August 23, 2017
SYMBOLS ALL THE WAY UP:
Turtles All the Way Down: Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A 1988 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS REVIEW OF STEPHEN HAWKING'S BESTSELLING POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK ON THE ORIGINS, WORKINGS, AND FATE OF OUR UNIVERSE (Lit Hub, August 23, 2017)
"Stephen Hawking opens his new book with a marvelous old anecdote. A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: 'You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's turtles all the way down.'Most people, Hawking writes, would find this cosmology ridiculous, but if we take the turtles as symbols of more and more fundamental laws, the tower is not so absurd. There are two ways to view it. Either a single turtle is at the bottom, standing on nothing, or it's turtles all the way down. Both views are held by leading physicists.
The problem being, of course, that there is no physical basis for a belief in either turtles or physicists.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2017 8:42 AM