A special kind of magic is one of the many things that have made humans what they are. It's called education. It's how we pass on ideas from one generation to the next. If we were like computers, we'd be able to copy our minds into our children, so that they would grow up agreeing with every opinion that we hold dear. Well, actually they wouldn't, though they might start out that way. There is an aspect of education that we want to draw to your attention. We call it 'lies-to-children'. We're aware that some readers may object to the word 'lie', it got Ianand Jack into terrible trouble with some literally-minded Swedes at a scientific conference who took it all terribly seriously and spent several days protesting that 'It's not a for It is. It is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie. A lie-to-children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child's mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie.
The early stages of education have to include a lot of lies-to-children, because early explanations have to be simple. However, we live in a complex world, and lies-to-children must eventually be replaced by more complex stories if they are not to become delayed-action genuine lies. Unfortunately, what most of us know about science consists of vaguely remembered lies-to-children. For example, the rainbow. We all remember being told at school that glass and water split light into its constituent colours, there's even a nice experiment where you can see them, and we were told that this is how rainbows form, from light passing through raindrops. When we were children, it never occurred to us that while this explains the colours of the rainbow it doesn't explain its shape. Neither does it explain how the light from the many different raindrops in a thundershower somehow combines to create a bright arc. Why doesn't it all smudge out? This is not the place to tell you about the elegant geometry of the rainbow, but you can see why 'lie' is not such a strong word after all. The school explanation diverts our attention from the real marvel of the rainbow, the cooperative effects of all the raindrops, by trying to pretend that once you've explained the colours, that's it.
Other examples of lies-to-children are the idea that the Earth's magnetic field is like a huge bar magnet with N and S marked on it, the picture of an atom as a miniature solar system, the idea that a living amoeba is a billion-year-old 'primitive' organism, the image of DNA as the blueprint for a living creature, and the connection between relativity and Einstein's hairstyle (it's the sort of crazy idea that only people with hair like that can come up with). Quantum mechanics lacks a public 'icon' of this kind, it doesn't tell a simple story that a non-specialist can grab and hang on to, so we feel uncomfortable about it.
When you live in a complex world, you have to simplify it in order to understand it. Indeed, that's what 'understand' means. At different stages of education, different levels of simplification are appropriate. Liar-to-children is an honourable and vital profession, otherwise known as 'teacher'. But what teaching does not do -although many politicians think it does, which is one of the problems, is erect a timeless edifice of 'facts'[10]. Every so often, you have to unlearn what you thought you already knew, and replace it by something more subtle. This process is what science is all about, and it never stops. It means that you shouldn't take everything we say as gospel, either, for we belong to another, equally honourable profession: Liar-to-readers.
On Discworld, one of Ponder Stibbons's lies-to-wizards is about to come seriously unstuck.
5. THE ROUNDWORLD PROJECT
ARCHCHANCELLOR RIDCULLY AWOKE FROM AN AFTERNOON NAP in which he had been crawling through a baking desert under a flamethrower sky, and found that this was more or less true.
Superheated steam whistled from the joints of the radiator in the corner. Ridcully walked over through the stifling air and touched it gently.
'Ouch! Damnation!'
Sucking his right hand and using his left hand to unwrap the scarf from his neck, he strode out into the corridor and what looked like Hell with the heat turned up. Steam rolled along the corridors, and from somewhere overhead came the once-heard-never-forgot-ten thwack of a high-energy magical discharge. Violet light filled the windows for a moment.
'Will someone tell me what the heck is going on?' Ridcully demanded of the air in general.
Something like an iceberg loomed out of the steam. It was the Dean.
'I would like to make it absolutely clear, Archchancellor, that this is nothing to do with me!'
Ridcully wiped away the sweat that was beginning to trickle down his forehead.
'Why are you standin' there in just your drawers, Dean?'
'I…well, my room is absolutely boiling hot...'
'I demand you put something on, man, you look thoroughly unhygienic!'
There was another crack of discharged magic. Sparks flew off the end of Ridcully's fingers.
'I felt that one!' he said, running back into his room.
Beyond the window, on the other side of the gardens, the air wavered over the High Energy Magic building. As the Archchancellor watched, the two huge bronze globes on its roof became covered in crawling, zig-zagging purple lines.
He hit the floor rolling, as wizards are wont to do, just before the shock of the discharge blew the windows in.
Melted snow was pouring off the rooftops. Every icicle was a streaming finger of water.
A large door bumped and scraped its way across the steaming lawns.
Tor goodness' sake, Dean, handle your end, can't you?'
The door skidded a little further.
'It's no good, Ridcully, it's solid oak!'
'And I'm very glad of it!'
Behind Ridcully and the Dean, who were inching the door forward largely by arguing with each other, the rest of the faculty crept forward.
The bronze globes were humming now, in the rapidly decreasing intervals between discharges. They had been installed, to general scoffing, as a crude method of releasing the occasional erratic build-up of disorganized magic in the building. Now they were outlined in unhealthy-looking light.
'And we know what that means, don't we, Mister Stibbons?' said Ridcully, as they reached the entrance to the High Energy Magic building.
'The fabric of reality being unravelled and leaving us prey to creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, sir?' mumbled Stibbons, who was trailing behind.
'That's right, Mister Stibbons! And we don't want that, do we, Stibbons?'
'No, sir.'
'No, sir! We don't, sir!' Ridcully roared. 'It'll be tentacles all over the place again. And none of us wants tentacles all over the place, do we?'
'No, sir.'
'No, sir! So switch the damned thing offt sir!'
'But it'd be certain death to go into...' Ponder stopped, swallowed and restarted. 'In fact it would be uncertain death to go into the squash court at the moment, Archchancellor. There must be million of thaums of random magic in there! Anything could happen!'
Inside the HEM the ceiling was vibrating. The whole building seemed to be dancing.
'They certainly knew how to build, didn't they, when they built the old squash court,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, in an admiring tone of voice. 'Of course, it was built to contain large amounts of magic ...'
10
As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. ‘Yes, but you needed to understand that,’ they are told, ‘so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true’. Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universites are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.