Science alone is not The Answer. Science too has its myths. We have shown you some of them, or at least what we believe to be some of them. The misuse of anthropic reasoning is a clear example, as in the case of the carbon resonance, but argued with no thought for the fudge-factor of the red giant.
The ideal of the scientific method is often not realised. Its usual statement is an oversimplification in any case, but the basic worldview captures the essence. Think critically about what you are told. Do not accept the word of authority unthinkingly. Science is not a belief system: no belief system instructs you to question the system itself. Science does. (There are many scientists, however, who treat it as a belief system. Be wary of them.)
The most dangerous myths and ideologies, today, are the ones that have not yet been destroyed by the rising ape. They still strut their stuff on the world's stage, causing grief and havoc -and the tragedy is that it's all to no purpose. Most of it doesn't matter. Issues like abortion do matter, to some extent; even 'pro-choice' adherents would prefer that the choice should not be necessary.
Issues like short skirts or lengths of beards do not matter, and it's foolish and dangerous to make a big fuss about them on a planet that is bursting at the seams with an excess of people. To do so is to promote the memeplex above the good of humanity. It is the action of a barbarian mind, a mind sufficiently removed from reality that the consequences of its resident memeplex do not affect it directly. It is not the actions of the naive young men who carry the suicide bomb, or fly the airliner into a skyscraper, that are the root of the problem; it is the actions of the evil old men who lead them to behave like that, all for the sake of a few memes.
The key memes are not religious, in this case, we suspect, even though religion is often blamed: that's mostly a smokescreen. Those old men are motivated by political memes, and the religious memeplex is merely another of their weapons. But they are also trapped in their own stories, and this is high tragedy. Granny Weatherwax would never make that mistake.
The elves are still with us, in our heads. Shakespeare's humanity, and the critical faculties encouraged by science, are two of our weapons against them. And fight them we must.
And to achieve that, we need to invent the right stories. The ones we've got have brought us a long way. Plenty of creatures are intelligent, but only one tells stories. That's us, Pan narrans.
And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea ...
1 And in this short statement may be seen the very essence of wizardry.
2 This one was apparently the result of a curse some 1,200 years ago by a dying Archchancellor, which sounded very much like 'May you always teach fretwork!'
3 Lord Vetinari, the Patrician and supreme ruler of the city, took proper food labeling very seriously. Unfortunately, he sought the advice of the wizards of Unseen University on this one, and posed the question thusly: 'Can you, taking into account multi-dimensional phase space, meta-statistical anomaly and the laws of probability, guarantee that anything with absolute certainty contains no nuts at all?' After several days, they had to conclude that the answer was 'no'. Lord Vetinari refused to accept 'Probably does not contain nuts' because he considered it unhelpful.
4 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'.
5 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.
6 And many things that there aren't, such as Dark.
7 It would have been an exit hole, but he didn't.
8 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.
9 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 x 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.
10 Not hand and glove, the fit isn't that close.
11 Others found by research wizards include Objects In The Rear View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, No User Serviceable Parts Inside and, of course May Contain Nuts.
12 There's a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers with it much because it's self-evidently a load of marsh-gas. [This footnote is a footnote in the original quotation. So this is a metafootnote.]
13 The bean-counters don't even know how to count beans sensibly. Are we surprised?
14 A tour of any airport bookshop will show that this is reasonable.
15 But Joycean scholars would be furious if we excluded Finnegan's Wake, which reads exactly like that.
16 See The Science of Discworld, 'A giant leap for moonkind'.
17 An extremely common and versatile substance, unfortunately not available in all universes.
18 The sad histories of these hitherto unknown civilisations, along with the tale of the two-mile limpet, can be found in The Science of Discworld.
19 Isn't 'Bombastus' a lovely name? Well-chosen, too.
20 Headers who have not met this felicitous phrase, for reasons of youth or geography, should be told that the three Rs are Reading, Riting and Rithmetic.
What this tells us about the educational establishment is unclear, but it could be a joke. The three Rs, not the educational establishment, that is. Though, come to think of it...
21 Hidden knowledge at that time was spectacularly practical knowledge, exemplified by the Guild secrets and especially by the Freemasons. It was dressed up in ritual, because it was mostly passed on verbally and not written down.
22 Carers even encourage or berate the child: 'What's the magic word? You forgot the magic word!'
23 Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it -and should have, but the publisher got cold feet - was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.)
24 A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala.
25 And new diseases, although it was quite hard to make bamboo models of these.
26 The Librarian, on the other knuckly hand, held the view that humans were apes who had given up trying. They were the ones who simply couldn't cut the mustard when it came to living in harmony with their environment, maintaining a workable social structure and, above all, sleeping while holding on.
27 On his first visit to England in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi was asked 'What do y think of modern civilisation?' He is said to have replied 'That would be a good idea.'
28 A time measurement we developed in The Science of Discworld as a 'human' way of measuring large amounts of time. It's 50 years, a 'typical' age gap between grandparent and grandchild. Most of the really interesting bits of human development have taken place in the last 150 Grandfathers. Remember objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.
29 Most of them being Grandfather bacteria, you appreciate. That's the trouble with metaphors.