... 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)
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'That’s what the warriors on the Counter-weight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout -’ He tried to remember some far-off reading. ‘– er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!’
‘I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small,’ said the Senior Wrangler. The Dean hesitated. He wasn’t too sure himself, if it came to it. But a good wizard never lets uncertainty stand in the way. ‘No, it’s definitely got to be bonsai,’ he said. He considered it some more and then brightened up. ‘On account of it all being part of bushido. Like ... small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it.' (RM) ... it used to be so simple, once upon a time.
Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition. Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like ‘Hurrah, I’ve discovered Boyle’s Third Law.’ And everyone knew where they stood. But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself – partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt. (WA) …the fastest animal on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually
achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest – usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. (P) |
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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