The Science of Discworld is a 1999 book by novelist Terry Pratchett and popular science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Three sequels, ', ', and , have been written by the same authors. The book alternates between a typically absurd Discworld story and serious scientific exposition after each chapter. The cover of the book, designed by Paul Kidby, is a parody of the 1768 painting "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Plot summary
The Discworld part of the book begins when a new experimental power source for the Unseen University is commissioned in the university's squash court. The new "reactor" is capable of splitting the thaum, in homage to the Chicago Pile-1 nuclear reactor, which was housed in a rackets court at the University of Chicago. However, the wizards' new reactor produces vastly more magical energy than planned and threatens to explode, destroying the University, the Discworld, and the entire universe. The university's thinking engine, Hex, decides to divert all the magic into creating a space containing nothing—no matter, no energy, no reality, and, importantly, no magic. The Dean sticks his fingers in the space and "twiddles" them, inadvertently creating the universe. The wizards soon discover that they can move things around in the universe, using Hex. They call it the Roundworld, because in it, matter seems to accrete into balls in space. They decide to appoint Rincewind, whom they dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning, the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, and send him down to investigate this strange world. The wizards create a series of balls of matter in space, and give one of them a Moon. This stabilizes the ball enough that, over a score of millennia, blobs of life emerge, ready to begin evolving into more complex forms. The book also features a fictional crab civilization and the dinosaurs, before jumping ahead to when an advanced civilization has evacuated the earth due to an impending natural disaster.
Ideas and themes
The science centres on the origins of the universe, earth and the beginnings of life, the fiction on the creation of a world in a jar. One of the themes is that most scientific explanations are in reality a good deal more complicated than most of us realize. It is explained that this is because their teachers use Lies-To-Children or, in Ponder Stibbons' case, Lies-To-Wizards. The even-numbered chapters are self-contained essays that discuss, among others, the following topics:
, reviewing the 2014 edition, described it as "unique and outrageously funny", with "writing is as entertaining as it is accessible." The New England Science Fiction Association considered it "a fine popularization of science and of the scientific method", and "most unusual and entertaining", but observed that this makes it "something of an oddity".
Origins
Cohen reports that it was extremely difficult to find a publisher who was willing to purchase the book, saying "I spent two-and-a-half years going around editors. I must have had 80 . And they all said ‘don’t be stupid’. At last Ebury took it. The editor there was made to understand that if it sold less than 10,000 copies, he’d lose his job. It sold more than 200,000 copies in the first year." He also states that the books were inspired by a "bloody awful" book on the science of Star Trek, and noted that Pratchett was initially reluctant to write about science on the Discworld "because there isn’t any science on the Discworld".
