‘... the universe has no time for life. By rights it shouldn’t exist. We don’t realize the odds.’ (DSS)
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... there was no such thing as absolute control, not in a fully functioning universe. There was just a variable amount of lack of control. (DW)
“Humans need other humans – it’s as simple as that.” (SC)
A rescue attempt had hitherto been so far at the back of his mind that, if some advanced speculations on the nature and shape of the many-dimensioned multiplexity of the universe were correct, it was right at the front ... (COM)
It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it. (RS)
Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails and testicles of their father.* There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people.
*Gods like a joke as much as anyone else. (LL) The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did
not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Lyn Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher*, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large. *He always argued that he was. (S) For something to exist, it has to be observed.
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is paperwork. (TOT) That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.
They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell.
And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically wasthings that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot. (TOT) There might have been more efficient ways to build a world. You might start with a ball of molten iron and then coat it with successive layers of rock, like an old-fashioned gobstopper. And you’d have a very efficient planet, but it wouldn’t look so nice. Besides, things would drop off the bottom. (E)
"Some people” – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – “think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is." (E)
'Where are we heading Angalo?'
Angalo rubbed his hands and puller every lever right back. 'So far up,' he said, with satisfaction, 'that there is no down.' (Wings) Some parts of the world had night while other parts had day. This, Gurder said, was bad organization. (Wings)
Mr Fletcher looked around the little room. It was currently occupied only by Adrian 'Nozzer' Miller, who'd wanted to be an astronomer because he thought it was all to do with staying up late looking through telescopes, and hadn't bargained on it being basically about adding columns of figures in a little shed in the middle of a windy field. (JD)
... he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. (GO)
... it was often said that the sky was full of stars. It was untrue. The sky was full of sky. There were unlimited amounts of sky and really, by comparison, very few stars. (Wings)
SPACE: There are two types of space: a) something containing nothing and b) nothing contains everything. It is what you have left when you haven't got anything else. There is no air or gravity, which is what holds people on to things. If there wasn't space, everything would be in one place. (Wings)
'I think you do not appreciate what it is that space contains.'
'What's that, then?' 'Nothing. It contains nothing. And everything. But there is very little everything and more nothing than you could imagine. (Dig) They wouldn't be able to get to grips with the fact that the stars, fr'instance, were much further away. Even if you ran all the way, it'd probably take weeks to reach them. (Truck)
Everyone knew that stars were points of light. If they weren’t, some would be visibly bigger than others. Some were fainter than others, of course, but that was probably due to clouds. In any case their purpose, according to established Discworld law, was to lend a little style to the night. (SODW)
'Absolute nothing is very unstable. It’s so desperate to be something.' (SODW)
Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting things when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all. (LC)
Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. (LL) Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock
a leg to allow the sun to go past. Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. (WS) |
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