"It was Ponder’s particular genius that he had found a way around this by considering the phrase, “How do you know it’s not possible until you’ve tried?” And experiments with Hex, the University’s thinking engine, had found that, indeed, many things are not impossible until they have been tried. Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all. When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case†—in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along."