The Science of Discworld Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Science of Discworld Book

Terry Pratchett needs no introduction. Ian Stewart has written fine nonfiction books on mathematics, and he and Jack Cohen collaborated on the quirkily inventive pop-science titles The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality. What on earth, or on Discworld, are they all doing in the same book? Pratchett provides a very funny 30,000-word novella about Discworld science, beginning in the High Energy Magic faculty of Unseen University and leading his eccentric wizards to investigate an alien cosmos where there's no magic to keep things going. This is the Roundworld universe--ours. The key point: much that's true only on Discworld (eg: that suns orbit planets and not vice-versa) was once believed on Earth and the wizards' comic misunderstandings echo the history of real science ... Unusually, Pratchett's story is split into chapters and in between his chapters Stewart and Cohen wittily discuss the concepts underlying the fiction, from the Big Bang through stellar formation to life and evolution. Much of the science we know, they cheerfully insist, is "lies-to-children": good stories that are mostly untrue, like thinking of atoms as tiny solar systems. Discworld operates by narrative plausibility and so does human thought even when our Roundworld universe disagrees. Between the laughs, The Science of Discworld is a provocative, informative book that'll make you think about what you think you know. --David LangfordRead More

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    When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld. The Universe, of course, is our own. And, Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow, we follow the story of our universe from the singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet.

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    The hard science is as gripping as the fiction (Peter Ingham "The Times"). When a wizardly experiment goes adrift the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic. The Universe of course is our own. And Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow we follow the story of our universe from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. Through this original Terry Pratchett story (with intervening chapters from Cohen and Stewart) we discover how puny and insignificant individual lives are against a cosmic backdrop of creation and disaster. Yet paradoxically we see how the richness of a universe based on rules has led to a complex world and at least one species that tried to get a grip of what was going on...

  • Pickabook

    Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack S. Cohen

  • 0091886570
  • 9780091886578
  • Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack S. Cohen
  • 2 May 2002
  • Ebury Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 400
  • 2nd Revised edition
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