The Librarian was informally banned from the High Energy Magic building, owing to his inherent tendency to check on what things were by tasting them. This worked very well in the Library, where taste had become a precision reference system, but was less useful in a room occasionally contains bus bars throbbing with several thousand thaums. The ban was informal, of course, because anyone capable of pulling the doorknob right through an oak door can obviously go where he likes. (SD)
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It was such a relief to be right, even though you knew you'd only got there by trying every possible way to be wrong. (FC)
Every scientific statement is provisional. Politicians hate this. How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds. (JD)
… it is the nature of Great Big Things that if the money isn’t spent on them, it isn’t spent on smaller scientific projects either. Small projects don’t advance bureaucratic or political careers as effectively as big ones. (JD)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails
if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed. (M) '… you know how it is with boundaries,' Ridcully mumbled. 'You look at what's on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.' (UA)
'… I don't think it was for reading. It was for having written …' (CCODD)
It is always useful for a university to have a Very Big Thing. It occupies the younger members, to the relief of their elders (especially if the VBT is based at some distance from the seat of learning itself) and it uses up a lot of money, which would otherwise only lie around causing trouble or be spent by the sociology department or, probably, both. It also helps if it pushes back boundaries, and it doesn’t much matter what boundaries these are, since as any researcher will tell you that it’s the pushing that matters, not the boundary. (DW)
He was spending more nights now watching Hex trawl the invisible writings for any hints. In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers. (LC)
Another response of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls. (LH)
And the trouble with clues, as Mister Vimes always said, was that they were so easy to make. You could walk around with a pocket full of the bloody things. (Th)
Every real copper knew you didn’t go around looking for Clues so that you could find out Who Done It. No, you started out with a pretty good idea of Who Done It. That way, you knew what Clues to look for. (FC)
The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. (FC)
'How do we usually test stuff?’
‘Generally we ask for student volunteers,’ said the Dean. ‘What happens if we don’t get any?’ ‘We give it to them anyway.’ ‘Isn’t that a bit unethical?’ ‘Not if we don’t tell them, Archchancellor.’ ‘Ah, good point.' (H) Hexperiment: to use magic just to see what happens. (W)
... the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was successfully demonstrated to be made up of resons* or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at
least five ‘flavours’,known as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘sideways’, ‘sex appeal’ and ‘peppermint’. * Lit: ‘Thing-ies’ (LL) The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers. (LC)
The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building - at least, all the really funny ones* - gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them, or even knows how they came to be there. His research was causing extreme constipation and a queue outside the door every morning.
*The ones with cartoons about cows and dogs. And captions like: ‘As soon as he saw the duck, Elmer knew it was going to be a bad day.' (SM) The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn’t quite grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring - a sort of green bean thing that buzzed - led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider. (S)
The Faculty was lukewarm on the subject of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but they were boiling hot on the subject of warm bedrooms. (SODW)
Wizards seldom bothered to look things up if they could reach an answer by bickering at cross-purposes. (SODW)
Some questions should not be asked. However, someone always does.
‘How does it work?’ said Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, the Master of Unseen University. This was the kind of question that Ponder Stibbons hated almost as much as ‘How much will it cost?’ They were two of the hardest questions a researcher ever had to face. (SODW) The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted. (TT)
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