The Science of Discworld Revised Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the depths of space in search of a distant light? Perhaps. According to
The Light Fantastic
, ‘Philosophers have debated for years about where Great A’Tuin might be going, and have often said how worried they are that they might never find out. They’re due to find out in about two months. And then they’re
really
going to worry …’ For, like its earthbound counterpart, Great A’Tuin is in reproductive mode, in this case going to its own hatching ground to watch the emergence. That story ends with it swimming off into the cool depths of space, orbited by eight baby turtles (who appear to have gone off on their own, and perhaps even now support very small Discworlds) …
    The interesting thing about the terrestrial turtlish trickery is that at no stage is it necessary for the animals to be conscious that their timing is geared to the Moon’s motion, or even that the Moon exists. However, the trick won’t work unless the baby turtles
notice
the Moon, so we deduce that they did. But we can’t deduce the existence of some turtle astronomer who wondered about the Moon’s puzzling changes of shape.
    When a particular bunch of social-climbing monkeys arrived on the scene, however, they began to ask such questions. The better the monkeys got at
answering
those questions, the more baffling the universe became; knowledge increases ignorance. The message they got was:
Up There is very different from Down Here
.
    They didn’t know that Down Here was a pretty good place for creatures like them to live. There was air to breathe, animals and plants to eat, water to drink, land to stand on, and caves to get out of the rain and the lions. They
did
know that it was changeable, chaotic, unpredictable …
    They didn’t
know
that Up There – the rest of the universe – isn’t like that. Most of it is empty space, a vacuum. You can’t breathe vacuum. Most of what isn’t vacuum is huge balls of overheated plasma. You can’t stand on a ball of flame. And most of what isn’t vacuum and isn’t burning is lifeless rock. You can’t eat rock. 1 They were going to learn this later on. What they
did
know was that Up There was, in human timescales, calm, ordered, regular. And predictable, too – you could set your stone circle by it.
    All this gave rise to a general feeling that Up There was different from Down Here for a
reason
. Down Here was clearly designed for
us
. Equally clearly, Up There wasn’t. Therefore it must be designed for
somebody else
. And the new humanity was already speculating about some suitable tenants, and had been ever since they’d hidden in the caves from the thunder. The gods! They were Up There, looking Down! And they were clearly in charge, because humanity certainly wasn’t. As a bonus, that explained all of the things Down Here that were a lot more complicated than anything visible Up There, like thunderstorms and earthquakes and bees. Those were under the control of the gods.
    It was a neat package. It made us feel important. It certainly made the priests important. And since priests were the sort of people who could have your tongue torn out or banish you into Lion Country for disagreeing with them, it rapidly became an enormously popular theory, if only because those who had other ones either couldn’t speak or were up a tree somewhere.
    And yet … every so often some lunatic with no sense of self-preservation was born who found the whole story unsatisfying, and risked the wrath of the priesthood to say so. Such folk were already around by the time of the Babylonians, whose civilization flourished between and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from 4000 BC to 300 BC . The Babylonians – a term that covers a whole slew of semi-independent peoples living in separate cities such as Babylon, Ur, Nippur, Uruk, Lagash, and so on – certainly worshipped the gods like everyone else. One of their stories about gods is the basis of the Biblical tale of Noah and his ark, for instance. But