No matter, these are mere elaborations of what would otherwise be an entirely transparent story: you understand what we're getting at.
Taking all this into account, was Phocian a scientist?
No. Hex has bungled again, for despite Phocian's years of visibly 'scientific' activity, he falls down in two respects. One, open to dispute, is not his fault: he has no peers, no colleagues. There are no other 'scientists' for him to work with, or to criticise him. He's on his own and ahead of his time.63 Just as there cannot be just one wizard, there cannot be just one scientist. Science has a social dimension.64 The second reason, though, is decisive. He is mortified when his work proves that Antigonus, the great authority, is wrong.
Any genuine scientist would give their right arm to prove that the great authority is wrong.
That's how you make your reputation, and it's also the most important way to contribute to the scientific endeavour. Science is at its best when it changes people's minds. Very little of it does that, in part because our minds have been built by a culture that is pervaded by science anyway.
If a scientist manages to spend 1 per cent of the time discovering things that are not what they expected, they are doing amazingly well. But boy, does that 1 per cent count for a lot.
This, then, is science. Questioning authority. Complicity between theory and experiment. And being within a community of like-minded people to question your work. Preferably accompanied by a conscious awareness of all of the above, and gratitude to your friends and colleagues for their criticisms. And what's the aim? To find timeless truths? No, that's asking too much. To stop frail humans from falling for plausible falsehoods? Yes -including those of people who at least look and sound just like you. And to protect people from their willingness to believe a good story, just because it sounds right and doesn't upset them. And to protect them from the firm smack of authority, too.
It took humanity a long time to arrive at the scientific method. No doubt the reason for the delay was that if you do science properly, you often find yourself overturning entrenched, well- established beliefs, including your own entrenched, well-established beliefs. Science is not a belief system, but many areas of human activity are, so it is not surprising to find that the early developers of science often found themselves in conflict with authority. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Galileo, who ran into trouble with the Inquisition because of his theories about the solar system. Sometimes science exposes you to the firm smack instead.
Science, then, is not just a body of teachable facts and techniques. It is a way of thinking. In science, established 'facts' are always open to question,65 but few scientists will listen to you unless you can offer some evidence that the old ideas are wrong. If the people who invented those ideas are dead, then alternatives can quickly gain acceptance, and the scientific method is working well. If the people who invented those ideas are still around, in influential positions, then they can put a lot of obstacles in the way of the new suggestion and the people who proposed it. Then science is working badly, because people are behaving like people. Even so, the new idea still can displace the accepted wisdom. It just takes longer and needs really solid evidence.
Let's contrast science with alternative ways of thinking about the universe. The Discworld worldview is that the universe is run by magic: things happen because people want them to happen. You still have to find the right spell, or the narrative imperative has to be so strong that those things will happen anyway even if people don't want them to, but the universe exists in order to be there for people.
On Discworld and Roundworld, the worldview of the priesthood is similar, but with one important difference. They believe that the universe is run by gods (or a god): things happen because the gods want them to happen, don't care if they happen, or have some ineffable long- term aim in view. However, it is possible for people to ask the priests to intercede with the gods, on their behalf, in the hope of influencing the gods' decisions, at least in minor ways.
The philosophical worldview, exemplified by Antigonus, is that the nature of the world can be deduced by pure thought, on the basis of a few deep, general principles. Observation and experiment are secondary to verbal reasoning and logic.
The scientific worldview is that what people want has very little to do with what actually happens, and that it is unnecessary to invoke gods at all. Thought is useful, but empirical observations are the main test of any hypothesis. The role of science is to help us find out how the universe works. Why it works, or what manner of Being ultimately controls it, if any, is not a question that science is interested in. It is not a question to which anyone can give a testable answer.
Oddly enough, this hands-off approach to the universe has given us far more control over it than magic, religion or philosophy have done. On Roundworld, magic doesn't work, so it offers no control at all. Some people believe that prayer can influence their god, and that in this way human beings can have some influence over the world in which they live, like a courtier at a king's ear. Other people have no such beliefs, and consider the role of prayer to be largely psychological. It can have an effect on people, but not on the universe itself. And philosophy has a tendency to follow rather than lead.
Science is a form of narrativium. In fact, all four approaches to the universe -magic, religion, philosophy and science -involve the construction of stories about the world. Oddly enough, these different kinds of story often have many parallels. There is a distinct resemblance between many religious creation myths and the cosmologists' 'Big Bang' theory of the origin of the universe. And the monotheistic idea that there is only one God, who created everything and runs everything, is suspiciously close to the modern physicists' idea that there should be a single Theory of Everything, a single fundamental physical principle that unites both relativity and quantum mechanics into a satisfying and elegant mathematical structure.
The act of telling stories about the universe may well have been more important to the early development of humanity, and for the initial growth of science, than the actual content of the stories themselves. Accurate content was a later criterion. When we start telling stories about the universe, the possibility arises of comparing those stories with the universe itself, and refining how well the stories fit what we actually see. And that is already very close to the scientific method.
Humanity seems to have started from a rather Discworldly view, in which the world was inhabited by unicorns and werewolves and gods and monsters, and the stories were used not so much to explain how the world worked, but to form a crucial part of the cultural Make-a-Human kit. Unicorns, werewolves, elves, fairies, angels, and other supernatural were not real. But that didn't actually matter very much: there is no problem in using unreal things to programme human minds.66 Think of all those talking animals.
The models employed by science are very similar in many respects. They, too, do not correspond exactly to reality. Think of the old model of an atom as a kind of miniature solar system, in which tiny hard particles called electrons whirl around a central nucleus consisting of other kinds of tiny hard particles: protons and neutrons. The atom is not really like that. But many scientists still use this picture today as the basis for their investigations. Whether this makes sense depends upon what problem they are working on, and when it doesn't make sense, they use something more sophisticated, like the description of an atom as a probable cloud of 'orbitals' which represent not electrons, but places where electrons could be. That model is more sophisticated, and it fits reality more closely than a mini solar system, but it still isn't 'true'.