#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, featuring guest Alanta Colley, discussing the second collaboration between Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

The episode title is a reversal of the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will “almost surely” eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In this book, a single Shakespeare eventually (after much tampering with history) produces a species descended from monkeys that can invent and use typewriters – modern, storytelling humans.
The most recent Sci Fight, “Should we upload our brains into the cloud?”, was held online on Thursday, 12 August 2021. The debate is available on YouTube, and was part of Melbourne Science Gallery‘s exhibition “MENTAL“.
You can find out more about Alanta’s comedy shows, including Parasites Lost, at alantacolley.com.
Melbourne’s six lockdowns began with two in 2020 – March 29 to May 12 and the big one, from July 9 to October 26. There have been four in 2021: from February 12 to 17; May 28 until June 10; July 16 to 27; and the current one, which began on August 5 and is not expected to end until the Victorian population reaches an 80% vaccination rate, estimated to happen by December.
We covered The Science of Discworld a year ago in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, with guest Anna Ahveninen.
Alanta makes the reasonable assumption we’ve had “forty-six prior guests” – but, thanks to a few repeat offenders and some double-guest episodes, the actual count to date is forty (including Tansy Rayner Roberts in our first live bonus episode).
Douglas Adams’ famous love of long baths was a trait he passed on to the Captain, a character who appears at the end of most versions of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, commanding his starship from the bath. You can read about his bath habit – er, Adams’, not the Captain’s – in this great piece by his friend Jon Cranter for The Guardian.
The photo of Pratchett with Jack and Ian was taken at Warwick University – where Jack and Ian were both researchers – on July 14, 1999, just after he made them honorary wizards of Unseen University, and the University made him a Honorary Doctor of Letters. (The photo from the book is different, but you can see another one in this article from the time on the Warwick University website.) This was the first of Pratchett’s ten honorary degrees, which we listed in the notes for #Pratchat27.
The History and Philosophy of Science is a distinct humanities discipline, combining the study of both…er…the history and the philosophy of science. It arose from the fact that the philosophy of science has been primarily studied from an historicist perspective: deducing what it is and how it works by studying the history of its development.
Mustrum Ridcully famously has no time for meetings or long explanations; in Reaper Man it is explained this way:

…it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991)

On another look, Ben isn’t really sure why he was confused about how the wizards end up on Roundworld; Ridcully explains to Ponder in Chapter 5 that the elves passed through Discworld to get into Roundworld, and he and the faculty were caught up in the “trans-dimensional flux” (Ponder’s words, obviously). They landed in London because Dee had made a magic circle – Hex further explaining that while magic doesn’t work in Roundworld, it can create “passive receptors” for outside magic to connect to, as with the crystal ball he uses to communicate.
The other Discworld element (or substance, at least) Ben couldn’t remember the name of is “deitygen“, which Ridcully says is known to be produced by intelligent beings. While Narrativium is the most important element on Discworld, the world itself is said in The Truth to be composed of Air, Earth, Fire and Water – though there is also an important fifth element: Surprise.
Mind-body dualism is the idea that the mind is a non-physical substance, i.e. that mind and matter are not the same kind of thing. There are several different flavours of this philosophy. Cartesian dualism, more generally known as substance dualism, is the one discussed in the book; others are subtly different, suggesting that while there are the mind is distinct, it is not a different type of substance to ordinary matter. (Note that when we say “substance” here, we mean it in the philosophical sense that encompasses all things.)
Spontaneous Human Combustion is the idea that sometimes humans just burst into flames without any apparent external cause. It’s not taken very seriously these days, and critics and researchers – most notably science investigator Joe Nickell and forensic analyst John F. Fischer – have found that in most cases there were likely sources of flames near victims which were overlooked and not reported in popular accounts.
The bit in the book about humans being unable to imagine being a dog or a bat is in Chapter 26, “Lies to Chimpanzees”.
Liz read about the babbling baby bats in this article from the New York Times, though many new outlets picked up on this research about greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata), published in Science by Dr Ahana Fernandez and her team. This video from Science magazine gives you the short version.
That birds learn songs from their parents was first observed (in scientific terms at least) in the 1950s, when British ethologist Peter Marler noticed that chaffinches sang different songs in different parts of the country. His work showed that some birds are innate singers, while others learn their songs from their parents, creating regional differences or dialects. This has since been observed in many bird species.
Jack and Ian have written many other books, separately and in collaboration. Ben mentioned What Does a Martian Look Like? (aka Evolving the Alien) in #Pratchat35. On a related note, Ben spotted that in his first edition of The Science of Discworld II, in chapter 10, the authors introduce the idea of an elf visiting Earth in the distant past and observing our ancestors; this visitor is mistakenly referred to as a Martian several times afterwards, leading Ben to wonder if this was text originally written for the other book…
Ben previously mentioned Flatland and Ian Stewart’s sequel, Flatterland, in #Pratchat35. The science that Ben thought Ian did a particularly good job of explaining was string theory – the branch of physics that seeks to explain discrepancies between classic and quantum physics by saying that fundamental particles are not actually tiny points, but strings which exist in higher dimensions, and we only see the point that pokes into our three. (That’s a lie-to-Pratchat-listeners, but it’s on the right track; see chapter 16 of Flatterland, “No-Branes and P-Branes”.)
Dr Randolph M. Nesse is currently a Research Professor of Life Sciences at The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, and Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. You can read a summary of his views on altruism and social selection – another kind of “group selection” in biology, where social groups who may not be closely related work together to survive – on his website here, with links to his articles on the subject, though he does not include the 1999 Science and Spirit piece cited in chapter 20 of The Science of Discworld II, “Small Gods”. He also wrote a book about commitment (as discussed the book), Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, in 2001. Notably, though, he seems to have concluded that commitment offers only “a limited explanation for some special kinds of altruism … it did not offer the more general kind of explanation I wanted.” He refers to the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, who has studied altruism in animals, when discussing where his own work is heading.
Evolutionary medicine (including evolutionary psychiatry) is the scientific use of evolutionary biology to understand and treat diseases. It complements the standard “proximate” approach of looking for problems in an individual by looking at evolutionary explanations for why all humans have the potential to develop certain diseases. Randolph Nesse is a recognised leader in this field; his books on the subject include Why We Get Sick and Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Evolutionary psychology is a similar approach to psychology, but while the idea behind it is sound, it suffers many of the testability and ethnocentric problems as regular psychology. Shallow interpretations of evolutionary psychology have also been used to prop up many harmful ideas, especially in terms of gender roles. Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and political activist, thinks evolutionary psychologists often ignore evidence that doesn’t support the political status quo.
The “Galaxy Song” – not “Universe Song”, though to be fair the name of the song is only mentioned in album liner notes – was originally written by Eric Idle and John du Prez for the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In the film, a medic (John Cleese) trying to convince a woman (Terry Jones) to donate her liver for a “live organ transplant” opens a door and a man (Eric Idle) steps out to accompany her through the universe while singing the song, making her feel small and insignificant enough that she agrees to the transplant. An updated version (“The Galaxy DNA Song“) was used for astrophysicist Brian Cox’s TV series Wonders of Life in 2012, and in 2016 another updated version appeared in the two-hour television program The Entire Universe Show, also hosted by Cox. It wasn’t included in any of the Python stage musicals, but an updated version did appear in the stage show Monty Python Live (Mostly) in 2014, including a video cameo by – you guessed it – Brian Cox, but also…someone else whose appearance we won’t spoil. The original is actually pretty good for the time – if you assume facts are rounded to the nearest singable number, then it gets several figures pretty close to correct. Liz may have quoted the speed of light to her teacher: the song gives this as “twelve million miles a minute” – not far off an accurate figure of 11.16 million miles per minute, though scientists would normally express it in round numbers as a bit under 300 million metres per second (299,792,458 m/s, to be more precise).
We’ve previously mentioned the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption many times. The most significant discussions of it appear in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, but we most recently talked about it in #Pratchat38 – so Ben is way off when he says we haven’t talked about it for “about 30 episodes”. (Though, given how long the last year or two has felt, we’ll give him a pass on this one.)
The history of the idea that storytelling makes humans unique goes back to at least the 1967, when the name Homo narrans was coined by German ethologist Kurt Ranke. American communications scholar Walter R Fischer used it in his later work, in which he also codified the “narrative paradigm” – the idea that all significant communication occurs through storytelling. (Pan narrans seems to be a unique contribution from Jack and Ian.)
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was first performed in 1993 at the Royal National Theatre in London, with a cast that included Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Emma Fielding. It is set in an English manor house belonging to the Coverly family, and happens in two time periods: in the present, two rival academics are researching the mysterious history of the house’s previous inhabitants at cross purposes, while one of the Coverly siblings is doing biology research. In the past of 1809, young lady of the house Thomasina Coverly has some advanced ideas about science and mathematics, while her tutor is caught up in drama with the house’s visiting poets. (Ben played the modern-day scientist, Valentine Coverly.)
The book Ben read about chaos theory was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It should also be clarified that it was the play that was about complexity not chaos; the book is definitely about chaos.
The Luggage’s legs were the subject of much discussion in previous episodes; way back in #Pratchat14, when we discussed its debut in The Colour of Magic, we wondered if anyone had tried drawing it with non-human legs. It is described in the first two books only as having “little legs”, without any reference to them being human-like, or their colour, leading us to make a callout for fan art depicting them as…well, anything else! Josh Kirby has always drawn them as human-like, and made them white-person flesh coloured, despite the fact that the Luggage’s wood is a darker colour. We suspect this influenced Pratchett’s own image of the Luggage, and its next appearance in Sourcery is the first time it has “little pink legs”.
Hobbits, also known as halflings, are a kind of people found in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. They look like humans, but grow only to about three feet tall (hence the name), with slightly pointed ears. Aside from their size, their main difference from humans is their feet: they have extremely tough soles, and the ends of their legs from their ankles down, as well as the tops of their feet, are covered in thick curly hair to keep them warm. As a result, hobbits do not wear shoes. Clearly these sort of feet would suit the Luggage well!
John Dee (1527 – 1609) was, as described in the book, a real historical figure. An English mathematician, occultist, astronomer and astrologer (the two being far more closely linked back then), he advised Queen Elizabeth I, and is – unfortunately – credited with coining the term “British Empire”. He had one of the biggest libraries in England in his day, giving the wizards a handy portal into L-Space. In his later life, he found public opinion turning against sorcery, and while he was abroad much of his library and possessions were stolen, destroyed or burned. Once Elizabeth was dead, her successor James I had no interest in helping Dee, and he died in poverty in 1608 or 1609 at his home in Mortlake. He has been a popular character in works of fiction, though Ben is mistaken to think he has often been a villain; he’s perhaps confusing him with Doctor Destiny, a supervillain who appears in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, and whose real name is John Dee, but is not meant to be the same person.
Stephen Pinker – a long-time defender of evolutionary psychology, it turns out – published The Language Instinct in 1994, well before The Science of Discworld II. The book not only argues that language is an innate trait possessed by humans, but also tries to debunk many commonly-held beliefs about language. It has been criticised for presenting too strong a view about how much of human behaviour can be explained by innate, biologically evolved instinct.
Swedish supergroup Abba reunited for performances in 2016, in the wake of the smash hit Mama Mia, a stage and film jukebox musical featuring their songs. They announced that year that they were working on new music, and a new “digital entertainment experience” featuring “ABBAtars” of the band – digital avatars of the group which would look like their 1970s selves, and which would somehow appear in concert. Two announced singles, and the ABBAtar experience, were delayed multiple times, but in August 2021 they announced Voyage, their first new album since 1981’s The Visitors. The album was released on September 2, 2021, and pictures of the band in motion capture suits – the lycra numbers with little ping-pong balls attached – accompanied many articles and made the rounds on Twitter. (Here’s the BBC one.)
Ponder and Ridcully argue about evolution in The Last Continent and The Science of Discworld, and to be fair, evolution only seems to work on the Disc on one island in its distant past, where is it the work of the God of Evolution. (See #Pratchat29 for our discussion of that!)
When Liz says “We’ve gotta Back to the Future this“, she is specifically speaking of the scenario in Back to the Future: Part II, where Marty’s carelessness allows villain Biff Tannen to go back in time and give his young self a book containing future sports results, allowing him to take over the town and run a hugely successful (and, it’s implied, criminal) business empire out of a casino. Marty and Doc have to go back in time and set history on its proper course.
Thief of Time (to be discussed in #Pratchat48) was published on the 1st of May, 2001 – a year and a day before The Science of Discworld II! It wasn’t the most recent Discworld book at the time of the latter’s release: in between, Pratchett published The Last Hero (a large-format illustrated book, published in October 2001) and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (the first younger readers Discworld novel, published in November 2001; see #Pratchat33). But Thief of Time was the most recent “regular Discworld novel for adults”, and in fact its first paperback edition was published one year after the original hardcover – the day before The Science of Discworld II.
Night Watch is the twenty-ninth Discworld book, and the sixth of the eight City Watch books. It remains one of the most popular of the entire series. Our current plan is to discuss it for #Pratchat50 – unless you have a better idea!
Liz’s speech referencing free will (or the lack of it) was given at the last Sci-Fight she participated in, on the 20th of May, 2021. The topic was “Scientists Go to Heaven”, and Liz was (perhaps surprisingly) on the affirmative team.
Liz has said “Time is a flat circle” on a number of occasions, beginning way back in #Pratchat5; this is Ben’s first time. It refers to the idea of “eternal return” – i.e. that time repeats itself – and is specifically a reference to the first season of the television series True Detective.
Loki is a Disney+ series and part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the series, a version of the trickster god Loki – as seen in the films Thor, The Avengers and others – is lifted from existence when he becomes a “variant” – a version of someone who strays from the single set of events enforced as the “sacred timeline” by a mysterious organisation known as the Time Variance Authority.
“A Bathing Ape” – or BAPE for short – is a fashion brand from Japan founded in 1993, now owned by Hong Kong fashion conglomerate I.T Group. You can see the kind of stuff they sell on their website.
The aquatic ape hypothesis is, at best, highly controversial among anthropologists. It was first suggested by marine biologist Alistair Hardy in 1960, though he described it as a “rough guess” rather than a serious theory, and according to some accounts was mortified at the sensational media attention it received at the time. It was popularised in part by Welsh television writer Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book The Descent of Woman, which challenged the highly gendered stories of human evolution – in particular the focus since the 1950s on early humans hunting and gathering, excluding the previously thought just as important activity of fishing. After receiving general acclaim for the book but criticism for the aquatic ape portion, she later published an entire book devoted to the idea, 1982’s The Aquatic Ape. The theory has been defended by many, including philosopher Daniel C Dennett (who has also suggested that both Morgan and her opponents go too far) and David Attenborough. The later seafood theory of human brains, espoused by Michael Crawford and David Marsh in their 1989 book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future (as mentioned in Chapter 8, “Planet of the Apes”), was not taken especially seriously either. All that said, there’s always room to challenge the status quo, especially if the dominant stories it supports seem to suspiciously uphold modern ideas about gender roles. So far, though, the fossil record doesn’t support the idea that early humans spent most of their time on the beach, so at best, the jury is still out.
It’s worth noting that the updated 2002 edition of the first The Science of Discworld also talks about the aquatic ape hypothesis and the importance of seafood in brain development – and goes another step further. In chapter 42, “Anthill Inside”, they mention that the savanna hypothesis is also in trouble from evidence that some areas where early human fossils are found weren’t savanna back when those humans died – they were woodlands. This is an ongoing question, and the savanna hypothesis – while still the dominant idea in the public consciousness – is described as controversial by some palaeoanthropologists and palaeobotanists, with interpretation of the habitat at that time seemingly still a bit in question.
The so-called “paleo diet” – short for palaeolithic diet – is, like most diets, a fad, in this case supposedly emulating the diet of our palaeolithic ancestors. Though versions of the idea go back at least as far as 1890s, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin really made it popular with his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, which claimed humans ate very little other than meat up until 10,000 years ago and recommended modern humans do the same. It saw a revival at the start of the 21st century – when The Science of Discworld II was published – and the new name was seized by health scientist Loren Cordain with her 2002 book The Paleo Diet. (She also owns the copyright on that name.) While some of the recommendations of the diet probably are good for you, there’s not much in the way of proper research into the amazing health benefits Cordain and other proponents claim – and, for that matter, there’s not that much detail available about what our ancestors actually ate, either.
Neanderthals were a sister species to (or perhaps a subspecies of) modern humans; they are given the name Homo neanderthalis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalis if you think of us as Homo sapiens sapiens). They are named after the Neandertal valley in Germany, where their first fossils were found, and lived mostly in Europe until around 40,000 years ago. In the last few years, evidence has been found in Spain that Neanderthals – who lived there before modern humans – made forms of cave art, suggesting they may have been more sophisticated than the unflattering ideas given of them via the “Ugs” in Science of Discworld II.
Tool use in animals has been observed in many species, including monkeys, dolphins, birds (especially crows), and yes, octopuses. There’s some debate about what counts as a “tool”, but some animals do modify objects they find in the environment to suit their purposes; this includes crows and octopuses.
Octopuses can indeed get out of jars, as evidenced by this viral video from 2010 which did another round of the Internet in 2014. Though it should be noted that while the octopus does unscrew the lid from inside the jar, she seems perfectly happy to stay inside it.
We haven’t yet found a good source for the idea of fish returning to the location of their ancestors every four generations, but don’t confuse it with the four-generation cycle of history, which is another name for Strauss–Howe generational theory.
Robust and gracile are terms mostly used to describe two broad groups of species of our ancestor genus Australopithecus. While the concept does appear more broadly in biology, it seems much less common.
The three kinds of elephant are the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant (referred to in the book as the Indian elephant). Genetic analysis suggests that the two African elephant species diverged more than 2.5 million years ago – the same kind of timeframe as the divergence between woolly mammoths and Asian elephants.
Let’s talk about that claim about the huge number of illegitimate children. In chapter 12, “Edge People”, Jack and Ian say “In English society, about one child in seven” are in the position that their “legal and biological parentage differ”. This is based on Elliott Philipp’s analysis of blood groups in the late 1960s, published in 1973. Blood typing was the standard form of paternity testing before DNA fingerprinting techniques were refined in 1980s, and it is pretty good at determining that someone can’t be someone’s parent – you have to get the genes for your blood type from your parents, after all. Unfortunately we have no way of checking these numbers because we can’t find the study, or any writing about it (or similar ones in the United States, for that matter). It doesn’t instil us with confidence that the book’s authors seem to have misspelled the author of the study’s name – they name “Elliott Philipp”, who we think is probably Elliot Elias Philipp (1915 – 2010), a gynaecologist and obstetrician from Stoke Newington in London, though his official biography doesn’t mention this study. In any case, the figure of “one in ten” is popularly accepted, and was the result of the surveys they cite, but they correct for the fact that an unknown father has a reasonable chance of having the same blood type as the supposed father, leading to their figure of 13-17%, or roughly one in seven. There are other figures; while there’s not as much literature about this as you might expect – or at least not any that’s easily accessible to a lay researcher – we found that a study by University of Leicester in 2009 using a survey of genetic markers in nearly 1,700 British men suggested the real figure is probably closer to one in twenty-five. Here’s a BBC article from the time – note that the Leicester researchers don’t seem to be aware (or at least, don’t mention) Philipp’s study as a possible source of the one-in-ten assumption.
Mitochondria are the “organelles” responsible for most of the generation of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main source of chemical energy in cells. They are found in most cells of eukaryotic lifeforms on Earth. (An organelle is a distinct sub-structure that fulfils a specific function – so the cellular equivalent of an organ in the body.) The dominant theory is that they were once separate single-celled organisms that were absorbed and incorporated into the body of our single-celled ancestors millions of years ago. Supporting this is the fact that mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s been long thought that children only inherit the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of their mothers, hence the idea of “mitochondrial Eve” – the woman from whom all modern humans inherited their mitochondria. As the book points out, this doesn’t mean there was only one woman, only the others alive at the time do not have any surviving direct female-line descendants (they could have direct descendants, but if they or their following generations only had male children, then they would have inherited another line’s mtDNA). And, as modern lines end – i.e. as women now live and have no daughters – the specific woman in question would change. More recent genetic studies from 2013 have suggested the most recent mitochondrial Eve would have lived around 155,000 years ago, about twice as far back as the estimate current at the time of The Science of Discworld II. Of note is that since at least 2018, researchers have discovered that humans can inherit some of their mtDNA from their fathers, though this seems very rare and doesn’t seem to have left a significant mark on the human genetic map.
The Richard Dawkins book Ben mentions is The River Out of Africa, which uses the metaphor of a river to represent the flow of humans – or at least human DNA – out of Africa and across the world.
The Biblical story discussed in the book, in which the Israelites agree to let the Hivites join their tribe if they get circumcised but then murder them all, is the story of Dinah and Schechem, from the book of Genesis, chapter 34.
The early version of “Sleeping Beauty” to which Liz alludes is known from its earliest written version, “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, by Italian author Giambattista Basile in his 1634 book, the Pentamerone. Rather than being waken by a handsome Prince, the magically cursed princess Talia is discovered by a king, who…look, we’ll let you look it up. It’s not okay.
Cinderella’s slippers might be described as being made of “fur” in earlier versions, but this doesn’t seem to be an allusion to what Jack and Ian are talking about. Rather “squirrel fur” was one of a number of luxury materials that a common would never be able to afford or allowed by the conventions of status to wear. Many sources we found about this debunk the idea that it’s a mistranslation of an earlier version. The famous source of the modern version, Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” (“Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper”) uses the unambiguous phrase “pantoufles de verre” (“glass slippers”) many times. We will also note that Ben is wrong about the story always being about shoes – sometimes the item that helps identify the mystery woman is a ring. The earliest written version, in Chinese, does feature gold shoes.
The name Rumpelstiltskin actually derives from the German name Rumpelstilzchen. As Ben mentions, this is the name of a type of goblin – a noisy one who walks with a limp, in fact – and loosely translates as “little rattle stilt”. It seems to come from the old German children’s game, Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart, which one source described as “like duck-duck-goose except instead of a goose there’s a goblin, and instead of a duck there’s a man with a limp”. The goblin player would rattle and bang on things. (Sadly it seems others also think there’s a phallic interpretation for the story, though it doesn’t seem to be an explicit part of the tale in any version we can find.)
Ilona and Peter Opie published many books; the ones relevant to this discussion are 1959’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and 1974’s The Classic Fairy Tales, which contained twenty-four stories as they first appeared in English, with a literary history.
We’ve mentioned the various folk tale indices in our show notes on previous occasions; the big one Ben usually refers to is the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), though there are others. Like the Dewey Decimal System, the idea is that stories with closer numbers are more similar, or at least share significant traits. Both Rumpelstlitskin and Cinderella are in the 500s, the grouping known as “Supernatural helpers”. Rumpelstiltskin is the main example of ATU type 500, and Cinderella is the “persecuted heroine” subtype of 510A, “Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes”.
The high school physics experiment Ben mentions is still done in high schools today. It uses a “ticker timer”, which is basically an electromagnet which, when attached to an AC power supply, turns on and off, causing a metal strip with a point on it to vibrate up and down at a fixed speed. It has a bit of carbon paper under the metal strip, so when the strip moves down it will make a mark with the carbon on paper underneath. In the experiment, you feed a strip of ticker tape through some guiding holes under the metal strip; by attaching one end of the tape to a block of wood with wheels on it, it can be dragged through, and by measuring the distance between the dots on the tape you can measure the speed at which the truck is moving. Ben was happy to discover that searching for “ticker timer” on YouTube brought up a number of high school physics teachers (many of them in Australia) explaining the demonstration to their students – some of them even from the Before Times!
The horse galloping photography experiment was to determine whether a horse always has one foot on the ground when trotting. It was undertaken by famous American photographer Eadweard Muybridge for Leland Stanford, former Governor of California, as mentioned in the book in chapter twenty-two, “The New Narrativium”. While the story of this settling a substantial bet is popular, some historians say there’s no evidence it’s true. The two men later had a falling out when Stanford published a book about horse movement containing illustrations based on Muybridge’s photographs but giving him no credit, costing Muybridge some research funding.
Rincewind’s deep love (or indeed lust) for potatoes was first explored while he was marooned on an island at the beginning of Interesting Times.
We’ve previously mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat25 (Equal Rites), #Pratchat31 (The Long Earth) and #Pratchat35 (The Science of Discworld), as well as the second episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. Thursday Next is the star of his most famous series of novels, beginning with The Eyre Affair; she works for the Special Operations Network department 27 ((or SpecOps, or specifically SO-27, for short), the Literary Detectives or “LiteraTecs”. Not only is literature incredibly important in her alternate history 1985 – “WillSpeak” machines are common coin-operated vending machines which recite lines from his plays and poems – but the lines between fiction and reality are very thin, allowing her to pass into the “BookWorld” and enter the plots of well-known novels. Her father has long since disappeared, but he worked for SO-12, the ChronoGuard, tasked with protecting the timeline from paradoxes and other tampering. As a result, Shakespeare and time travel are at least minor elements (an often much more significant ones) in most of the Thursday Next novels.
Liz claims no-one knows when Shakespeare was born, or what his life was like, or who he was…some of which is true. We don’t know when he was born, but we do know he was baptised on the 26th of April, 1564; his birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which is also the date on which he died in 1616, aged 52. We also known he was married to Anne Hathaway on the 27th of November 1582, but there’s little detail recorded of his life until he begins to make his mark on the theatre scene in 1592, when he was roasted in print by rival playwright Robert Greene. As to his identity, while no end of scholars have made themselves famous with alternative theories about his identity and very existence, at least half of the Pratchat team subscribes to the simplest theory: that he was just one guy, named William Shakespeare.
Doctor Who featured Shakespeare in the 2007 episode “The Shakespeare Code”, when the Tenth Doctor and his companion Martha Jones visit the Globe to see an original Shakespeare production and discover alien witches are influencing both Shakespeare’s play and the Globe theatre for their own ends. Doctor Who had mentioned Shakespeare several times in the classic series, implying (but never showing) that the Doctor had met him on more than one occasion.
Ben makes an unintentional pun when he says that “Shakespeare is kind of your biggest Touchstone” – Touchstone is the name of a fool, one of the major characters in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It.
The author who suggested Western-style science requires monotheism, which is why it didn’t develop in China was British biochemist, historian and sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995). A noted scholar of Chinese history and philosophy of science, he wrote many books, but Jack and Ian specifically mention “his truly gigantic History of Science in China“. His work was so influential that in history circles, the question of why China had been overtaken by the West in scientific terms, despite being centuries ahead with many of the most important inventions, is known as “the Needham Question”. Needham has been criticised for being perhaps biased in China’s favour, however, and there are many other hypotheses that have been put forward to answer the Needham Question.
We hope you enjoy the seeming non-sequitur when Liz says “On the space elevator, on the way to the banana planet“; this is a result of a previous bit where Ben gave an entirely incorrect (and thus cut) account of how banana plants move up hills, and Liz deciding that when they get to the top they build a space elevator and leave the planet.
The Milgram experiment, conducted by Yale University psychologist Dr Stanley Milgram in 1961 and published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology as “Behavioural study of obedience” in 1963, remains one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. As the subjects were filmed – and that footage used by Milgram to capitalise on his fame by using it in a 1974 film titled Obedience – it has been shown to students of psychology and the history and philosophy of science for decades. But like many similar experiments from the time, it has since come under a great deal of scrutiny. In 2013, Australian psychologist Gina Perry published Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments; with access to all Milgram’s original papers and documentation, she felt that his methodology and the the quality of the experiment was highly questionable. Even those who think the experiment holds up – and it has, despite ethical objections, been repeated in various forms, even as recently as 2007 – many others question the conclusions that have been drawn from the results. This great piece by Cari Romm for The Atlantic from 2015 is a great primer on the legacy of the experiment, and more recent criticism.
As Ben mentions, if you’re a subscriber, keep an eye out for the next episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast – he has a few more things to say about this book!
The expression Bojack Horseman has ruined for Liz is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Many sources trace its origin back to a version found in The Court and Character of King James, written by Anthony Weldon in 1650, though some suggest a similar sentiment appears in “The Embassy to Achilles” in Homer’s The Iliad – or at least its English translation by Alexander Pope, published between 1715 and 1720. (Having had a look, that latter attribution seems a bit of a long bow.) Bojack Horseman is a Netflix original animated series about depressed and self-hating anthropomorphic horse actor Bojack Horseman. In the first season’s fourth episode, a number of characters are unable to recall the expression correctly. This echoes former US President George W Bush, famous for his “Bushisms”, who also mangled it; here’s a little collection of his gaffes that includes that one, from a speech given on September 17, 2002 in Nashville.

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