It’s no secret that one of my many obsessions is the author Terry Pratchett, and his creation Discworld – world and mirror of worlds. At first, I suspect like many others, I thought it was just an amusing sci-fi/fantasy series, but I quickly realised that within the wild plots, free-wheeling humour, pinpoint character portraits and searing critiques of …. of … well, just about everything (Read ‘Going Postal’. You’ll pick up the stuff about Ankh-Morpork and the Patrician Vetinari as you go along, and as for Adora Belle Deerheart and the Golem Trust which she runs …. well, as Jimmy Carter almost said, I have committed fictional adultery with her in my heart.) there is a man who wants to take us by the neck and shake us silly. He is the Charles Dickens de nos jours. What a cruel joke God is playing on him, if you still think God exists.
Oh, you were maybe expecting something about music in this, my music blog? Well, welcome to the Interweb. It’s chaos. I can do anything I damned well please, and I please to write about Pratchett right now.
Not least because his life mirrors mine, except that I haven’t written 30-plus novels. A minor point, I think – after all, I have a hat just like his, and at a distance people poke each other and whisper excitedly, until they get close. AND I invented the plot of ‘Hogfather’ before he wrote it, and have files of correspondence between me and him (admittedly, after the first brief note from Terry, his side tapers off sharply) to prove it.
But I digress. It’s what I do best.
You bought ‘A Brief History of Time’, by Hawking, didn’t you? Did you get to page 145 (no, me neither), where he breaks down and admits that he’s just having a laugh, and he hasn’t a clue what it’s all about, and we should just pursue our quest for the perfect Chicken Tikka Massala followed by the perfect Mohito, and then listen to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ with the quadraphonic speakers just so? All else is silence.
I had a point here, somewhere. Oh, yes.
I am re-reading the ‘Science of Discworld’ trilogy. I’m not overly (Incidentally, ‘overly’ is a word my English master at secondary school refused to believe existed. You can tell I didn’t go to a good school.) fond of spin-offs from any franchise, but I make an exception for these. They are funny, and thought-provoking. Terry collaborates with two science-based authors, and successfully contrasts the magic-based structure of Discworld with the quantum-mechanically based structure of the ‘real’ universe (a reality you soon come to doubt) – with hilarious consequences.
The science authors make the trilogy a bit verbose, but stick with it. Each book features alternating chapters between discourses on real science, and the efforts of the wizards at Unseen University
The trilogy covers the creation of the universe, and evolution. Big subjects. But out of it all, the one which captures me is ‘time’.
We really have no conception of how long a million years really is. Really. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts compared to
Sorry. Flipped over into the wrong obsession, for a moment.
OK, there’s lots of stuff about the physics of time and the fact that current hypotheses say that time’s arrow could be reversed, and there’s string theory and multidimensional/parallel universes and black/white holes and dark matter and the whole Deep Space Nine scenario …. but time and time again, I come back to Time.
The species we call ‘human’ has been on this planet for an eyeblink of time. We’ve done pretty well (deforestation and imminent extinction of most major mammals aside) in our study of what the hell is going on, but we haven’t got to grips with time. As witness, the fossil record. We comfortably assume that, because we have some fossils of trilobites and fish and the odd ichthyosaur and dinosaur and hadrosaur and pterosaur that we have a clear picture of evolution. Nope. There were tens of millions of years when the earth was ruled by creatures that we know about, but are not photogenic enough to have appeared in ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’.
Not to beat about the bush, WE DON’T KNOW SHIT!
Fossils are amazingly rare. It’s just the sheer mass of them, accrued throughout immense lengths of time, that makes us think otherwise. There are hundreds of millions of years in our history when no fossils were formed or preserved. The earth is 4.5 billion (Did you get that? Billion? That’s 1,000,0000,0000,000 years – think of all those tax returns.) years old, give or take. It’s quite possible that there was a flourishing civilisation of some kind two billion years ago, with intelligent entities saving up to buy a second home in the polar regions where it was nice and chilly all year round, until a comet impact turned the planet back into hot lava. And then we evolved from the remains of their equivalent of a Lamb Biriani.
I could say something trite, like; “Life will find a way!”.
But I have run out of energy, and I was never very good at conclusions.
Live long and prosper.
[Damn! I can never do that finger thing!]
