The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 106: The Science of Discworld Pt. 1 (Dynamically Dominant)

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 1 of our recap of “The Science of Discworld”. Moons! Stars! Galaxies! BURSARR!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Lie-to-children - Wikipedia Terry Pratchett and the real science of Discworld- [Jack Cohen interview] GuardianThe magic numbers - [Ian Stewart interview] The Guardian  Jack Cohen obituary - The Guardian An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump - Wikipedia THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD with Terry Pratchett at Science Gallery Dublin - YouTube   The Simple Secret of Runway Digits - CGP Grey, YouTube www.langtonant.comLangton’s Ant - WikiAnty Particles by Ian Stewart - Wayback Machine50ft tides in Burntcoat Head Park, Nova Scotia - YouTube Omnibus Episode 182: Biosphere 2 (Entry 124.IS6517) Science Fiction Sent Man to the Moon - The New York Times Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com 

I'm actually just for the location section, I'm just going to sing that Monty Python song. Uh, the wait, no, I'm thinking you've told me, what are you, what's the money for time? Remember that just standing. Oh, yeah, that's evolving. Uh, yeah, I was thinking the, uh, I had the periodic table one in my head earlier, the elements.

Oh, yeah. There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, rhenium, et cetera. I've never actually even tried to learn all the lyrics to that one. More of a poisoning pigeons in the park girl myself with a bit of masochism tango at the weekends. So, um, we've not spoken for weeks and I don't want to talk about anything that's happened in those weeks.

Um, let's talk about something else. Oh, I went to see where that wasn't bad. Oh yeah. How did, how did that go? Tell me about that. That was super fun. The tour he's doing is one where he, um, it's like not all the big props and costumes and stuff up on screens.

It's like him playing a bunch of his deeper cuts that aren't really covers. Oh, okay. So it was fun. I'm glad I had read that that's what it was before I went because otherwise like I can see it would have been disappointing. Uh, but it did say that on the website. But I was a bit dreading it because I knew that it was all these deeper cut stuff and it was supposed to be in the smaller venues, but it was at O2 Academy

in Birmingham, which had never been to before. So I assumed that the venue was quite big, like a kind of arena size. Yeah. Like just based on the fact it was O2 Academy and I had standing tickets and the way the numbers looked on the standing tickets, it was like there were like separate standing blocks. And then I got there and I found out actually it's a much smaller venue than I thought it was.

And there were seats out, like the standing tickets were like seats out in the standing area with just no assigned seating whatsoever. Oh, okay. And because we'd gotten the queue early enough, I could get seats on the end, which so I could leave and get a drink or like. Oh yeah, no, that's very important. Yes. Yeah.

So yes, we had our gig. Very fun. I went to Birmingham. I went to a horror. I ended up in a horrible little nightclub. Oh, it was like literally next to the hotel and we were kind of like, I'll let's get one more drink. That place looks kind of fun.

And it looked like like a German beer bar. And then we had to pay to get in, which considering, okay, so it was Valentine's Day, but it was also like it's a Tuesday night. But at that point we got an aura, not like a club. Well, it turned out it was more of a club. Okay. There was a dance floor and like little private booths you could hire for, I'm assuming silly amounts of money.

And the vibe, we were like stood there at the bar and I'm not that old. I'm only 30. We were by far the oldest people in there. And a Belgian beer place. That's interesting. Oh, no, it was like a German themed. Even so. Yeah.

Like all the girls behind the bar and like the kind of laid a hose and he milk made it nonsense. Cute. Yeah. And the vibe, the vibe was very school disco. Like one of the quietest spots we found to stand was kind of overlooking the dance floor a little bit and you could see like little gangs of girls and little gangs of guys kind of almost trying to drift.

It was adorable, but I have never felt so fucking ancient. Oh, that's lovely and terrible. Anyway, then I will got chips. Good. I like chips, which was a successful end to the evening. Where did you tell me it was the best place that was doing this kind of branching narrative stuff? I remember you saying, is it Dragon Age and that dragon age?

Like there's a whole thing of your choices, master. And there's a limit to how much they do because they're making sequels to these games and they kind of have to create a bit of a default world state. But even that, they managed to do quite a lot with it. That's my personal favorite. That's not to say it's the best one, but I enjoy what Dragon Age does with branching narratives, like a set of Mass Effect. Not so much what you do across the three games does matter for events in the

following games, but it does all come down to that final choice, which is kind of disappointing. But at the same time, it's an interesting final choice. OK. Oh, I think so anyway. I know there's a lot of people that really hate the Mass Effect three ending. But what would a world would it be if we were all the same? Yeah, it goes to show, doesn't it?

Just goes to show. I haven't done a lot of game stuff recently. I've been very focused on the book. Is the writing going well? It's OK. This last week was kind of tough. I keep getting the horrible weeks of incredibly shit focused on the week. I really need to finish writing a chapter.

So that's a lot of connected or coincidence. I think it's kind of been bad luck because the chapter before this came out of me like I had a couple of struggling days because I was getting back into the rhythm of writing because it was the first chapter I was writing post Christmas and New Year's and everything. But it just came out and flew out of me like water once I got into the rhythm of it. And then this chapter was back on the struggling to write. So I think it's more like life has been chaotic.

And therefore my brain does not want to think about the silly thing. Yeah, for sure. Also, like the last chapter had the really fat phobic stuff in. And I'm quite good at talking about that because I bitch about it a lot. This chapter had the like really bad transphobic stuff in. And I was just like, oh, I'm not in the mood to sit and point out this. Like, is that Chandler's mum? Well, yeah. Yes.

Parallel. Second mum. Yeah. So, yeah, played by a cisgender woman and only refers to with male pronouns. So, yeah, that was that was super fun to write about. But you did it. But I did it and I think it's readable. It was quite fun to sit and record it. Although I noticed like a million mistakes in it while I was recording it.

Which is how that goes. That's how I'm going to do the next section of editing process is readable. Reading aloud is always part of my proofreading process. Yeah. It's better still if you can get someone else to read it for you, allowed. And if that's not a pass and for practicality reasons, for instance, if you're writing a whole fucking book, use one of the text-to-speech things.

Yes, I will try that. One of the stupidest mistakes I made as I was writing about the show, Freaks and Geeks, which has a character in it called Lindsay Weir. It's felt W-E-I-R. I referred to her more than once in that chapter as Allison Weir. Not a character from Freaks and Geeks, famous historical novelist. Yeah, I mean, also great, but for different career reasons. And not big in 90s sitcom.

All right, it's eight o'clock. Shall we shall we press on? Yeah, do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, I do actually. I do want to make a podcast. Let's do that. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to The Tree Shall Make You Threat,

a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one is Time in Chronological Order. I'm Joanna Hagen. And I'm Francine Carroll. And we've spun mildly off course to talk about a Discworld supplementary novel. Yeah, we've catapulted back in time a little bit, which is suitable. Acceptable. I think for the subject matter.

For the subject matter, we are talking about the science of Discworld. Part one. Because there are many. Part one of the first book. Because there are four. We are talking about chapters one through 24 of the first Science of Discworld book. Which sounds scary, but they're short chapters. Yeah, it's going to be OK, guys.

There's a lot of science, but we're going to be OK. Yeah. Note on spoilers before we crack on. We are a spoiler-like podcast. Heavy spoilers for the science of Discworld. But we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld past and night watch. The part of the main canon we're currently up to. And of course, we are saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel,

the Shepard's Crown, until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. Surfing on waves of dark matter in a rapidly expanding universe. Amazing. I want to point out. I don't know what a wave of dark matter is, but I like the visual. Also, before we crack on, I am aware that by talking about this book, I've broken my own rule about not explaining quantum physics to me. But listeners, you're still not allowed.

I think if anyone's allowed, it's prior to in colleagues. Yeah, they're allowed. They're the only ones. But I did my best to not understand this before we made up the bit. I'm still very firm on the rules of cricket, though, guys. Not a word. I don't want. I don't know what a wicket is and I don't want to know. All I know is it rhymes with cricket and that just seems egregious.

Follow up. Yes. We've had emails for a while now. We've had emails. Just a couple of emails from Elizabeth, who's a new listener who was listening to our Night Watch episodes and then going back to the start. So it may be many, many moons before Elizabeth hears this. I'll tell you something about moons.

Sorry, later. I've been learning. Elizabeth says, read the mountain names. And I think Elizabeth mentioned that there was somewhere around equal rights. So I do not remember the context for this. Oh, shit. Sorry, guys. Yeah, no. There's a range in the US called Tua Tito that was named by French trappers, but trappers before America was a thing,

which means three tits. I have a vague memory of talking about how many people named mountains after tits. And I seem that made it into the podcast, not just our coffee, then. I don't know, but either way, apparently, this brings Elizabeth joined. It brings me joy to joy all around. Elizabeth did also say something about scones, but she was wrong. So we'll ignore that. She said bus. Oh, my way was right, according to Elizabeth.

Busser, then jam, then cream, which is just wrong on like eight million levels. So no, no, because the cream first and that kind of acts like the boss. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, we've been through this at length, haven't we? We don't need to do this again. I did a demonstration, Francine. He did. And we're going to have to do an in-person episode again one day for food reasons. Yes, we'll do it.

Basically, Joanna, I'm saying I'm hungry. I've got really back into making bread a lot recently at the moment. So we'll do a bread related episode. I'll make for catcher. Shall I just have a dinner party? Yeah, OK, yeah, yeah. Or maybe bring a microphone. We also got an email from Steve, who

in response to us talking about Nightwatch and especially the whole Vimes made veterinary thing. His regular, regular correspondent, Steve. Regular correspondent. No, not regular correspondent, Steve, a different Steve. Hello, other Steve. Hello, other Steve. He was talking about how veterinary made vimes because of how he was in the start of guards, guards compared to later books.

But although veterinary interacted with vimes more after that, he would have known him out of beforehand because it's veterinary. So it wasn't just his influence that it was the other person Vimes met, Sibyl. Although Vimes was literally in the gut when we met him, that seemed to be because he lacked hope in being able to change things, but was at his core still a good man. He just hated the world for grinding down people who weren't in power and didn't have the self-belief to do anything about it.

But then he meets Sibyl, who helps build him up, show him love and compassion, and is his rock, gives him the confidence to try to make a difference, put himself out there and do what he believes is the right thing to do. And that increases over times. So I agree that veterinary had a huge influence on Vimes and used him well, but he didn't make Vimes. Vimes was almost Vimes, but Sibyl gave him a position to really be Vimes. And I didn't really think to talk about Sibyl.

In fact, there are eight million things I realized I could have said better after we finished recording Nightwatch. I think we talked briefly about Sibyl, but not in enough depth. And I think that was beautifully put. So I don't regret not saying it because that is a really well-written addition. So thank you very much, Steve, for pulling over into a lay-by while driving to write that because ADHD brought him and he would have forgotten otherwise. Yeah, I understand.

I tried to start like listening to some of the audiobook stuff on my commute because I was running out of time to do the reading. And that's no nonsense because I can't pull in on the lay-bikes. I need to get to work and I will just forget everything. Yeah, I understand that problem. So Francine, would you like to introduce us to the science of Discworld? I would. Actually, sorry, let me have a supporter.

I've got such I've had so much coffee today. I've got really dry mouth now. I'm the same. I did not sleep. So the science of Discworld. The first of four books by Terry Pratchett in Stuart and Jack Cohen. Each kind of alternates around world science with Discworld Story. This one was published in 1999, which is the same year as the Fifth Elephant

later that year during a ceremony at which Pratchett was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Warwick. He would make Cohen and Stuart honorary wizards of the Unseen University. Oh, rather upstaging himself, I feel. We know a lot about Pratchett already. So let's talk briefly about Jack Cohen and Ian Stuart. Jack Cohen, who sadly died in 2019, was a zoologist and embryologist, embryologist, yeah, whose former pupils include Nobel Prize winners.

Oh. Oh, Ian Stuart is a mathematician who was famous for his contributions to catastrophe theory. Cohen and Stuart knew each other well and had, in fact, written books together years before this particular project. In fact, the concept of lies to children as presented in Science of Discworld first appeared in their books, The Collapse of Chaos, although it gained popularity for a wider audience in the Discworld collaboration.

In fact, there's a whole Wikipedia page just on the concept lies to children like based on this, so I'll link to that. Pratchett met Cohen at a sci-fi convention when Cohen spilled a pint of beer over Pratchett's lab. They met again and formed a friendship at a late convention in The Hague, which is an event alluded to in the Science of Discworld. Some years ago, at a science fiction convention held in The Hague, four writers who made lots of money from their books sat in front of an audience

of mostly impecunious fans. I had to look up that word. It means not rich. To explain how they'd made huge income from their books, as if any of them really knew. Each of them said that money isn't important and the fans became quite rude at this perfectly accurate statement. It was necessary to point out that money is like air or love, unimportant if you've got enough of it, but desperately important if you haven't.

So it turns out one of those four writers was Cherry Pratchett and the heckler who stopped him in his tracks and therefore earned his respect was Jack Cohen. I'll link an interview with the Guardian that tells the full story. It's quite funny. Someone throws a tomato at Pratchett and Cohen tells him to shut up. So and that's how you made friends with him, apparently. In the same interview, Cohen told the Guardian about the struggles he had getting the first Science of the Discworld book published.

He says, I spent two and a half years going around editors. I must have had 80 lunches and dinners and they all said, don't be stupid. At last, Ibrey took it. The editor there was made to understand that if it sold less than 10,000 copies, it loses job. It sold more than 25,000. It would be a miracle. It sold more than 200,000 copies in the first year.

Oh, and because we've been talking about covers and that quite a lot recently, I say the cover of the book was designed by Paul Kidby. It's a parody of the 1768 painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Rite of Derby, which is a rather beautiful painting. I'll link to a image of it and apparently was fairly groundbreaking at the time because it showed a scientific experiment in the same kind of reverent holy light that was usually used for like scenes of biblical or other religious stories. Oh, right.

So that's great. I'm also going to link a couple more written interviews and a lovely hour long YouTube video showing a presentation given by all three of the authors. Oh, amazing. So I had a lot of fun doing the around the subject reading. Excellent. So do you want to tell us what happened? Yeah, so like for context, this is this is a fiction story playing out,

alternating with chapters on real science based in our galaxy. So I have just summarised what's happening in the fictional chapters. I'm not going to try and summarise all of the science because it's quite a lot of science. Yeah, there is. That would be a really silly thing to try and do in a page. Luckily, the plot on the other hand, quite simple. So in this first section, chapter one to 24, Ponder has taken over the university squash court in an attempt to split the

thumb and heat the university. The burst is helping and explosion might be imminent. Things are heating up and there's magic in the air. Too much magic. The globes are discharging and ponders on the verge of panic. But Hex has an idea using the excess to generate a magicless void. The round world project. The dean gets hands on in the empty expanse and a universe begins.

Hex expands into want some future computing and the universe is under glass. It's a bit too spherical and full of exploding furnaces, but somewhere underneath it all intelligence might be lurking. The project grows and rocks are being thrown. It looks like the universe has built in balls. Stars are exploding and ponders raining. World freezes, but the wizard start up a sun. A volunteer is needed to explore the project up close.

Rincewind unwillingly volunteers and dons a suit of spells to visit the round world. It's lifeless, but incredibly damp. Rincewind walks out of the ocean as time moves rapidly for the round planet. But there's no tides until a moon's moved into place. Ponders in the dark trying to comprehend the speed of light. Rincewind's got his sandwiches, but there's still no signs of life, although there is a beautiful blue sea deep in the rock pools. There's life forms blobbing along with a bit of time.

They might approve. You knew that was going to happen. Why do you think I put that in? On the bottom of the beautiful blue sea. Fucking blue, green algae. Helicopter and linecloth watch. Dean's drawers get the loincloth on her. Of course.

Well, it's rather warm in the university. Honestly, like everything in this book could be a helicopter. There's just a lot of spinning. A lot of spinning. I went with the centrifugal forces in the Earth's core that contribute to the magnetism of the North and South Pole. Yeah, that's good. I have a recommendation of a video, by the way,

if like me, sometimes benefit from visuals. Weirdly enough, C.G.P. Gray's video on runway numbers at Air Force has a really in-depth explanation of the Earth's magnetism. Oh, I remember that video. I will link to that if I remember. Excellent. Other things we're keeping track of, the librarian gets explained briefly. We do have death here in reference to Mort

and talking about the character. So I'll call that death turning up. Yes. For the sake of consistency. Oh, yeah. We set the scene with weather. That's something we sometimes look at. Oh, we do.

In the first chapter, we're talking about how cold it is. And in fact, that is the catalyst. Yes. Oh, that's also a scientific thing. You know what I mean, everyone. Thank you for understanding. Listeners, please forgive our overlapping of scientific and narrative terms. We just only know so many words.

And some of them are difficult, like corrugated. Marmalade. And you've got an irrelevant elephant. I do. It's lifted straight from the book. Neutron stars are incredibly dense, about 40 trillion pounds per square inch, 20 million elephants in a nutshell. Marvelous. Yeah.

Don't do that to elephants in real life, obviously. If anyone was going to try it, that's quite cruel and probably fatal to you before it is to them anyway. I thought you were going to have a different elephant fact because there was another one at the end of this section. Oh, which one? Elephants get stressed out if they spot. They find the bones.

Yes. Yeah. No, you're quite right. Yeah, I also did have that one highlighted and I went back to the other one. Yeah. Sorry. Quite. Yeah. Do you want to go first? I don't know which ones first. Yes. I'm glad that sorted out then, said the senior wrangler, briskly.

We're here because we're here. And since we're here, we might as well be warm. Very practical philosophy, I think. That is the senior wrangler's great skill. I do agree. We should be warm. He always thinks everything has to mean something, said Ridcully, who generally took the view that trying to find any deep meaning

to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror. You always succeeded, but you didn't learn anything new. The big Ridcully fans are on this podcast. Might be a slight personal attack on us, constantly trying to find meaning in things. But I think sometimes we manage to find something new, so it's fine. And often we fail, in fact, so that's fine. I can't believe Ridcully just called out our entire fucking podcast like this. We might as well just stop now.

Oh, it's fine. It's fine. He'd never work out. I'd listen to it anyway. Ah, good point. Characters, then. Yeah. We've got a few friends. We've got Ponda. Ponda. Panicky Ponda.

He gets very sad when he's figuring out the rules for this universe he's made. There are no there's rule number five. There are no turtles anywhere. Rule number six. It's so depressing. I agree. Yeah.

Although, of course, that is a direct translation of Isaac Newton's is a translation. I can't remember Isaac Newton writing a lot about turtles. No, no. All because back in the day, it was impossible to make large quantities of clonium without. Fuck, I couldn't think of a scientific equipment that wasn't a Bunsen burner and that might have existed.

No, I can't have. Fuck. Oh, Joanna, I used to know a lot more science history than this. I used to know some science history, but I've learned so many things for this podcast that apparently nothing has retained in my brain. Well, I read Bill Bryson's brief history of nearly everything, whatever it's called, short history of nearly everything. And I must have read it four, five times. And it really is appalling how little I've retained.

I've just got little tidbits, you know, I struggle with the idea that every scientist is a little bit wrong in the head. I struggle a bit with like books like this and like the Bill Bryson one in its lots of different kinds of information at once. And I am if I get into something sciency, then I will very much directly obsess over a very specific topic until I've burned it all into my brain. Yeah, so hence why I understand eyesight and deep sea fish

and the molecular structure of chocolate, but haven't deeply, deeply got my head around any of the science in this book yet. Oh, I have a podcast episode on bioliminescence and bio fluorescence to send you remind me of. Oh, yay, my favourite. Anyway, sorry. So that was that was Ponda Bursa. Bless Bursa. I think he did pretty well for a minute there.

And I see he's been reading, which is ominous. I very much enjoy the line. He picked up the first page and made a paper hat out of it before beginning to read. Because there's sort of a. It's the shape of the sentence is doing someone doing something completely normal. He made a cup of tea before he sat down to read. Yes, yeah. Yeah, sat down and adjusted his paperwork before.

But yeah, yeah. I think I'm going to start making paper hats out of something before I begin reading. Yes, I think so. We should probably start keeping a blank page around just for that, though, otherwise we'll miss context. Yeah, I shouldn't start tearing pages out of my books for the sake of hats. Well, every most of mine on the iPad now, so it'd be difficult for me. Just balance the iPad on your head, but that would make reading challenging.

We'll come back to this. We'll circle back, we'll circle back. We'll circle back. Ridcully, Ridcully. Oh, what a charm. As always, lovely to see him again. Little bit of bonus Ridcully in this book. I enjoy the amount of Ridcully in this book. I did notice ponders trying to explain what might happen,

vis-a-vis explosions and such. And Ridcully does the it's because of quantum and there's some masses in some universe next door where it did go wrong and the poor devils got blown up. And I like that out of everything Ponder has ever explained to Ridcully, the trousers of time have stuck. Yes, that's quite right, isn't it? Yeah, because he had to do that at length once.

I think it was in Lords and Ladies because he's dealing with granny weatherwax at the same time and he's trying to explain the trousers of time to her. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, Ridcully has a couple of nice perspicacious moments. Is that how you pronounce that word? I'm having a day of it. But the, oh, sorry, that you definitely started this off before.

We did the ceremony, the whole. Now, when you say it's not going to blow us up, you're clearly lying, so can we try again? I do like Ridcully having like shrewd moments because Ponder just doesn't face shrewdness from most of the faculty ever. He's got this whole thing built based on, well, it's awfully chilly though, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, Ridcully in his way is a perfectly evolved beast.

He uses his mental energy on exactly the points he needs to or the points that will annoy Ponder the most. Which is like emotional nourishment, I suppose. And yeah, the rest of it just lets bounce off him until needed. I like it. I wish I could feel like that. Yeah, we should all be a bit more Ridcully, shouldn't we? Yeah, without the hunting, probably.

Otherwise, everything will be extinct within days. Yeah. I heard that they're trying to get dodo's back from the dead, the same people who are doing the Tasmanian devils and the mammoths. Oh, cool. I mean, Tasmanian tigers, Tasmanian devils still exist, don't they? Yeah, dialysines, whatever, though. Yeah, anyway, sorry.

Fuck, I've got nothing to do with Ridcully, really. Hex, yeah. This is like the most we've ever heard from Hex in a short time, right? Yeah, we get like Hex's actual internal monologue. It's its own character, sorry. But he does get referred to as he. Ridcully keeps calling him as that good man or whatever. But Hex, when thinking of itself, thinks of it, doesn't he?

Yeah. Now, that is a pronoun I'm struggling with. It is. It is a challenging pronoun sometimes. It's disrespectful. Oh, there was one of the rare science bits I didn't understand right away was the reference to. I wanted a rare bit, I am. Not much of it, I understood immediately.

We've talked about my quantum issues, Francine. No, bullshit. There's loads of this stuff I know you already know. But carry on. Hex has multiple logic constructions, so as well as being able to cope with and or and and all statements you also can do, maybe, perhaps, suppose and why. So this is why all your games say it's so long to build.

Yeah, I'm trying to build new logic states from scratch. I don't like fucking my thinking. Why have a Boolean when you can have a large smudge of gray area? The Dean is a dick and I love it. He's such a twat, I love him. He is the most like he's my favourite twatty character that I know in person. I would have to hit.

But the moment where the whole then my name's not Red Cully and Dean is repeatedly doing the Charlie Grinder Gertrude because as much as I would hit the Dean, I would also drag that bit out that long, if not much, much longer. Yeah. Do you know what? Because there was the chapter in between. I was so confused the first time I read that page. I was like, what the fuck is he on about?

I had to do it as well. I had to go back and see what. Oh, girl, my name's a bloody hell. Ha ha, I guess. The joy was slightly taken out of it by the fact I'd forgotten and I knew that was my fault. But yeah, he's. Always a delight, I think, in that very, very special way of his.

The others as well, I think is the dynamic, isn't it? Is that, you know, the senior wrangler being a straight man there? Yeah, the electron recent rooms. They've all got elements named after each other that they sound when they disappear. Oh, I noted down. We've occasionally had a look at the character, the job title, some way I noticed the professor of eldritch lace making, which I thought you might like.

I did spot that one. Consider that as a new drag name. If you ever learn how to make lace, I think love crafty and monsters as a motif should be definitely in there. I have been resisting the urge to learn how to tat lace by hand because it looks really satisfying, but also like I don't need to learn another fucking hobby. Yeah, no, I mean, at least it's kind of connected some of your other hobbies.

So it would be so cool to me. Right. No, sorry. I'm so easily derailed today. What have we done so far? Tasmanian devils, unity, lace. Cool. So story prompt. So for hours of your life. Many, many hours.

And yes, we're not spending a ton of time on characters today because there's so much fun, sciency stuff to talk about. But we also have rinse, wind. It's nice to see. Swim again, rinse and fact. And this would have been like right after the last continent. So he's just come back from Forex. Yes. And now he gets the job of cruel, unusual geography,

having just spent many weeks in the place that ate the last. Geography, cruel and egregious geography. Oh, that's right. Quite right. Egregious geography. There's just too much for goodness sake, calm it down. Definitely earlier fives there. Yep. Turquoise, is it? Oh, what a blue sea, raining for a million years, for God's sake.

Oh, another volcano. Are you serious? We get it. We get it. Simidown, mate. God. Yeah. Anyway, rinse, wind, pool, sword, as usual, being dragged into something.

I quite like his VR experience. That's an interesting bit of magic. I'm finding it hard to visualize. Yeah, because it is very much VR, but I am picturing it like. It's like this is aerial. Well, the thing is because we had him doing not quite VR, but in interesting times. He had his kind of suit where he was controlling stuff.

And that was based on a video. So I do feel like this has moved on slightly from that, but not by much. Yeah. Well, it's made by the modern wizards, of course, rather than the ancient temple builders, tomb builders. Very much. I guess magic has moved on. Or something. So certainly it's useful for the plot.

Yes. But I'm not sure I could cope with eating sandwiches in virtual reality. Oh, yeah, this is, by the way, the second time that rinse, wind has eaten a sandwich at the dawn of time of a world. Although at least this time life came from elsewhere, probably. If I had a quit for every time rinse, wind had eaten sandwich at the dawn of time, you know, get afford a sandwich maybe anymore. No, no, no, I mean, I can't make a sandwich.

All right. I'd have a primordial ooze. Oh, with lettuce. Yeah. Or crunch. And then with locations fucking everywhere. Ever. In the history of everywhere,

because at once it was possibly all in one spot. Brackets, my head hurts, listeners, is what this one bullet point says. I think Joanna got a little fed up halfway through this episode plan. Look, there's a slight possibility that I had a mild existential crisis reading about the formation of the universe. I had one of those with the the theory of time not really existing, although I like that theory. Yeah, no, I think my note I put down in my notebook for that one was just,

oh, headfuck, but like in a in an OK way. Yeah, like I'm kind of OK with time not really being a thing. Yeah, I like that. It's quite close to immortality. Yeah, like if you think about it, if there's no such thing as linear time, then technically you've always been alive. Yeah, always been alive. Everyone you miss is still spending time with you somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah, I like it anyway. It's a comforting thought to give yourself a crisis with. It's a nice flavor of existential crisis. What a lovely crisis. Not one of the spicy ones. Right, shall we talk about some science? Yes. So little bits we liked. We have some of those.

That's for sure. Do you want to start us off? Yeah, as above so below. Ridcully says while talking about why the the universe they've created appears to be aping no offense, librarian, the much more sensible and well constructed discworldian one. And Ridcully says we're forgetting our kindergarten magic, can't we? It's not even magic.

It's a basic rule of everything. The project can't help being affected by this world. Piles of sand try to look like mountains. Men try to act like gods. Little things so often appear to look like big things made smaller. Goes on and then. So as above so below is like obviously a well established. So thought experiment theory, whatever thing on round world.

And I've always quite liked it. The idea that, you know, those wonderful visuals you get of neurons and you zoom out and out and out and then all the galaxies make the same patterns. You know, the spiral of a fern making these astronomical kind of mirror kind of stuff. I love it. Love all of that stuff. So I looked it up and as above so below, it's a popular modern paraphrase

of the second verse of the Emerald Tablet, which is a compact and cryptic hermetic text first attested in an Arabic source dating to the late eighth or early ninth century. That which is above is like to that which is below and that which is below is like to that which is above and I like it a because I love the concept and B because what a wonderful shortening of that phrase as above so below. That's a beautiful bit of sub-editing, if ever I saw. That is perfect succinct. Yes, indeed.

Speaking of things that are small, a good segue, well, the Langtons and Langtons and this was a bit I spotted in the book and was immediately like, well, I want to know all about that and look at pictures of it and that sounds cool. It's Chapter 12, where the rules come from. And Langtons and is the small star of a computer program. The one does around on an infinite square grid. Every time it comes to a square, this square changes colour from black to white or white to black.

If it lands on a white square, then it turns right. But if it lands on a black square, then it turns left. And this is in the book, it's in relation to the theory of everything. And it's quite interesting, as the book explains, it starts with simplicity. So for the first few hundred moves, it creates very simple, symmetrical-ish patterns. And then it's total chaos with no discernible pattern up to about the 10,000 mark where it starts creating a strictly patterned diagonal highway. And then stays there.

Yeah, and we'll continue that highway infinitely if you're using an actual infinite square. So I will link to a couple of things in the show notes. I found a website that basically allows you to run Langtons and with all sorts of different parameters so you can run it starting going in any direction you want. So it can start going north, south, east or west, places anywhere on the grid you can do. Obviously, it can't do an infinite grid, but it can do any size grid you want. So you can see how far you can make it go.

So that in itself is quite an interesting thing. The Ants trajectory is always unbounded, regardless of the initial configuration. That's quite straight from the Wikipedia page, but I was looking for more explanation of that. It's called the Cohen-Kong theorem. And the explanation I found is actually from Ian Stewart. There's a wayback machine link of an article, but I'll link to it in the show notes. And the explanation is any bounded trajectory must eventually repeat the same pattern, position and heading.

And by reversibility, such a trajectory must be periodic, repeating the same motions indefinitely. With the Ant, and there is an explanation, a proper theorem type explanation, which if I read out on the podcast, I don't think will be particularly helpful for people. Yeah, let's try and reserve some listeners. Yeah, but it effectively proved that the Ant has absolutely no bounded trajectory. So running the initial configuration of Langton's Ant, that horizontal diagonal highway that it's created will go on indefinitely. It will not hit a point where because of the pattern, it stops and then can only work around

the existing number of squares. Cool. Does this have any real life practical applications? So you can use it to calculate the trajectory of an instance of Langton's Ant can be used to calculate a Boolean circuit. Oh, thank goodness. Yes, I won't go into a lot of depth with that because if I had spent all day on this, and I very nearly did. It's true listeners, she did at one point message me like,

I've been watching fucking simulations of Ants for ages. I need to plan the episode. The Ant can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine, which means it is possible. The Ant is capable of universal computation specifically. So what's also quite cool is that there are multiple color extensions of Langton Ants, and you can play with all of these in the thing I like to do. No, nor is Technicolor.

Very much, though, but you can do different things where it has a cyclical thing. So it's not just black and white, but there's four colors and it goes through them in a certain order. So like LLL, they're described through these like acronyms like LLRR. So that's four colors across those four letters, but that means it goes left on certain colors, left on certain colors, right on certain colors, right on certain colors. And because that effectively allows for infinite repetition of that, it grows perfectly symmetrically.

Oh, oh, fractal kind of stuff. Yeah, the Ant's name, so when these things are called the name of the Ant, so like the original Langton's Ant is named RL in this scheme. The Ant's name seen as a cyclic list consists of consecutive pairs of identical letters. So the cyclic list implies that the last letter compared with the first one. And then there's lots of much bigger, more complex versions of it where it creates hexagonal shapes. There's a version that involves about eight letters where it fills in a space in a square

around itself. Some of them can be trained to draw like really specific triangles. It's all really cool. The only reason they actually looked up was I wanted to look in the coding behind it for how to represent it on screen. And so I had some fun looking at source code, which also distracted me for quite a while. So I'll link to all that stuff in the show notes, but it's very interesting. And also, especially the different configuration ones are just really,

really satisfying to look at. Brain scrappy. Nice. So from something very small to something rather larger, what's a planet, Joanna? What is a planet? What is this thing they keep going all about in here? Well, I was interested in this because they were talking about exoplanets. So planets outside of our solar system, and they've found an awful lot of them.

About 70 extra solar planets have been detected either by the wobble method. Perfect name. Sorry, was that in this book? Yeah, that was in this book, obviously. Lots and lots since, yeah. Well, this is an interesting thing, actually. You and I were talking about the fact. Had we spotted any science that we know is out of date?

And the answer is probably not as much as there is, because obviously this book was written over 20 years ago. Some of the stuff that's made the news, so like the element. Yeah, the Higgs boson particle obviously has now been found. Under the sofa, obs. Is there a Higgs boson under the sofa? Are you just pleased to see me? Very quickly.

So this ties into one of the other bits of science, which is is Pluto a planet? Yes. So defining planets is quite complicated. But for help, we have the International Astronomical Union. Thank goodness. So in 2005, there was the discovery of Eris, which is a trans-Neptunian body. Trans-Neptunian means it is within our solar system's orbit, but out past Neptune. Eris is notably bigger than Pluto currently, the smallest accepted planet.

So there was an argument of, is Eris also a planet then? Which encouraged the... I've got to please my back as a planet now. It's a dwarf planet, as is Eris. And quite a few others actually. There's a few trans-Neptunian bodies, it turns out, and they're all quite large. So this was discovered in 2005, so in 2006, the International Astronomical Union sat down to find a planet.

Now, I will point out that this definition of planet is somewhat controversial, and geophysicists have had some conversations about whether this is the only way the planet should be decided. But there's only so many definitions we can go into on one podcast. And I think for what the book talks about... The geophysicists and the astronomers argue about this, that's quite fun. Yeah, no, there is some drama. So according to the IAU, a planet orbits the sun,

is big enough for its own gravity to make it spherical, and is gravitationally dominant within its area, also known as dynamical dominance. And what that means is that there are no other bodies of comparable size, other than its own satellites within its orbit. Okay, so it's now allowed for the massive moons like we've got them. Yes. So dwarf planets are planets that meet the first two criteria, but not the third.

Okay. So Pluto, Eris, these trans-Neptunian orbiting bodies, they're big enough for their own gravity to make them round, and they do orbit the sun, but they're not able to achieve dynamical dominance, especially with a planet like Pluto whose moon is almost the same size as it. Okay, okay. So it's effectively twiddling around its own moon. Oh, like one of those lovely little desk toys.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so the IAU definition only covers bodies within our solar system, so they then got together and had a conversation about exoplanets outside of our solar system. Okay. And it was laid down but continued being discussed, so this is as of 2018. Okay. And these are like they get to have together, they're a big meeting, so the whole solar system

planet discussion all happened at a big conference in Prague and was taken to a vote. It's quite a democratic process for defining these things. So exoplanets as of 2018 are objects with true masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium. Catchy. Currently calculated to be 13 Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity. I'm not following. Sorry.

They are big but not so big that they're celestial bodies that aren't big enough to become stars, basically. Okay, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. Because if their masses were above that limiting mass, then the thermonuclear fusion would start and they would potentially become stars. Okay, got it, got it. So it's only so big a planet can be. Yeah, so exoplanets have that mass, the orbit stars, brown dwarfs, and I'll get to brown dwarfs

in a sec, all stellar remnants and that have a, there's a whole thing with a mass ratio that I won't explain. Okay. Because it's a very complicated equation. Yeah, no, those just aren't fun to read out loud. Anyway, they are planets no matter how they are formed because obviously we've had lots of conversations in this book about the formations of, say, planets, the moon, etc. The minimum mass slash size required for an extracellar object to be considered a planet

should be the same as that used in our solar system. Hence, things like Pluto and Eris not being planets but being dwarf planets. So brown dwarfs, for context, are failed stars. They're not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen into helium. So it's a specific kind of size thing. It's between, they're bigger than gas giants like Jupiter, but smaller than little stars. Because you get little stars and then you get big stars like our Sun. So you also have, as well as the exoplanets that are found and part of their planetary

definition is that they are orbiting a star, a brown dwarf, a stellar remnant. They are in something's orbit. They are not often part of a system. You have rogue planets, which is an interstellar object of planetary mass, not gravitationally bound. Fractal bunch of misfit rogue planets. So they're big enough to be planets, but they're not bound to a star or a brown dwarf. And quite often it's possible that a lot of them have been ejected from planetary systems. The book talks about a possibility that possibly flick by wizards,

possibly have a rock through them by wizards, possibly the thing that might happen to Earth, which is that orbits are going to go a bit funky and something's going to dosy-dough out of the solar system. That was in the book, but it's going to happen like billions of years from now. We'll be living on a cooler planet by then, I hope. So yeah, so these rogue planets may have been ejected from planetary systems. Theoretically, some are formed in a similar way to stars are. But if they're outside of planetary systems, and they're again, if they're a certain size, they're also classified as sub-brown dwarfs. If it seems like they have a star-based formation

as opposed to a planet-type coalescence. Anyway, sorry, that was a lot of information, but I hope you know what a planet is now. I certainly know some more about it. I'm not convinced I could explain that to anyone else, which is always the test, isn't it? However, I've now got it on record. So I can go back and listen again. It's basically just size and gravity. It all comes down to size and gravity, much like dating. Yeah, I'm not too fast about size, but if they're not like... Dynamically dominant.

I could see myself careening towards that phrase like you first defogated. Much like a planet knocked off its orbit in a gravitational dosy-dough. It's a bit of a rogue planet, if you know what I mean. It's not dynamically dominant, but he's certainly dangerous to the orbit of our habitable... Never mind. No, carry on. He's certainly got a tree mass below the limiting mass for the thermonuclear fusion of deuterium. Yeah, but it's a bit of a fixer-upper, but... Stop dating gas giants. Right. Oh, tides. So I like tides.

I like tides. I didn't know quite a lot of the stuff in this book about tides. I like the subject. I didn't know the stuff about trees being affected by tides. That's pretty cool. And convinces me that there might be something to the whole thing about human behavior being in some way linked to the moon, because if trees are, we're watery too. And honestly, not much more complex than trees. No, no, certainly not. I can, for instance, have never once grown a crop of apocorns. I've never photosynthesized. I've never housed a squirrel.

Fun fact, Jersey, where I was born, the Turtle Island, has the third largest tidal range in the world, according to jersey.com. Anyway, I think I might be... I'm not sure if it means by island or by nation or what, because all the other places I found listed are just like specific bays or whatever. Anyway, it does double in size almost at low tide, can confirm. Pretty dramatic tides coming very quickly as well, and weird shapes, so you don't want to be standing in the wrong place. Yes, I nearly got trapped on a beach while we were in Jersey. Yes, you did, yes. But you didn't quite, so well done you. Lots of Doros do.

The highest tide on Earth can be found at the Bay of Fundy, which is mentioned in the book, and in the Bay of Fundy, in one 12-hour tidal cycle, about 100 billion tons of water flows in and out of the bay, which is twice as much as the combined total flow of all the rivers of the world over the same period. Wow. One day. Isn't that mental? That's amazing. Yeah, I'll find some like pics and videos or something. It's pretty cool. I also like this part of the book because it had some of my favorite quotes from the wizards. I liked, I think we can dispose of the invisible moon theory, interesting though it was, Dean. And also, you really believe that thing, said the Dean, pointing,

with its moon-hating water and wells that go around suns. Our moon-hating water, hey? Honestly, silly moon-hating water. But yeah, I didn't realize how little water shift there really was of the tides without that kind of tidal resonance. Yeah. So, yeah, I've learned a lot about tides today, and I think that's probably the information that will stick with me, even though I just gave a shitty definition, you know what I mean? I think probably the thing that will stick with me the most is that trees do stuff with tides. Yeah. That's very cool. That's really fucking cool. Yeah. And hopefully that fact about the Bay of Fundy,

because that's a pretty cool one. Yes. I could do it with trying that out. I'm going to go there now. Yeah, absolutely. I bet there's really handy in a pub quiz as well, actually. I feel like that's good to know. Yeah. Speaking of Rick Kelly and the Dean, actually, my other little bit I liked was not science-based. I just thought this was fucking stone cold. This is after you were saying earlier that the Dean was dragging the joke out. You're dragging not a very funny joke out for ages. And I just loved the snappy, the very calm snapping moment from a bombastic man. I just said, Dean, said Rick Kelly. Yes, our Chancellor. I would just like to point out,

Dean, that it was not a very funny joke to begin with. It was a pathetic tempt, Dean, at dragging a sad laugh out of a simple figure of speech. Only four-year-olds and people with a serious human deficiency keep on and on about it. I just wanted to bring this out into the open, Dean, calmly and in a spirit of reconciliation for your own good in the hopes that you may be made well. We're all here for you, although I can't imagine what you were here for. Wow. Incredible. That was fucking cold. I like that. And I love that the next line or something is similar to the Dean and that kind of, yeah, yeah. He's properly calm, but in a way that he'll dance back, it's fine.

This kind of like devastating attack must happen once or twice a day, I think. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Cool. Do you want to cap off the little bits with another little science bit, perhaps? Yeah, this is fun because this is speaking of people arguing. The biosphere, too. Oh, yes, yes. So I hadn't heard of this before, the book you've had because you listened to the Omnibus episode on it. Yeah, a link to that is really cool. Yeah. So the book provides, like, obviously, a decent amount of context. This was the building that struggled with oxygen levels, despite the fact they'd calculated it to be totally self-staining. They had to put oxygen in,

and that was because exposed concrete was absorbing carbon dioxide because it hadn't occurred to the ecologists that that would happen because they didn't know that concrete cures for 10 years after a site. Just why you want some just random fucking specialists around all experiments, I think. That's what I was saying the other day with the AI and very niche linguists. I feel like you just need some really esoteric knowledge geeks around everything confusing. Absolutely. So the original biosphere, too, mission, basically, the aim was to research a totally self-sustaining closed ecological system. And the idea was thinking about if this could

practically be used in the future for colonization of planets and such. And obviously, they had to start pumping oxygen in, so they swiftly found, as it was, not quite. But that doesn't mean it was a complete waste of time. So the original mission ran from 1991 to 1993. And the whole idea was, once the people went in, it was closed until the mission was over. Any amount of opening it up to bring anything in would count as a failure of the research being done. So the oxygen thing was already kind of dicey. I won't go into all of the drama around it because there was a lot of dramas to do with the funding, the PR for the mission, public response to it. But the biggest drama was there were only eight people on this mission, so eight people locked in this biome.

And they had a huge mix of biomes. They had an ocean with actual coral reefs. They had multiple species in there. The thing was huge. They had a full agricultural setup because obviously they had to be entirely self-sustaining. And the diets designed for them were very nutrient dense but quite low in calorie because there was only so much food. They could sustainably produce themselves. They were only eight people. And they were doing a lot of research work as well. And that was one of the factors that led to the eight people on the mission splitting into two factions and basically completely at war with each other. They still worked as a team for the sake of the mission to keep everything running. Like, I guess, as a survival thing. But otherwise,

the two factions completely refused to speak, will communicate with each other. And these were people who were friends who had worked together for years. They became like swan life long enemies. But they just hungry. That was a big part of it. So, Jane Pointer, who was one of the people who was on this mission, she now runs like a luxury space travel thing. I went down so many fucking Wikipedia roundabout holes today. It's ridiculous. I'm going to re-listen to this episode after this because I've forgotten all of this. Yeah, I'm going over this very quickly as well. I'm assuming the omnibus episode goes into a lot more interesting detail. I think so. The faction split was kind of based on the nature of the research. Should it be specifically

focused on the system itself, in which case keeping it totally closed off was essential? Or if it was more generalized into looking at what research they could do with what they had within this terrarium, but then risking the level of closure. So, some factions wanted to risk the level of closure for the sake of being able to do more research and possibly having a better quality of life in there. I take it because it was just so expensive. It was like a whatever the aim is. We need to get it right this time. Yeah, very much so. The morale was really low because, like I said, they were literally living with reduced oxygen. This is the equivalent to living like in the highest peaks of the Andes for quite a long time. Oh, okay. So, if you can imagine how

that would affect your mental health, they were also on a restricted brain fog kind of thing. Exactly. They were also obviously on these restricted diets because they were trying to live completely self-sustained. There has been a lot of research into this stuff. Isolated human groups is most often studied in Antarctic research stations because there are small groups living in isolation for very long periods of time. So, what was noticeable about the Biosphere 2 mission? I think you're not allowed to play chess in those anymore. Yeah, there's some weird stuff that's come up around it. Yeah, so this is an interesting thing. In a lot of those, especially those Antarctic research and similar isolated situations,

it can often turn violent and sabotage can happen, but that didn't happen in this. Like I said, they kept everything going pretty much as it was meant to go for the sake of the research, for the sake of the mission, even as they couldn't agree on it. They just also really used to speak to each other and hated each other. Oh, good scientists, not good people maybe. No, I'm sure they were good people. I would be so fucking cranky. But yeah, I'm very glad to know there's an omnibus episode because I'm going to go and read and learn a lot more about this because I am so fascinated by isolated human behavior. Yay, we didn't have any joint obsession for a couple of weeks. At one point, the crew actually started eating the seed stocks that have been brought

in for agricultural purposes. And they shouldn't have been doing that because that was food that hadn't been grown within the biosphere. So Jane Pointer, who was one of the people on the mission, told the PR director she'd been doing this and so would others and was told she had to leave and just decided not to, just stayed. Yeah, what are you going to do? Drag me out? PR director? Not even it would look bad from a PR thing. It would have ended the project. They couldn't open the project to forcibly remove her without ending the project because the whole point was that it stayed sealed off and closed. Oh, so she'd have to go through like a decompression chamber or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, and they didn't have something like that. So it was literally like

while she wanted to stay there, they couldn't force her to leave until the project ended. Love it. And then there was a whole separate drama to do with how it was being funded. But this episode is getting quite long. Is it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about the bigger stuff. So this was kind of like near the end of the section and in the introduction, actually. So nicely topped and tailed. The idea of sci-fi influencing science is something I've liked before. And I think we talked about it in Strata maybe or Dark Zone of the Moon, something like that, probably Strata. And so I did another little tangent, probably similar to the one I did last time, but in a slightly different direction. Just having a

look at what has affected what over time. There's some of the obvious ones that I know we've mentioned before, like William Gibson coming up with the term cyberspace metaverse, that kind of thing, the word robot coming from that play RUR. Yeah. Although interestingly, I didn't know much about this play. It's based on like meat automations, like the biological matter, they look like humans. Oh, right. They're not androids. Yeah. There's Erewan by Samuel Butler. And he was the pioneer of this theory that technology is going to end up ruling our lives, that the fast-paced progression of technology is what's going to consume all of our time and energy at some point as we maintain it. And what's interesting is that he was writing this and writing it about

things like the wristwatch. Oh. So this is quite a while ago. And it sounds almost amusing with the kind of timeframe it's in. But of course, it was the start of this exponential growth of technology. So around that time. So that was pretty prescient. Things that were mentioned in this book, things like geostationary orbit, space elevators, clock, you know, clock, that guy. And more solidly, though, I didn't realise how much sci-fi had directly influenced the people who were most involved in rocket travel. Really? Yeah. Spaceflight. So Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon inspired, directly inspired, Konstantin... Oh, crap. Sjölkovski? Yeah, that sounds right, maybe. And Hermann Oberth, two of the very important pioneers of actual

space travel. Yeah. So the shit. I've forgotten the name for it. With the rocket fuel that then powers the next bit, the name powers the next bit. You know what I mean. I know what you mean. I don't know the name for it. There's a really good New York Times piece about this in particular, which I'm going to link to. And I've got a subscription, so I think I should be able to like link it as a gift. And then like, so if you're listening to this in the two weeks after this episode has come out, you should be able to read it for free. But otherwise, I don't know, just email me. I'll find it for you. It's fine. Oberth, anyway, also worked on a film with Fritz Lange as kind of a consultant. Yeah, whether he was getting stuff about space travel, right? So

Fritz Lange's ago did Metropolis, which is like the iconic. Yeah. This film was called Woman in the Moon. And the rocket that Oberth built, although it didn't work, and in fact exploded and perforated his eardrum and like nearly blinded him in one eye. And he like, left an embarrassment, not discreet. He's like, no, I made him, but he was embarrassed he left. But even so, that prototype was the real like starting basis of Saturn V. So there is like a direct link there from this sci fi film to the first lunar expedition. And then and then Robert Goddard directly inspired by the world of the world. Oh, like this isn't just speculation, like these are just sci fi books, these people like these people have said like reading this made me do this or that. And I thought

that was really cool. And the last thing is one of Jack's favorite facts. And it doesn't really fit, but it kind of does. And I love it. So Serrano de Bergerac, you know, the French poet, yeah, wrote a couple of books that are like comic sci fi kind of. So one of them was called Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, but in French, which was published posthumously in 1657, note that very early date. And in it, Serrano travels to the moon using rockets powered by firecrackers, which may be the earliest description of a space flight powered by any kind of rockets. Amazing. Yeah. And obviously, that was so far ahead of its time and so vaguely connected, it didn't directly inspire or affect anything. But it's very cool.

And also, in that book, he meets moon men on the moon, and they have four legs, they have firearms that shoot game and cook it, which to me sounds very like a laser gun. Yeah. Yeah. And they also have talking earrings used to educate children. So I'm gonna read that because I've got a coffee right there. So yeah, and I like that because it's somewhere in this, oh, it was the last footnote in this section, wasn't it? Is it like asking what what sci-fi is? And talks about the evolution man, which I did read on Pratchett's direct recommendation, I guess you must have mentioned it in one of his other books. Yeah. And yeah, this to me almost fits into that. That's not really sci-fi, but isn't it great? Like the other side of that, it's not sci-fi, even though it has some

of the trimmings. But it's wonderful, all the same. It's wearing a sci-fi hat. Yeah. And educational earrings. Is that Bluetooth headsets? Oh, yeah. So yeah, your talking point is let's talk about narrative, talking about stories and such. Yeah. I'm gonna shoehorn that into a science book. No, Pratchett did that for me. Yes. So the prologue talks early on about disc world running on narrative imperative, which we all know is is a favorite theme of mine. It is. And we have this whole running thing through the book that Ponder is trying to understand how a universe works, not just without magic, but without narrative. There's a narrative within the science aspect of the book as well as the story within the disc world side of the book.

We start with the kind of the birth of science. Okay. And the transition of sort of philosophy into science by way of heresy. Oh. With a bit of natural philosophy. As a treat. As a little treat. But yeah, just challenging orthodoxy. But it's one of my favorite things I've talked about with Pratchett before, especially when it comes to talking about folklore and stories is that science began with people going, well, why are those lights up there? The simple questions. Yeah, the hardest, yeah. And then that leads into the bigger questions, like, what the fuck is the mass of a planet and how does that react to nuclear fusion? Yeah, but to me, I think what Pratchett's saying there is that's the smaller question,

isn't it? Exactly. That's why the bright lights in the sky is a big question. And that starts getting broken down into smaller questions and smaller questions and smaller questions in a question that's in the country. Yeah, exactly. A little questionnaire in the exoplanet. Not a rogue planet, though. And it goes back, it goes into this potentiality this time before time. And we talked about this idea of time not even existing, which is something I do kind of like as a concept we landed on. It, of course, mentions the turtles all the way down theory, which is something we've definitely talked about in the podcast before. Yeah, but I loved this explanation of it.

Of finding something for the turtle to stand on. Yeah. I guess I'd appreciated it as a joke before, or as like a clever line. But I really liked how they expanded on it in this. I thought that was very cool. Yeah, going into the actual idea of this infinite thing and, you know, is there such a thing as causality, especially when it comes into the universe existing? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, at some point, it's all, it's at some point the question and what's that standing on stops making sense. Yes. Yeah. Like a five year old going, why, why, why? Until eventually, the parent or in this case, the universe just goes because.

Well, this is you mentioned introducing the book, The Whole Lies to Children thing, or Ponda's version of lies to wizards. Yes. And this necessity of it, this idea to start with a lie, because that helps you prepare your brain for more and more of the truth. And turtles all the way down is kind of a nice one of those lines of just, yes, just turtles keeps being turtles, recursive turtles. Which, by the way, I must admit, the two lies to children mentioned have also stuck with me. The rainbow one and the atom being structured like a solar system are both very much still in my head as the, yeah, that's that's about it. Don't ask me to explain what they are, but like,

that's what's in my head. Very much same. And that's fine. At some point, I might learn how rainbows work properly, but right now I can just go pretty colors in the sky makes me happy. What a shiny. And I found it quite interesting actually that not long past the lies to children, but it talks about this idea of boundaries and drawing a line. And it relates it to discussions of, you know, where does life begin and discussions around abortion? At what point the embryo counts as a person with legal rights and what have you. Very good gender take as well, I noticed, especially for the 90s. Mm hmm. When you're out there, actually, the simple thing might be drawing a line,

creating a binary, and then as soon as you grow up a little bit, there's at least a dozen different combinations of sex chromosomes in humans beyond XX and XY. Yep. It's a big blurry spectrum, lads. She says immediately using a gender term. Well, that's just, I didn't realize that Android was a gender term, by the way, spinning back wildly to something we were talking about a second ago. Wait, Android's gendered? Apparently, and apparently, one can, if one wishes to be absolutely appalling, refer to a female and presented Android as a guinoid. Listeners, I implore that you do not, but it is within the realm of linguistic possibility. Listeners, I'd like to just

put a blanket man on guinoid on the podcast now. It's on our band words list. All right, cool, cool. I'll add it to the list. You can think it as much as you like. We're all for freedom of thought, but you do not have freedom of speech on our podcast. Oh, good. Sorry, Fark, what did I interrupt there? The boundaries and the beginnings and the becomeings came out of that, didn't it? Exactly, very much so. And if you think about how Pratchett shapes a story, there's very much this thing because there is, obviously, there's an actual beginning you can point to with the Discworld. You have the color of magic, but there's also a sense that the Discworld has

just constantly continued to spin and fly through space. It doesn't need a boundary, a beginning or an end. And much in the same way that it's not always the right thing for us to assume that the way the universe worked a long time ago is the way it worked now. On the Discworld, some things didn't work the same way as they do now because either the Time Monks did something fucky or Brackets, a wizard did it. Or just because Pratchett changed his mind and that's fine too, it says well. The Discworld is becoming. It's becoming. Oh, that's nice too. That's a way of interesting phrase, isn't it, actually? Becoming is like a tractive.

Yeah. Okay, we're not doing a demolition live on the podcast right soon. You're fine. I'm getting a real insight into how our conversations work, this episode, listeners. We're a little bit lost without the usual narrative structure, relevantly enough to this point. Okay, yeah. So speaking of narrative, you have the book constantly going back into the way humans on Runward still do use narrative even if it's not officially a present element. Yes. And Ponder's whole crisis that a narrative-emless universe is meaningless, but it's the thing humans have always done. We understand by keeping things simple by telling lies to children, by telling ourselves stories such as the solar

system-shaped atom and the pretty colors make the lights in the rainbow. And what this becomes with humans telling themselves stories to deal with things they don't understand is this idea that Pratcha brings up or the book brings up of privatives. And so on the Discworld, dark is a literal thing. It is the opposite of light is also a tangible concept. Yeah. And we love this. We're always going on about this. We are a big fan of how light works on the Discworld, the tangible dark. And just privatives in general. Love that word, by the way. I didn't know it before. No. Very into the fact we now have a word for what we've been kind of vaguely

ranting about for two years now, three years now. Fuck. A thing that's just actually the absence of another thing, the drunk-sovereignty-nerd relationship. And this is something humans do. They think narratively. So they create privatives. They create names for things that are actually just the absence of things. So we name darkness as if it's a thing as opposed to just the absence of light. And this leads into reifying, um, creating, constructing something real based on what's actually more of an absence. And using death as an example is really fascinating. Yeah. It's taking this abstract, making it into the solid.

Yes. Into its own physical state. And then because it is a state, it must therefore have these other implications such as the soul and what have you. Yes. Yeah. And obviously, believe what you want about souls. We won't go into the deep religious discussion on the podcast. Because death doesn't have time. He's got so many to reap. Exactly. He doesn't have time for you to worry about whether you've got a soul or not. It's coming with him. So we reify things in the round world all the time. We create narratives to explain processes, to put a label on something intangible as if we could then hold it in our

hands. Is it anthropomorphic? The solidification. Yeah, it's a type of reifying then, I guess. Effectively. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Putting something into this kind of human form that we feel like we could then interact with, which is what you have with really early multi-deity systems. And that's not the word for it. There's a proper word for it. Like pantheons. And so those gods come to represent certain things. And that's another way of putting a tangible thing on it, having Aphrodite who's a goddess of love. And actually, that kind of continued into Western Christian culture with saints and

patron saints for different things. I mean, it's a patron saint for fucking everything. And that's like the modern version of the pantheon. That was a side track. But there's this idea of reifying, of putting words on things to make them more tangible, of course, on land. Well, it allows for conversation. You need to have language to discuss something, even if that's something is the absence of something, even if it's a privative like death, like darkness. But then of course, solid things are sometimes built on those conversations. Exactly. But in the disc world, if you start reifying things, they're going to fucking manifest at you. And get really annoyed if you build on top of them. Don't build on the tooth fairy,

she will deck you. Anyway, it brings me to the fact that once again, we have got back to my favourite project theme, power of belief. Yay, we did it. Despite my best efforts to do real us as always, we have as always ended up where we wanted to be. Have you got an obscure reference for me in front of you? Yeah, it's not the one I wrote down. Because that's just the kind of episode it is. It's scraping right outside my window and I'm not going to check what it is because it might be a drunk. Right. When worlds collide, young man, someone is doing something wrong. It's the voice of the senior wrangler. It sounded more petulant than usual. This is when all the students are chucking planets at the other planets and such, I think. When worlds collide

is of course 1933 sci-fi and all that, which Joanna, you'll be thrilled to know is based upon rogue planets. Plop centres around them. Yes, rogue planets in particular, which threaten the existence of our planet, not only threaten it, but are about to destroy it. Are they looming? And I'm actually not going to spoil it, even though it's from 1933 because it's a good story and has a sequel and everything. But when worlds collide, that's what it is. It also spawned a film of the same name, which listeners might be more familiar with. And yeah, that's my obscure reference, which is thankfully quite short for a science heavy book. I had to track down a literature reference because all the science stuff was explained.

Beautiful. Thank you. I think that's everything that we are going to say about the science of discworld. We've saved you at least eight more tangents. We will be back for the second half of the book from chapter 25 onwards. I'm sure I did say that we are using a slightly more modern addition that I believe has some chapters added. The 2002. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm reading. Yeah. So going from chapter 25 unnatural selection through to chapter 49, if you have a different number of chapters, I'm sorry, it might get a bit weird. Yep. But even so, I think the depth we're going into, you can enjoy the episode just the same. Yeah. So until next time, dear listeners, you can follow us on Instagram at the true shall make you fret on Twitter at make you fret board

on Facebook at the true shall make you fret. Join our subreddit community r slash t t s m y f email us your thoughts queries, castle snacks and quasars, the true shall make you fret pod at gmail.com. If you would like to support us financially, go to patreon.com forward slash the true shall make you fret where you can exchange your herd and pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. And of course, please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, all that nonsense where you find us because it helps other people find us. Which can be difficult and such a large and uncaring universe. Yeah, somehow you keep camping on those fucking exoplanets. And until next time, dear listeners, don't let us detain you.

I think that's as smooth as we've done the outro in a year. Yes, I've just realized if I don't want to say it, I just need to point at you.