Read The Science of Discworld II for Free Online

an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans , the storytelling chimpanzee.
    At this point, the structure of The Science of Discworld 2: The Globe becomes very self-referential. You will need to bear that in mind as we proceed. The book is itself a story – no – two intertwined stories. One, the odd-numbered chapters, is a Discworld fantasy. The other, the even-numbered chapters, is a story of the science of the Mind (metaphysical again). The two are closely related, designed to fit together like foot and glove; 7 the science story is presented as a series of Very Large Footnotes to the fantasy story.
    So far, so good … but it gets more complicated. When you read a Discworld story, you play a curious mental game. You react as if the story is true, as if Discworld actually exists, as if Rincewind and the Luggage are real, and Roundworld is but a fragment of a long-forgotten dream. (Please stop interrupting, Rincewind, we know it’s different from your point of view. Yes, of course we’re the ones thatdon’t exist, we’re bundles of rules whose consequences take place only inside a small globe on a dusty shelf in Unseen University. Yes, we do appreciate that, and will you please shut up? ) Sorry about that.
    People have become very good at playing this game, and we will exploit that by setting Earth and Discworld on the same narrative level, so that each illuminates the other. In the first book, The Science of Discworld , the Discworld defined what is real. That’s why reality makes such good sense. Roundworld is a magical construct, designed to keep the magic out, and that’s why it makes no sense at all (to wizards, at least). In this sequel Earth acquires inhabitants, the inhabitants acquire minds, and minds do strange things. They bring narrativium to a story-less universe.
    A computer can do a billion sums in the blink of a keystroke and get them all right, but it couldn’t pretend to be a cowardly wizard if one walked up to it and thumped it on the memory cache. In contrast, we can think ourselves inside the mind of a cowardly wizard with ease, or recognise someone else when they’re acting the part of one, but we’re completely lost when it comes to doing several million simple sums a second. Even though, to someone not of this universe, that might appear to be a simpler task.
    That’s because we run on narrativium, and computers don’t.
    1 PET = Positron Emission Tomography, meaning that the machine picks up tiny particles emitted by the tissues of the brain and reconstructs a map of what’s going on inside it.
    2 And you’d be in the position of the horrible Discworld ‘Auditors’, who are anthropomorphic representations of the rules of the universe, who in Thief of Time reduce paintings and statues to their component atoms in a fruitless search for ‘beauty’.
    3 And many things that there aren’t, such as Dark.
    4 It would have been an exit hole, but he didn’t.
    5 In the simplest picture of an atom, the nucleus is a relatively small central region made from protons and neutrons. Electrons ‘orbit’ the nucleus at a distance. The triple-alpha process takes place in a plasma, where the atoms have been stripped of their electrons, so only their nuclei are involved. Later, as the plasma cools, the nuclei can acquire the necessary electrons.
    6 1 MeV is one million electron-volts. An electron-volt is a unit of energy, obviously, and for our current purposes it doesn’t really matter what that unit is . For the record, it’s the energy of an electron when its potential is raised by one volt, and is equal to 1.6 × 10 -12 ergs. And the energy referred to here is the excess energy compared to the lowest energy state of the atom, its ‘ground state’. What’s an erg? Look it up if you really need to know.
    7 Not hand and glove, the fit