Then an oak table, three chairs and two spoons crashed into the beach. A moment later, the wizards vanished.
FORGET THE FACTS
IT'S THEORIES THAT MATTER.
Discworld does not have science as such. But it does have a variety of systems of causality, ranging from human intentions ('I'll just go out for a drink in the Mended Drum') to magical spells to a generalised narrativium that keeps local and general history close to the lines of `story'. Roundworld does have science, but it's difficult to discover the extent to which it determines, modifies, affects people's actions - technology does, of course, but does science? Science does affect what we do, what we think, but it doesn't change what we do and think because so much of our basic knowledge is simply accepted scientific `fact'.
Well, actually not `fact', but theory.
We search for theories because they organise facts. We do this, according to The Science of Discworld II, because we are really Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, not Homo sapiens, the wise man. We invent our own stories to help ourselves to live. For this reason we are not reliable when we collect `facts' for scientific purposes. Even the best scientists, and certainly the paid help and the student employees, are so full of what they want to find that there's no way that what they do find can relate to the real world more than to their own prejudices, biases, and wishes. However, we were all told at school that `science's facts are reliable', but that its theories - and even more so its working hypotheses - are and were constantly subject to criticism, and therefore to change. It was explained to us that Newton had been supplanted by Einstein, Lamarck by Darwin, Freud by Skinner ... So we were told that theories were constantly being supplanted, but that the observations on which they were based were reliable.
This is the reverse of the truth.
No teacher pointed out that many, perhaps most, of the basic assumptions of our intellectual world were scientific theories that had survived criticism ... from the place of Earth and Sol in the Milky Way galaxy to the fertilisation theory of human conception to subatomic physics producing atom bombs ... to Ohm's Law and the electrical energy grid, to medical tricks like the germ theory of dis ease, all the way to X-rays and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), not to mention chemical theories that reliably gave us nylon, polythene and detergents. These theories go unnoticed because they have become defaults, so completely accepted as `true' that we fail to paint them with emotional tags, and simply build them into our intellectual toolkit. Even though no teacher pointed out that they were scientific successes, they constitute much of the (regrettably but unavoidably) uninspiring parts of school science.
On these foundation beliefs we hang such glittering flesh as visits to Mars, new fertility techniques like ICSI, fusion power, new bactericides for kitchen surfaces - and for a minority of the more imaginative children, the wide and wonderful worlds of science fiction.
The theories of science, then, particularly the totally accepted ones like sperm-egg conception, polythene, and Earth-orbits-Sun, are good reliable science. They are continually tested against the real world when babies are conceived in fertility clinics, when people do the washing-up, or when astronauts circle the Earth in sunlight and shadow. An enormous mass of Roundworld science is built into our everyday world, and it's mostly reliable.
But there is also a whole mass of science that is incomprehensible to nearly everybody, which pretends that it's The Answer for all kinds of technical or philosophical issues, and which supports experts. Quantum theory is the classic case, relativity is a touch more accessible, but subatomic physics and most of medicine, aeronautics and automobile engineering, soil chemistry and biology, statistics, and the higher reaches of economics, are all subjects that nearly everybody is content to leave to the experts. Mathematics has a strange position, similar but with its own peculiar stance akin to revealed religion - mostly because it has been presented from school onwards as an arcane craft whose practitioners are the only humans with access to Platonic truths.
Then there are the quasi[1]-sciences like astrology, homeopathy, reflexology, and iridology, which simply can't work. They should be sharply distinguished from odd, often ancient practices like acupuncture, osteopathy and herbal treatments, which work sufficiently often but have a theoretical base that is poorly worked out in scientific terms. Many people are attracted by their homespun mix of myth and mysticism (which are all the more impressive because the treatment sometimes works), and feel that a modem scientific investigation would somehow spoil them. It would certainly poke some holes in the traditional rationalisations, but in all likelihood it would make the treatments even better. Whereas the quasi-sciences would be (indeed, already have been, not that everyone's noticed) demolished.
To end that list, we add evolutionary biology, a very well-established set of models founded in the fossil record, chromosomes, and DNA, which explains similarities and differences among today's living creatures much more elegantly and effectively than its creationist or intelligent-design rivals. Nevertheless, a very large proportion of people - especially Christians in the American Mid-West, Muslims in fanatically Islamic cultures, and fundamentalist believers in general
[1] Pronounced `crazy'.
- deny that humans evolved. To them, their own brand of authority trumps the scientific evidence, or their `common sense' renders the whole concept laughable. `I ain't kin to no ape!' was the explanation given by a young schoolgirl at one of Jack's Life on Other Planets lectures, when the teacher asked her why she didn't believe in evolution.
There is a general human propensity, of which much use is made in the Discworld books, to set up accepted, unexamined mental backgrounds. Mostly these result from the Make-a-Human-Being kits that each human culture inflicts on its members as they grow up through childhood and adolescence. Each of us is the result of a learning process, only a tiny fraction of which is overt `education' by professional teachers. The kit includes nursery rhymes, songs, stories, the personification of nursery animals (sly foxes, wise owls, industrious litter-collecting Wombles) and human roles from fabulous postman and princess up to crime-fighting Batman and Superman. All these have their place in the unexamined basis of our day-to-day thoughts and actions. A possible explanation for Princess Diana's undeniable popularity with the British public - indeed the world - is that she, unlike `real' royalty, had imbibed the popular impression of What Princesses Do as distinct from the authentically royal version. So she did what we had all learned that real princesses do, she looked and behaved like an icon, not like genuine royalty.
Sophisticated human beings, citizens like us - and indeed like tribesmen and barbarians [1] in today's world, nearly all of whom have heard of Superman, Tarzan, Ronald MacDonald - all have this hotchpotch
[1] This is a special usage devised by the anthropologist Lloyd Morgan in the 1880s, picked up by John Campbell Jr in an Analog editorial in the 1960s, then by Jack in The Privileged Ape: for tribal humans, everything is traditional, mandatory or forbidden; for barbarians, action is driven by honour, bravery, modesty, defiance of precedent; for citizens, some roles are tribal, some barbarian, we choose.
of images, models, phobias, inspirations and villains. Our day-to-day experience gives us a self whose memory-train is a succession of scenes, thoughts, experiences, and passions, all painted a la Damasio with emotional tags that say `Great!', `Do This Again When I Can!' or `Avoid At All Costs!' when we recall them. But these sit upon a great mass of mostly unexamined structural human material, that labels us as Western Twentieth-Century Biologist or Ghetto Rabbi or Roman Centurion or Seventeenth-Century French Courtesan, or, for most people most of the time, Exploited Peasant.