Breaking up is never easy -- and splitting BT won’t give us better broadband

BT is big... but a smaller BT won't necessarily be more beautiful. Nick Ansell/PA

There have frequently been calls from one side or another for BT, the former telecoms monopoly, to be broken up. Now, with BT having emerged as the buyer of mobile phone network EE, complaints about BT’s power – which have never gone away – have grown louder.

But other than competitors' chagrin, is there any evidence that breaking up BT would deliver better a phone and internet service for customers?

By virtue of its history, BT owns and manages almost all the telephone and broadband cables and exchanges in the country (which other service providers must pay to access) while also offering its own competing home and business packages to customers. Operating from an advantageous position, competitors such as Sky and TalkTalk might say.

These concerns were previously tackled by telecoms regulator Ofcom in 2005, when it required BT to separate its broadband and phone network access services by creating Openreach, an arms-length division of BT that handles the national broadband network. Openreach is required by Ofcom to offer the same terms to competing firms as it does to BT in order to provide a level playing field – a process generally known as Local Loop Unbundling.

Consequently, even though Sky and TalkTalk have respectively 20% and 15% of the UK broadband market, this is only made possible because they can use the Openreach network to connect their customers. This is because, unless anyone else embarks on a hugely ambitious (and unneccessary) cable-laying project, it’s essentially the only telephone network there is. In contrast, BT has a 31% market share.

Mobile phone operator Vodafone is soon to enter the market as it gears up to offer domestic broadband services using Openreach’s network, and also its own national infrastructure acquired through the purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide in 2012.

The concern expressed by Sky and Talk Talk is that by being part of the BT Group, Openreach is too much influenced by the strategic decisions of its parent. This in turn, they argue, can result in an under-investment in the UK’s broadband infrastructure – to the detriment of their own business as they are totally reliant on Openreach to deliver services. Such under-investment could worsen, they claim, as BT has to find £12.5 billion to pay for its acquisition of EE. But these ignore the strict regulatory framework imposed by Ofcom and under which Openreach must operate.

Towering over the competition? BT Tower by Sue Robinson/www.shutterstock.com

More than one set of wires to consider

So, should the UK’s broadband network be managed by a totally separate and independent company, along the lines of Network Rail (railways) or National Grid (electricity and gas), by taking Openreach off BT?

Before we consider that question we must recognise another important player in the mix: Virgin Media has a 20% share of the UK broadband market but delivers services over its own cable TV network built during the 1990s – a market to which BT was denied access in order to stimulate competition. Virgin Media’s new owner, US firm Liberty Global, has recently sanctioned a £3 billion investment to expand its network reach by a third. But there is no obligation from Ofcom for Virgin Media to offer access to its network for other providers: if Openreach becomes independent, what should happen to the 20% marketshare based on infrastructure owned by Virgin Media?

Equally, what do you do about the growth in mobile broadband? With 4G connectivity speeds now rivalling those available on some domestic broadband connections, it’s clear there’s going to be significant growth in this area and new competition. So should mobile broadband access also be brought under the wing of a National Grid-style company?

Keeping the consumer’s interest at heart

Sky and TalkTalk clearly have a vested interest, hoping that an independent Openreach will mean lower prices for them – but not necessarily for us. On the other hand BT is unlikely to want to divest itself of Openreach, which currently generates almost 30% of its revenue. Complicating any potential break up would be the question of how a much smaller BT would then be able to support its pension scheme – already a cool £7b billion in the red.

In the ten years since Ofcom’s first strategic review of digital communications, the telecoms landscape and our internet use have changed enormously. While the UK may well have lagged behind Europe in broadband access speed for much of that time, there is clear evidence that things are changing for the better. Competition, regulation, investment and government initiatives to tackle difficult areas such as rural connectivity are helping to improve performance in a way that benefits us all.

So extricating Openreach from BT won’t necessarily change anything. It’s already heavily regulated by Ofcom, and that would continue. If service providers believe an independent Openreach will drive down prices, then where will the investment required to further expand the high-speed fibre and future G.Fast networks come from? And how should we compare the domestic broadband services from Openreach with cable and mobile operators' services?

Limiting our consideration to BT is to see only part of the overall picture. Hopefully Ofcom’s new strategic review will take a much wider view.

A promised 'right' to fast internet rings hollow for millions stuck with 20th-century speeds

Superfast? I'll be the judge of that. BT van by urbanbuzz/www.shutterstock.com

In response to the government’s recent declarations that internet speeds of 100Mb/s should be available to “nearly all homes” in the UK, a great many might suggest that this is easier said than done. It would not be the first such bold claim, yet internet connections in many rural areas still languish at 20th-century speeds.

The government’s digital communications infrastructure strategy contains the intention of giving customers the “right” to a broadband connection of at least 5Mb/s in their homes.

There’s no clear indication of any timeline for introduction, nor what is meant by “nearly all homes” and “affordable prices”. But in any case, bumping the minimum speed to 5Mb/s is hardly adequate to keep up with today’s online society. It’s less than the maximum possible ADSL1 speed of 8Mb/s that was common in the mid-2000s, far less than the 24Mb/s maximum speed of ADSL2+ that followed, and far, far less than the 30-60Mb/s speeds typical of fibre optic or cable broadband connections available today.

In fact a large number of rural homes still are not able to access even the previously promised 2Mb/s minimum of the Digital Britain report in 2009.

Serious implications

As part of our study of rural broadband access we interviewed 27 people from rural areas in England and Wales about the quality of their internet connection and their daily experiences with slow and unreliable internet. Only three had download speeds of up to 6Mb/s, while most had connections that barely reached 1Mb/s. Even those who reported the faster speeds were still unable to carry out basic online tasks in a reasonable amount of time. For example using Google Maps, watching online videos, or opening several pages at once would require several minutes of buffering and waiting. Having several devices share the connection at a time wasn’t even an option.

So the pledge for a “right” to 5Mb/s made by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, is as meaningless as previous promises for 2Mb/s. Nor is it close to far enough. The advertised figure refers to download speed, of which the upload speed is typically only a fraction. This means uploads far slower even than these slow download speeds, rendering it all but unusable for those needing to send large files, such as businesses.

With constantly moving timescales for completion, the government doesn’t seem to regard adequate rural broadband connections as a matter of urgency, even while the consequences for those affected are often serious and urgent at the same time. In Snowdonia, for example, a fast and more importantly reliable broadband connection can be a matter of life and death.

The Llanberis Mountain Rescue team at the foot of Mount Snowdon receives around 200 call-outs a year to rescue mountaineers from danger. Their systems are connected to police and emergency services, all of which run online to provide a quick and precise method of locating lost or injured mountaineers. But their internet connection is below 1Mb/s and cuts out regularly, especially in bad weather, which interferes with dispatching the rescue teams quickly. With low signal or no reception at all in the mountains, neither mobile phone networks nor satellite internet connections are alternatives.

All geared up but no internet connection. Anne-Marie Oostveen, Author provided

Connection interrupted

Even besides life and death situations, slow and unreliable internet can seriously affect people – their social lives, their family connections, their health and even their finances. Some of those we interviewed had to drive one-and-a-half hours to the nearest city in order to find internet connections fast enough to download large files for their businesses. Others reported losing clients because they weren’t able to maintain a consistent online presence or conduct Skype meetings. Families were unable to check up on serious health conditions of their children, while others, unable to work from home, were forced to commute long distances to an office.

Rural areas: high on appeal, low on internet connectivity. Bianca Reisdorf, Author provided

Especially in poorer rural areas such as North Wales, fast and reliable internet could boost the economy by enabling small businesses to emerge and thrive. It’s not a lack of imagination and ability holding people in the region back, it’s the lack of 21st-century communications infrastructure that most of us take for granted.

The government’s strategy document explains that it “wants to support the development of the UK’s digital communications infrastructure”, yet in doing so wishes “to maintain the principle that intervention should be limited to that which is required for the market to function effectively.”

It is exactly this vagueness that is currently preventing communities from taking matters into their own hands. Many of our interviewees said they still hoped BT would deploy fast internet to their village or premises, but had been given no sense of when that might occur, if at all, or that given timescales slip. “Soon” seems to be the word that keeps those in the countryside in check, causing them to hold off on looking for alternatives – such as community efforts like the B4RN initiative in Lancashire.

If the government is serious about the country’s role as a digital nation, it needs to provide feasible solutions for all populated areas of the country, which means affordable, and future-proof, which entails fibre to the premises (FTTP) – and sooner rather than later.

Meet the super salamander, who very nearly ate your ancestors for breakfast

Toilet jaws: the scourge of people and dinosaurs 200m years ago University of Edinburgh

Say hello to one of the strangest creatures to ever call our planet home: a giant salamander-like amphibian that lurked in the waters of Europe more than 200m years ago.

My colleagues and I recently discovered this new beast, whose fossils we found in Portugal. Its scientific name is Metoposaurus algarvensis, a nod to the sunny holiday region in southern Portugal where its bones can be found eroding from an ancient cliff. But as we so often do, we gave it a cheeky nickname that is a little more fun, and certainly easier to pronounce. We call it the “super salamander”.

That name pretty much sums it up. It was more than two metres long and probably weighed roughly as much as a human. Its head was the size of a coffee table, studded with hundreds of piercing teeth. Its big, broad, almost flat upper and lower jaws were hinged together at the back and could snap shut like a toilet seat to gobble up fish, other amphibians, and maybe even small dinosaurs and mammals.

Reptilian rulers

Some of these temnospondyls were even larger: the terrifying Prionosuchus was around eight to ten metres long and could have eaten Metoposaurus for a snack. Yet our super salamander warrants interest, if only because it’s a weird animal. It may as well be an alien from another planet.

Prionosuchus: even bigger and badder than super salamander Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

And this is the case with so many fossils that get their 15 minutes of fame in the press. Several weeks ago, a 480m-year-old “human-sized lobster ancestor” went viral online. And just a few days ago, another wacky creature living alongside the earliest dinosaurs got the celebrity treatment: a car-sized “butcher croc” called Carnufex .

Sometimes the way fossils are treated in the press makes it seem like they are nothing more than oddities, curiosities, or in the modern digital world, clickbait. You could almost imagine Metoposaurus or Carnufex in a prehistoric circus: come and see the fossil freaks!

But the reason most of us study fossils is not just because they are a talking point, but because they are our only record of how life has changed over time. They give us clues to how real animals and ecosystems have evolved and have responded to dramatic climate changes and environmental shifts.

Pangaea nights

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s super salamander!

In the background were the very first dinosaurs and mammals: small, marginal, almost forgettable animals. If you were around back then, you would never imagine that these shadowy creatures would go on to evolve into things like Tyrannosaurus and humans.

At this fragile time in their evolution, these groups were just getting their footing. Animals such as Metoposaurus were waiting near the shores to ambush little primitive dinosaurs that ventured too close to the water.

But things changed. Around 200m years ago, Pangaea began to break apart. As North America and Europe ripped away from each other, huge volcanoes started to erupt. Others erupted further south, as South America ruptured from Africa.

These volcanoes were nothing like the Hawaiian lava flows or Pompeii-style explosive eruptions that we are familiar with. These were huge fissures in the earth, which spewed out lava more or less constantly for thousands of years.

Around 3m cubic kilometres of lava were expelled. The rock formed when it cooled down covers huge swaths of the eastern United States, the western fringe of Europe, and the coasts of South America and Africa today.

This lava brought with it many other things: noxious gases that poisoned the atmosphere and dramatic shifts in climate, most likely violent alternations between hothouse and icehouse worlds.

Many plants and animals couldn’t cope. Many of the big amphibians, including Metoposaurus and its close kin, were decimated. Having dominated for tens of millions of years, they suddenly couldn’t handle this new world of fire and ice.

Two of the groups that did make it through were the dinosaurs and mammals. Whether by good genes or good luck, these pesky, almost pathetic early species found the means to cope with the extinction. And as things returned to normal and the Jurassic world dawned, they spread around the world and diversified into numerous species.

They remain here today: dinosaurs as 10,000 species of living birds (surviving after over 150m years of domination as Tyrannosaurus and Brachiosaurus-type animals) and about half that many mammals, ranging from mice to men.

So although it will surely be lost in the headline hoopla, the point is this: if those volcanoes didn’t kill off the super salamanders, you probably wouldn’t be sitting here now.

Three wireless technologies that could make 5G even faster

5G, wringing out the network cloth for the most capacity possible. towers by hin255/www.shutterstock.com

The capacity of today’s wireless communications networks has increased one million-fold since the introduction of the first cellular network in 1957.

But this improvement isn’t due to improving connectivity technologies such as WiFi, 2G, 3G and so on, which have contributed only a five-fold increase. Using additional radio frequency spectrum to carry network traffic accounts for a 25-fold improvement – but the largest single improvement, accounting for a 1,600-fold increase, is via shrinking the size of the network “cells” that constitute the network. In other words, installing more physical network towers, repeaters and other equipment to create a more dense network of nodes that can carry greater network traffic.

But this has been very expensive – digging for cables, putting up towers and base stations, installation and maintenance, and all the planning and bureaucratic requirements that entails. So much of the next generation 5G mobile network design focuses on squeezing greater speed and capacity from what we already have, without the costs of adding more infrastructure.

Decoupling send and receive

One area under investigation is the concept of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) decoupling, dubbed by some of its co-inventors DUDe. From the first generation mobile networks to the latest 4G, the downlink (or receive) and uplink (or send) connections of any communication session have been coupled together. This means a mobile phone associates with one base station at a time and data is both sent and received through the same connection.

Historically this was a near-optimal approach, since that way the base station and mobile phone would establish the strongest connection that could be provided in both directions. However as mobile networks have become more diverse, mixing together network cells of different sizes and transmission towers of different transmission power, it now makes more sense to separate the two. A phone could receive information through a high-power, large network cell for maximum speed, and use smaller cells to send data through its lower-power radio. This can yield double capacity and make connections up to ten times more reliable.

Doubling up on duplex

Another area under investigation is that of full duplex radio transmission. Full duplex refers to the concept of being able to transmit and receive over the same frequency at the same time, in the same way we’re able to talk over each other on a traditional, analog landline telephone.

The sort of repeaters used to extend network coverage in the satellite, broadcasting and mobile network industries have used full duplex for decades. But this is achieved using two different antennas placed sufficiently far apart that the strong transmitting signal does not interfere with the weaker receiver signal. Who can design a single-antenna system that provides full duplex operation?

It all comes down to using signal echo cancellation. The first milestone work appeared in 1978 but was not made operational until the 1990s. The essence of all these systems is to cancel the strong outgoing transmit signal from the weak incoming receive signal, eliminating interference. However this technique only works over a fairly narrow bandwidth of a few MHz or so.

Only recently has the ability to offer full duplex over wide bandwidths become available, ranging from 10-100MHz, where cancellation is achieved both in the analog as well as digital domain.

CoSMIC, the first full-duplex wireless transceiver in a single silicon chip. Jin Zhou/Harish Krishnaswamy/Columbia University

One firm leading in this area is Kumu Networks, a spin-out firm from Stanford University engineers which garnered US$15m investment funding following its first demonstration of full duplex using signal inversion cancellation techniques four years ago. The technology refines existing theoretical work and is compliant with real-world cellular systems. This is an important step from a proposed feature to a viable product.

Using similar techniques, engineers at Columbia University have recently implemented this on a single chip, miniaturising the circuitry required for full duplex into a single silicon chip for the first time. At this scale, the technology could be introduced to mobile phone handsets or tablets to improve performance – potentially a game-changing moment as adding further silicon chips to existing mobile phones or tablets is relatively straightforward. With some extra tuning, if introduced universally this could essentially allow us to double network capacity overnight.

Significantly more antennas

Another approach is massive multiple antenna systems, dubbed Massive-MIMO. Invented by Tom Marzetta at Bell Labs, it uses a very, very large number of antennas stuffed into base stations and mobile phone handsets if possible. We’re talking thousands of antennas, rather than the three to six commonly used today. Counter-intuitively, in theory this would in fact eliminate interference in the system and significantly boost network capacity and reliability.

For now, all these approaches are still at an early stage and face considerable challenges. However, while these 5G designs would require some software and hardware upgrades, one thing they won’t require is digging holes and laying cables.

When your body becomes your password, the end of the login is nigh

Soon you will be the key. face scan by Franck Boston/www.shutterstock.com

Passwords are a pain. I’ve just had to rummage around for the password required in order to post this article. I seem to have 100 or more different identities on different websites to manage. Whenever I book a flight or buy a concert ticket this often means setting up yet another persona and coming up with a password to authenticate it.

It’s got so bad I’ve resorted to a password manager program to suggest secure, truly random passwords and then keep track of them for me. Of course if I forget the password to that program, or worse still if someone else guesses that password, I’ll be in all sorts of trouble.

Your phone is the key

This is a recognised problem, so it’s no surprise firms are looking at ways to make this easier. In the US, Yahoo has announced it plans to move to a password-on-demand system, where a new, one-time password is generated and texted to your mobile phone, and you can text the password to Yahoo’s servers whenever its services require authentication.

This makes it things easier for the user, whose phone is now a key as well as everything else. But some security experts have been less than impressed. For example, many phones show the text of incoming messages automatically, popping up even when the phone is locked. All that would be required is five minutes alone with your phone and your Yahoo account could be hijacked. And who hasn’t left their phone unattended for even just a short while?

How about your body?

All this hassle with usernames and passwords has led many to think biometrics are the answer, in which uniquely identifying elements of our physical body are used as authentication keys. Obviously this still needs to be miniaturised. scanner by aurin/www.shutterstock.com

The most common, fingerprints, have been used as a means to authenticate users for some time. Fingerprint-based controlled access can be made to work reasonably well, although it is not immune to successful attack. When you find that Sherlock Holmes was cracking cases in 1903 which involved forged fingerprints, you might be forgiven for wondering if we really can provide security on the basis of our fingertips and thumbs. However, modern biometric security goes further to try to provide greater security.

Goodbye Windows password

Microsoft is building biometric password support into the forthcoming Windows 10, due to arrive later this year. The Windows Hello component, essentially a login screen, will be able to use a webcam to examine the user’s face, iris, or a fingerprint scanner to unlock devices and provide Windows logon. Microsoft are also touting a mechanism built into its Passport service that will provide authentication on your behalf to other sites once you have successfully logged on to your computer and it has recognised you.

Halifax, the bank, has gone one step further for its online banking services. It is currently testing a smart wristband called Nymi which reads the wearer’s heartbeat – another biometric measure that provides a rhythmic pattern that can be used as a unique identifier. Heartbeat biometrics are touted as harder to fake or fool than other biometrics, although when I consider what happens to my heartbeat when I check my bank balance I’d imagine it will need considerable testing.

Give me convenience or give me death

All this is a step toward the Holy Grail of authentication: security with convenience. Microsoft’s moves in this direction are as part of the FIDO Alliance which aims to improve the way we approach security for devices and online services in the future, improving security and reducing the burden on users, which has a tendency to lead towards corner-cutting, weak or re-used passwords, and security compromises.

The good news for us password jugglers is that there is now a greater imperative behind building higher levels of security into systems from the outset, rather than trying to add it on afterwards, and that new and better ways of doing this are being expored. Modern devices, the latest Dell tablet for example, have 3D cameras which can generate images that contain depth information as well as a visible picture. The wider introduction of these sorts of components and their successors will offer a way to provide a whole new way of authentication, to the point that in the not too distant future our smile really will be our passport.

Solar eclipses offer opportunity for science, as well as for awe and wonder

A lucky gap in the clouds. Kevin Pimbblet, Author provided

A solar eclipse is a rare event to witness first hand. A wag might add that once you’ve factored in the British weather they’re rarer still, however observers in some areas of the UK managed to peer through the clouds and experience a partial solar eclipse from Exeter and Truro in the South-West to Nottingham in the Midlands, and Hull and Newcastle and the North-East.

The reason solar eclipses are rare is due to the orbit of the moon around the Earth, which is inclined by about five degrees to Earth’s orbit around the sun. This means that not only must the moon be a new moon in order to put it in the sky during daylight hours, but it must also be in just the correct arc of its orbit that it is aligned directly between the Earth and the sun.

A lunar eclipse, where the Earth comes between the sun and the moon, darkening the moon by blocking the sun’s light, can be seen by most people on the dark side of the Earth. But not everyone on the daylight side of the Earth will see a solar eclipse, because the shadow of the moon on the Earth’s surface covers only a band across the planet. To witness complete totality during an eclipse observers must be in an even more narrow band just 250km (150 miles) wide. This is why the best views were restricted to the islands of Svalbard and the Faroes this year.

Scientific opportunities in the dark

Scientifically speaking, eclipses have had a rich history in helping scientists conduct certain types of experiment and making unique discoveries.

A total solar eclipse was used to test gravity as described by Newtonian physics against predictions made by Einstein’s new theory of General Relativity. Both forms of gravitation predict that light can be bent around the sun, but by different amounts. In order to see other celestial objects – such as background stars – near the disk of the sun, the only thing to do was await a total solar eclipse. This happened in 1919, when Arthur Eddington and others simultaneously made measurements of the positions of stars close to the sun during an eclipse. They found that light was bent by the extent predicted by general relativity, rather than classical Newtonian physics. This proved to be the first of many spectacular successes for general relativity.

The sun is not the only celestial body to be eclipsed – or occulted – by the moon. In 1962, a lunar occultation technique was employed at the Parkes Telescope to determine that a quasar (a bright point-like object that appeared like a star) consisted of two elements. This use of occultations yielded the positions and further details of these elements which led to an astronomical revolution. Quasars are exceptionally powerful extra-galactic objects.

Eclipse concepts in use elsewhere

Today we can use the idea of occultations even to predict the weather. This uses Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) that constantly transmit their positions to listening stations worldwide. All that is required is for part of the atmosphere to occult and block the signal between one satellite and another. This results in refraction, where the radio signal is bent through the atmosphere. Critically, the amount of refraction is highly dependant upon the conditions in the atmosphere, for example water vapour density and ambient temperature. So based on these factors we can produce an instantaneous mapping of the current weather, and additional data to predict the future weather, based on the degree of refraction encountered.

Further away from home, we can use the idea of occultations to help derive the size of other planets orbiting distant stars. When a planet passes in front of a distant star in the line of sight to Earth, it creates an apparent partial eclipse that causes a dip in the observed light from that star. We can deduce the size of the planet by measuring how much light is blocked out during its transit.

So while solar eclipses are not a common sight, they’re certainly an opportunity for scientists to learn more about the world and the laws that govern the Universe – naturally occurring phenomena that we’re lucky to have the opportunity to observe from time to time.

Five things Discworld will teach you about science

Terry making Jack and I honorary wizards of Unseen University. Warwick University

One evening, in a Mongolian restaurant, Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen and I came up with the idea of a popular science book based on Discworld. We all felt that this would be an attractive way to explain science to non-specialists, and that this was a worthwhile thing to do. Unfortunately, as Terry pointed out in his usual direct manner, Discworld runs on magic. It has no direct relation to science.

Eventually the three of us got round this obstacle: the wizards of Unseen University accidentally create a containment field that keeps magic out. Inside is Roundworld, our planet/universe, and it runs on science. From the point of view of Discworld, things we take for granted start to look very strange. The result of this comparing and contrasting was The Science of Discworld, which became a series of four books that we wrote with Terry.

So here are five examples of what Discworld can teach us about science.

Round worlds

Discworld is flat, carried by four elephants standing on a turtle. This is the sensible way to make a world: it’s shaped the way it appears to be, something stops it falling, and it is self-propelled. Roundworld is a silly shape for living on, things ought to fall off, and it swims through space unsupported, which is surprising for a large rock.

The science that explains why round – but a bit flattened – is a sensible shape for a world includes gravity, momentum, and the behaviour of rotating liquids. There’s also the psychology of why we think our senses convey a complete view of reality, rather than a limited and transformed one.

Much more sensible. mdpettitt/flickr, CC BY

Chaos butterfly

In the 17th Discworld novel, Interesting Times, Terry investigates the workings of chaos, including aspects of “chaos theory”, the mathematical discovery that deterministic laws can have apparently random effects. He gives the famous quantum weather butterfly a cameo role as Papilio tempestae. It flaps its wings … and freak gales cause road chaos.

This alludes to the famous “butterfly effect” in chaos theory link, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing can change the weather to something totally different. His suggested solution is “finding that bloody butterfly … and getting it to stop”.

Weather forecasters find it more effective to simulate the weather many times with slightly different random perturbations, in effect trying to find out which butterfly wins. Of course butterflies don’t cause hurricanes – but they affect where and when they occur, all else being equal.

Cat in a box

The witch Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo is a recurring character of the books. He is tough and streetwise, though Nanny considers him a big softie. When Greebo gets shut in a box in Lords and Ladies, Terry tells us there are three states for a cat in a box: alive, dead, and absolutely bloody furious.

This is an allusion to Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment in which a cat in a box that you cannot see into is simultaneously both alive and dead because of quantum mechanics … that is, until you open the box and find out which.

Terry’s joke puts quantum observations in a new light. For starters, “alive” and “dead” are not the only alternatives, even in classical physics.

God of evolution

Discworld has a god for almost everything, from Flatulus, god of the winds, to Bilious, the “Oh God of Hangovers”. In particular it has a god of evolution, which puts the science/religion debate in a typically Pratchettian light.

In The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch the Reverend Charles Darwin writes Theology of Species instead of The Origin of Species. The result? Roundworld stagnates.

While getting it back on track in time to avoid an inbound comet, the wizards introduce Darwin to the god of evolution. Darwin particularly admires the wheels on his elephant. This encounter opens up the entire topic of evolution and why creationist objections are nonsense.

Ate by eight

On Discworld, the number eight is special: the number of magic. There is an eighth magical colour, octarine. The eight son of an eighth son has to become a wizard – even when the midwife gets the sex wrong. No one dares mention the number by name because of the evil god Bel-Shamharoth: you might get ate, OK?

In Roundworld, the number eight is also key, but for a different reason: it plays a key role in atomic structure. Electrons surround the nucleus in concentric shells (energy levels). In principle successive shells can contain up to 2, 8, 18, 32, 50, and 72 electrons, but in practice they tend to fill up when they have eight electrons. The number of electrons in the outer shell determines the atom’s chemical properties. Noble gases have eight outer electrons (only two for Helium since it fills only the first shell) and seldom combine with other elements. So it is a magic number, in a way.

It has been a privilege and an honour to be part of Terry’s Discworld universe, and it is typical of his generosity that he allowed us to do so. And so we mourn his passing, while celebrating his achievements.