Sciencery

I’m now three books into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series involving the hapless wizard-protagonist Rincewind, who once again has to save the world. Grudgingly, of course. He’s the anti-hero and prefers a non-life-threatening life, but life seems to have different ideas. This time around, the magic of wizards will be threatened by the magic of sourcerers. No, that’s not a spelling typo. Sourcerers draw their magic directly from its source, bypassing the need for learning complicated incantations and hand-motions. I wonder if they somehow break the Law of Conservation of Reality, but sadly this is not addressed in the third book, aptly titled Sourcery. 

 

However, there is a remarkable side passage that deals with what I will dub “Sciencery”, that odd practice of its acolytes, of whom I am one of many – scientists. I will quote parts of it since paraphrasing Pratchett is nigh impossible and nowhere as fun.

 

It is a well-known and established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift [elevator], the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

 

Coincidentally, this week I was telling one of my research students about the tedious slog that accompanies most of research, but also the ‘high’ you get when something seems to just work out in one glorious gestalt moment. Pratchett’s prose, of course, is tongue-in-cheek. One might think of adages such as “Inspiration is 99% Perspiration”, but it is interesting how one gets these ‘aha’ moments. Chemistry has its famous iconic ones such as Kekule’s telling of his serpent-eating-its-tail dream. This past Friday, I told students about Archimedes and his eureka moment, upon which we proceeded to do calculations on gold-plated crowns and discussed the practicality of measuring water displacement when submerging said crowns.

 

But Pratchett has a twist on this story, so I’ll quote what follows.

 

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time, traveling through the densest matter the way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.

 

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

 

Oh, well. There went our chances of a workable fusion reactor. We’ll have to wait until the real Iron Man comes along and invents his new element – a subject for one of my later classes on the periodic table. In the meantime, what are my chances of being hit by an ‘inspiration particle’? I might have had one this morning in my state of hypnagogia, just as I was waking up but still having strange thoughts. At the very least I sorta think I have a new idea to analyze some data if the current simpler approach fails. Not mind-bending or profound in any way. Too bad I don’t remember the wild dream that preceded it. Now if only the inspirational particles hit when I’m conscious and ready for it.

 

Sciencery seems like a lot more work compared to Sourcery. In that sense, it’s more like the Wizardry practiced by the denizens of Unseen University in Discworld. There’s a lot of studying by the lower echelons, and then a lot of backstabbing your way into the upper echelons. Or I should say it resembles dysfunctional academia. The strong and cunning survive, and if they bide their time, one might even become the Archchancellor of Unseen University, who as Pratchett says:

 

…was the official leader of all the Wizards on the Disc. Once upon a time it had meant that he would be the most powerful in the handling of magic, but times were a lot quieter now and, to be honest, senior wizards tended to look upon actual magic as a bit beneath them. They tended to prefer administration, which was safer and nearly as much fun, and also big dinners.

 

Perhaps more Cornelius Fudge than Albus Dumbledore? But there’s always the power-hungry wizard who is also magically powerful, and who think that might makes right. But he’s also trying to avoid his date with Death – yes, Voldermort, that’s you. There’s a sort of symmetry between the antagonist in Sourcery and that of the Harry Potter series. But this stock character is true of many other stories – perhaps telling us something about human nature and the corruptibility of power. Perhaps then it’s a good thing that Sciencery is so much more difficult than Sourcery, and that the Law of Conservation of Reality kicks in when needed.

 

P.S. Here’s a reference for actual neutrinos, those ghostly particles. How do you trap ghosts anyway?