Turtles All The Way Down
Finding truth in emptiness
What holds up the world? In Hindu mythology, elephants. What holds up the elephants? A turtle known as Akūpāra.
“Everything must have a beginning,” as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley introduced her novel Frankenstein, specifically making note of the myth of the elephants and tortoise, and that beginning, in turn, “must be linked to something that went before.”
But that takes us to an infinite regress, doesn’t it? The physicist Stephen Hawking brings up the same image in his introduction to A Brief History of Time. He recalls an old woman who questioned an eminent scientist on his cosmology. The Earth, as the woman understood it, “is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” When the scientist asked smugly, “What is the tortoise standing on?” she replied, “You’re very clever, young man, very clever…But it’s turtles all the way down.”
A wise commentary on our ignorance. It isn’t only religious explanations that fail. Any question that assumes a linear chain of spaces or events will stretch infinitely into past and future.
