Within a decade, it was discovered that there is a state with energy 7.6549 MeV. Unfortunately, it turns out that the combined energies of beryllium and helium are about 4 per cent higher than this. In nuclear physics, that's a huge error.
Oops.
Ah, but, miraculously, that apparent discrepancy is just what we want. Why? Because the additional energy imparted by the temperatures found in a red giant star is exactly what's needed to change the combined energy of beryllium and helium nuclei by that missing 4 per cent.
Wow.
It's a wonderful story, and it rightly earned Hoyle huge numbers of scientific brownie-points.
And it makes our existence look rather delicate. If the fundamental constants of the universe are changed, then so is that vital 7.6549. So it is tempting to conclude that our universe's constants are fine-tuned for carbon, making it very special indeed. An it is equally tempting to conclude that the reason for that fine-tuning is to ensure that complex life turns up. Hoyle didn't do that, but many other scientists have given into these temptations.
Sounds good: what's wrong? The physicist Victor Stenger calls this kind of argument
'cosmythology'. Another physicist, Craig Hogan has put his finger on one of the weak points.
The argument treats the temperature of the red giant and that 4 per cent discrepancy in energy levels as if they were independent. That is, it assumes that you can change the fundamental constants of physics without changing the way a red giant works. However, that's obvious nonsense. Hogan points out that 'the structure of stars includes a built-in thermostat that automatically adjusts the temperature to just the value needed to make the reaction go at the correct rate'. It's rather like being amazed that the temperature in a fire is just right to burn wood, when in fact that temperature is caused by the chemical reaction that burns the wood. This kind of failure to examine the interconnectedness of natural phenomena is a typical, and quite common, error in anthropic reasoning.
In the human world, what counts is not carbon, but narrativium. And in that context we wish to state a new kind of anthropic principle. It so happens that we live in a universe whose physical constants are just right for carbon-based brains to evolve to the point at which they create narrativium, much as a star creates carbon. And the narrativium does crazy things, like putting machines on the Moon. Indeed, if carbon did not (yet) exist, then any narrativium-based lifeform could find some way to manufacture it, by telling itself a really gripping story about the need for carbon. So causality in this universe is irredeemably weird. Physicists like to put it all down to the fundamental constants, but it's more likely an example of Murphy's law.
But that's another story.
The more we think about narrative in human affairs, the more we see that our world revolves around the power of story. We build our minds by telling stories. Newspapers select news according to its value as a story, not according to how intrinsically important it is. 'England loses cricket match to Australia' is a story (though not a very surprising one) and it goes on the front page. 'Doctors think that they may have improved the diagnosis of liver disease by 1 per cent' is not a story, even though most science works like that (and in years to come, depending on the state of your liver, you might think it's a rather more important story than a cricket match).
'Scientist claims cure for cancer' is a story, though, even if the supposed cure is nonsense. So are
'spiritualist medium claims a cure for cancer', and 'Secret code predictions hidden in the Bible', more's the pity.
As we write, there is a furore over a small group of people who are proposing to clone a human being. It's a major story, but very few newspapers are reporting the most likely result of this attempt, which will be abject failure. It took 277 failures, many rather nasty, before Dolly the Sheep was cloned, and she has now been found to have serious genetic defects, poor lamb.
Trying to clone a human may indeed be unethical, but that's not the best reason for objecting to this misguided and foolish attempt. The best reason is that it won't work, because nobody yet knows how to overcome numerous technical obstacles; moreover, if by some stroke of
(mis)fortune it did happen to work, any child produced would have serious defects. Producing such a child, now that is unethical.
Making 'carbon copies' of human beings, which is the usual basis of the newspapers' story about the ethics, is beside the point. That's not what cloning does, anyway. Dolly the Sheep was not genetically identical to her mother, though she came close. Even if she had been, she would still have been a different sheep, moulded by different experiences. For that matter, the same would be true even if she was genetically identical to her mother. For the same reason, cloning a dead child will not bring that child back to life. Much of the media discussion of the ethics of cloning, like much of the public understanding of science, is vaguely stirred through with science fiction.
In this arena, as in so many, the power of the story outweighs any questions about the real factual basis.
Human beings do not just tell stories, or just listen to them. The are more like Granny Weatherwax, who is aware of the power of stories on Discworld, and refuses to be trapped by the story's narrativium. Instead, she uses the power of story to mould events according to her own wishes. Roundworld priests, politicians, scientists, teachers and journalists have learned to use the power of story to get their messages across to the public, and to manipulate or persuade people to behave in particular ways. The 'scientific method' is a defense mechanism against that kind of manipulation. It tells you not to believe things because you want them to be true. The proper scientific response to any new discovery or theory, especially your own, is to look for ways to disprove it. That is, to try to find a different story that explains the same things.
The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thin to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, w are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
At this point, the structure of The Science of Discworld 2: The Globe becomes very self- referential. You will need to bear that in mind as we proceed. The book is itself a story - no - two intertwined stories One, the odd-numbered chapters, is a Discworld fantasy. The other -the even-numbered chapters, is a story of the science of the Mind (metaphysical again). The two are closely related, designed to fit together like foot and glove;10 the science story is presented as a series of Very Large Footnotes to the fantasy story.
So far, so good ... but it gets more complicated. When you read a Discworld story, you play a curious mental game. You react as if the story is true, as if Discworld actually exists, as if Rincewind and the Luggage are real, and Roundworld is but a fragment of a long-forgotten dream. (Please stop interrupting, Rincewind, we know it's different from your point of view. Yes, of course we're the ones that don't exist, we're bundles of rules whose consequences take place only inside a small globe on a dusty shelf in Unseen University. Yes, we do appreciate that, and will you please shut up?) Sorry about that.
People have become very good at playing this game, and we will exploit that by setting Earth and Discworld on the same narrative level, so that each illuminates the other. In the first book, The Science of Discworld, the Discworld defined what is real. That's why reality makes such good sense. Roundworld is a magical construct, designed to keep the magic out, and that's why it makes no sense at all (to wizards, at least). In this sequel Earth acquires inhabitants, the inhabitants acquire minds, and minds do strange things. They bring narrativium to a story-less universe.