Turtles all the way down: Encyclopedia II - Turtles all the way down - Overview

Turtles all the way down - Overview

The most widely known version today appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins with an anecdote about an encounter between a scientist and an old lady:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

The origins of this story are uncertain. An earlier, more leisurely version of the story (perhaps the earliest occurrence in print) is found in the preface of an influential 1967 linguistics dissertation written at MIT by J. R. (Haj) Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax (published many years later as Infinite Syntax (ISBN 0893910422)). In Ross's version, the scientist is identified as the Harvard psychologist William James. Of the story's provenance, Ross writes:

I have been unable to find any published reference to it, so it may be that I have attributed it to the wrong man, or that it is apocryphal. Be that as it may, because of its bull's-eye relevance to the study of syntax, I have retold it here.'

The story can also be found in Bernard Nietschmann's "When the Turtle Collapses, the World Ends," Natural History, 83(6):34 (June-July 1974). A version of the story also appears in Clifford Geertz's, "Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Culture, with the scientist and old woman replaced by an Englishman and an Indian respectively. This version may be a reference to various Hindu beliefs, including the myth that Vishnu's second avatar was Kurma, a tortoise on whose back the Mandara mountain rested, or that the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma who upholds the world.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki