Book details of 'The Science of Discworld'

Title	The Science of Discworld
Author(s)	Terry Pratchett, Jack S. Cohen, Ian Stewart
ISBN	0091865158
Language	English

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Amazon.com info for The Science of Discworld

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virtualbookcase.com score: 5.0   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Science of Discworld':

Reviewer Koos van den Hout wrote:
For readers of the 'discworld' series, this book is a bit different. As the scientists of the Unseen University create a miniature world (what we think of as earth) and research this world, the book takes us on a tour of the history and current state of science. Both a book in the real Terry Pratchett style and a good book to get a read on the current state of science in all kinds of departments. Recommended!
Reviewer amazon.co.uk wrote:
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.
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Book description:

In the 'fantasy' universe of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, everything runs on magic and common sense. The world is flat and million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten. Our world seems different – it runs on rules, often rather strange ones. Science is our way of finding out what those rules are. The appeal of Discworld is that it mostly makes sense, in a way that particle physics does not. The Science of Discworld uses the magic of Discworld to illuminate the scientific rules that govern our world. 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. Roundworld is, of course, our own universe. With us inside it (eventually). Guided (if that's the word) by the wizards, we follow its story from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. 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 on what was going on...