The science of discworld.., p.36
The Science of Discworld I tsod-1,
p.36
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Omnianism had taught for thousands of years that the Discworld was in fact a sphere, and violently persecuted those who preferred to believe the evidence of their own eyes. At the time of writing, Omnianism was teaching that there was something to be said for every point of view.
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A magical accident had once turned the University's Librarian into an orangutan, a state which he enjoyed sufficiently to threaten, with simple and graphic gestures, anyone who suggested turning him back. The wizards noticed no difference now. An orangutan seemed such a natural shape for a librarian.
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Moreover, until the last few decades of human history, most women did not cycle. Nearly all the time, they were either pregnant or lactating. And for the great apes, the cycle is a week or so longer than for humans, and for gibbons it's shorter. So it looks as though the relation with the Moon is coincidental.
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A phrase meaning 'I'm not sure you know this.'
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And if so: congratulations! You are a human being, thinking narratively.
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Light on the Disc travels at about the same speed as sound. This does not appear to cause problems.
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And a terrible thing it is, akin to a state of horrible depression. Hence the affliction of Captain Vimes in Guards! Guards! who needs a couple of drinks simply to become sober.
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Well ... most people.
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'Desperate' is another privative - it means 'no hope'.
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Death's apprentice - well, he'd have to train a successor. Not in case he dies: so he can retire. Which he does (temporarily) in Reaper Man.
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Indeed, it is a 'fundamental constant' of the Discworld universe that things exist because they're believed in.
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'Truth' is a privative in the same way that 'sober' is - until you invent lies, you don't know what the truth is. Nature appears to, otherwise animals would not have invested so much effort on very effective camouflage.
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Everyone knows what science fiction is - until you start asking questions like 'Is a book set five years in the future automatically SF? Is it SF just because it's set on another world, or is it simply fantasy with nuts and bolts on the outside? Is it SF if the author thinks it isn't? Does it have to be set in the future? Does the presence of Doug McClure mean that a movie is SF, or merely that the men-in-rubber-monster-suits quotient is going to be high?' One of the best SF books ever written was the late Roy Lewis's The Evolution Man; there is no technology in it more sophisticated than a bow, it's set in the far past, the characters are barely more than ape-men ... but it is science fiction, nonetheless.
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They were fortunate, given the names of some places in Australia, that they ended up merely sounding like a minor Star Trek species.
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'Reddish-brown'.
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... which had engrossed wizards for many years. The debate ran like this: it was quite easy to turn someone into a frog, and fairly easy to turn them into, say, a white mouse. Strangely, considering the basic similarity of size and shape, turning someone into an orangutan took a vast amount of power and it was only an explosion in the intense thaumic confines of the Library which had managed the trick. Turning someone into a tree was much, much harder even than that, although turning a pumpkin into a coach was so easy that even a crazy old woman with a wand could do it. Was there some kind of framework into which all this fitted?
The current hypothesis was that most Change spells unravelled the victim's morphic field down to some very basic level and then 'bounced' them back. A frog was quite simple, so they wouldn't have to bounce far. An ape, being quite human-like in many respects, would mean a very long return journey indeed. You couldn't turn someone into a tree because there was no way to get there from here, but a pumpkin could be turned into a wooden coach because it was quite close to it in vegetable space.
The wizards agreed that this all seemed to fit nicely, and was therefore true.
If William of Occam had been a wizard at Unseen University, he would have grown a beard.
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The quantity of bacon per trotter is on average slightly more than one quarter of the amount per head.
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Wizards seldom bothered to look things up if they could reach an answer by bickering at cross-purposes.
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To the best of our knowledge, based on deduction from the available evidence. Certainly it was a big extinction - far bigger than the one that killed off (or helped to kill off) the dinosaurs. We remember the dinosaur one because they've had such good PR people.
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There's a silly reason for this, and a sensible one. The silly reason is that species are usually defined to be different if they don't interbreed. If two separate species don't interbreed, it's difficult to put them back together again. The sensible one is that evolution occurs by random mutations - changes to the DNA code - followed by selection. Once a change has occurred, it's unlikely for it to be undone by further random mutations. It's like driving along country roads at random, reaching some particular place, and then continuing at random. What you don't expect is to reverse your previous path and end up back where you started.
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According to the most recent dating methods, the Cambrian began 543 million years ago. The Burgess shale was deposited about 530-520 million years ago.
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In the words of Discworlcd's God of Evolution: 'The purpose of the whole thing is to be the whole thing.'
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Indeed, it is a fundamental part of story telling. If the hero did not overcome huge odds, what would be the point?
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Possibly he was holding a large axe at the time.
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Readers of the Discworld book The Last Continent will recall that, by an amazing coincidence, beetles were something of a passion for the God of Evolution.
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Rincewind would add some more:
'Is it safe?'
'Are you sure?'
'Are you absolutely sure?'
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A worse case is what used to be called Eohippus, the Dawn Horse - a beautiful, poetic name for the animal that formed the main stem of the horse's family tree. It is now called Hyracotherium, because somewhat earlier somebody had given that name to a creature that they thought was a relative of the hyrax, represented by a single fossil shoulder-blade. Then it turned out that the bone was actually part of an Eohippus. Unfortunately, whoever officially names a species first must get priority, so now the Dawn Horse has a silly, unpoetic name that commemorates a mistake.
We lost 'Brontosaurus' - thunder-lizard - for a similar reason. Thunder Lizard ... what a marvellous name. 'Apatosaurus'? It probably means 'Gravitationally challenged Lizard'.
The moral of this tale is that when learned committees of elderly scientists meet to discuss an exceptional issue they can always be trusted to make a completely ridiculous decision. Quite unlike the wizards of Unseen University, naturally.
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Lots of ammonite species died out 5-10 million years before the K/T boundary, so it looks as if their extinction genuinely was gradual. But whatever it was that happened at the K/T boundary finished them off.
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OK, if you insist ... Our favoured line here is 'hairy'. But hairs don't fossilize, so how can you tell? If you have hair, you need grooming. All over the body. This requires flexible backbones, and you can tell how flexible they are from the shape of the vertebrae. Which do fossilize. (Sometimes scientists can be very ingenious.) Evolution crossed that line about 230 million years ago.
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How many recipe books do you have that tell you to boil water, but never specify the altitude at which this should be done? It matters: higher up, water boils at lower temperatures.
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There was a television programme called The Magic Roundabout. One of the characters was a dog called Dougal, which looked a bit like a hairbrush. Mauds shrimps have the same general form, though not with hair.
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This is probably another lie. Alien microbes are unlikely to find us edible. So are alien tigers, although they might do us quite a lot of damage in finding out. But certainly an alien world will have a whole host of nasty surprises, if we are not very careful. We can't tell you what they'll be. They'll be a surprise.
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We apologize to any real gods.
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Unfortunately, huge malicious destructive force is a god-like power.
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Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld I tsod-1
