Apr 04 2009
It’s turtles all the way down
It's turtles all the way down
I’ve been reading, and re-reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time but still can’t get my mind around the General Theory of Relativity and it’s (apparently) obvious conclusions about the earth traveling in a straight line through the curved space-time continuum - and how Tibetans on top of a mountain age slower than Boca Ratoners on a beach. Might as well try and explain it to a dog - or a pope.
I’m tempted give in and agree with with the lady mentioned in Hawking’s first chapter:
“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!””
Later in his book Hawking decides against explaining his theory of space-time to the Pope:
“The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference — the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!”