Turtle Cosmology: infinite regression
Many of you have probably heard this story, but I am going to blog about it for the heck of it because I love this story so much.
The most famous version of this story is pretty much the way it appeared in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, and it goes like this:
“ 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 center 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!”
Yes, yes, old lady, you’ve got it right–it’s all turtles, all the way down.
This is one of those legendary stories whose actual original source is unknown.
Perhaps the lady did indeed ask such a question during Bertrand Russell’s 1927 “Why I’m not a Christian” lecture in which he had said, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”
The solution is easy, Mr. Indian:
infinite turtles.
I love infinite regression–a stacked function of tessellation–causation dependent, ad infinitum. M.C. Escher eat your heart out.
Eat your heart out, Escher, and your heart’s heart will eat its own heart, and its heart will eat its heart out–its very own heart of hearts–and feed upon itself in nourishment and destruction, like the symbol of the ouroboros, and so on, and on, ad infinitum.
And if you have a regressive flea infestation problem, you REALLY have a problem with its own problems….
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.”
–Augustus De Morgan, mathematician (parodying Jonathon Swift’s poem)
Turtles, I say, strange, armor shelled reptiles, walking battle helmets: with the bunkers on your backs, you are the true symbols of eternity.
Thank you, turtles–for being the keepers of world, of the universe, for being the long stack, for being the Chukwa, the totem pole swimmers within the universe’s primordial milky way stew.
image credit Escher tessellation: Andreia
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