood, deliberately or otherwise, some nasty social theories, too).
Today we expect big changes during our lifetimes. If children are asked to forecast the future, they'll probably come up with science-fictional scenarios of some kind -flying cars, holidays on Mars, better and smaller technology. They are probably wrong, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that today's children do not say: 'Change? Oh, everything will probably be pretty much the same. I’ll be doing just the same things that my Mum and Dad do now, and their Mum and Dad did before them.' Whereas even fifty years ago, one grandfather, that was generally the prevailing attitude. Ten or eleven grandfathers ago, a big change for most people meant using a different sort of plough.
And yet ... Underneath these changes, people are still people. The basic human wants and needs are much as they were a hundred grandfathers ago, even if we ever do take holidays on Mars (all that beach ... ). The realisation of those needs may be different -a hamburger instead of a rabbit brought down with an arrow you made yourself - but we still want food. And companionship and sex and love and security and lots of other familiar things.
The biggest significant change, one that really does alter what it is like to be human, may well be modern communication and transportation.
The old geographical barriers that kept separate cultures separate have become almost irrelevant.