The big machine with ducks

[Fred56]

With apologies to Terry Pratchett:

 

Science is a bit like a big machine that a bunch of guys found. It's sort of poking up out of the ground and it looks a bit weird but it does a whole lot of strange, amazing, and head-scratching things.

 

They aren't sure how much of the thing is visible, either, so can only guess how much of it is hidden from view. A while back, someone claimed to have discovered a Universal Force that makes the machine work, but it turned out he wasn't 100 percent about this (and the percentage seems to depend on how fast you are moving, which isn't very intuitive, but there you are).

 

Some of those busy trying to figure out the thing will tell you that they think it might be an entirely different kind of machine, or not a machine at all (but then seem unable to explain what they mean by this), but most people think that's what it is, just a really big machine.

 

Some bits of it are now quite well understood and various devices and contraptions have been made which themselves work like the machine (or at least like the bit they understand), and some of these work so well that they have become ubiquitous. Other people who use these devices sometimes marvel at their operation, but haven't a clue what that might be (they don't as a rule know what ubiquitous means either).

 

Science is sometimes like trying to figure out if some ducks are in a row or not. A bunch of guys tries to figure this out. They try different things, like walking to different sides of the bunch of ducks, walking through them, and trying to get some of them to follow in a nice orderly line, but nothing seems to work.

 

One of the guys thinks he has noticed something. He gets a stick and goes and draws a line on the ground with it. Then he hunkers down looking at some ducks and scribbling furiously with his pen. Then he announces to the others that he might have found a way to determine if the ducks are lined up.

 

The trick, he tells them, is to first determine how many ducks are already “coincident” with some line, which can be drawn anywhere. Then, after counting these ducks, draw another arbitrary line and repeat the process, and so on. They start to discuss this idea, and soon the debate gets fairly heated, with things like “..but we're supposed to get all the ducks on one line, not n lines..”, and “..it depends on your perspective..”, and suchlike.

 

While they are arguing, the ducks form up in a double column, march towards the group (who are too busy arguing to notice) break left and right into two single files which wheel back around, and march in perfect duck-step towards each other. As each duck approaches its opposite, one of them climbs up on the other, until eventually an almost perfect duck-pyramid forms, but just as the last duck climbs to the top, the whole thing collapses into a quacking heap.

 

“OK, well lets just try it then”, one of the guys is saying. “OK, well why don't we just do that, then”, another says, and they all turn and look back to see a bunch of ducks wandering in all directions.