What is the foundation of the earth? My favorite question. Among the belongings of my beloved mother-in-law Hazel McMullen Dickinson Bahret, who died at the age of 100, I found the following essay, carefully stowed as a bookmark in one of the many books she clearly enjoyed:
The origins of the turtle story are uncertain. The most widely known version, which obviously is not the source…appears in Stephen Hawking‘s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:
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!”—Hawking, 1988[1]
Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court discussed his “favored version” of the tale in a footnote to his plurality opinion in Rapanos v. United States (decided June 19, 2006):
In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”—Antonin Scalia, Antonin Scalia. “RAPANOS v. UNITED STATES”. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute’s Supreme Court collection.
The anecdote has achieved the status of an urban legend on the Internet, as there are numerous versions in which the name of the scientist varies (e.g., Arthur Stanley Eddington, Thomas Huxley, Linus Pauling, or Carl Sagan) although the rest is the same.
In the lake surrounding Dickinson Island, among the nearby lilypads, there lives an ancient turtle. At least one. As I sit on the porch at the lake pondering the origins of the universe and other mysteries, I sometimes believe the answer lies in his old brain, and in the story of the great boulders beneath me, dropped here eons ago by a melting glacier. Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Maybe it’s the biggest recycling project ever!
ON THE BEACH AT THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA
(A sonnet in trochees)
Rocks live slowly. Human life can happen
fast, too fast for what we call our senses.
Happy to have my ashes take their chances
coming back as rock, I’ll start a mountain
spewing hot from underneath an ocean.
Rush of dust and steam to stratospheric
heights, I’ll make the very air choleric,
smear the sky with primal self-expression,
then subside to wait for tide and season,
seed and bird and vast subcontinental
grind to move me through the elemental
molecules the universe has chosen,
make the dust I was into a diamond,
or fist of granite resting at Port Townsend.
Barbara Loots