“Why Are Turtles All The Way Down? Isn’t That A John Green Book?”
An exploration into the problem of the infinite regress, metaphysics, and seeking the “truth”
So, upon hearing the phrase, “turtles all the way down”, you’re like, “huh, sounds familiar; isn’t that a book”. That is, unless you’ve read “A Brief History of Time”, or are a well-read cosmologist who is extremely knowledgeable on the concept of the infinite regress problem in cosmology. If you’re the second one then you should probably exit this article and do something better with your time.
Ok, but say you’re a normal human being who happens to know about books. Then congratulations, because you’re not completely wrong. “Turtles All The Way Down” IS the title of one of John Green’s books. But that’s beside the point. What we’re interested in is not necessarily the content of the book, but rather the title itself. You see, the title is not original. As soon as I heard this book was released, I almost jumped up out of my seat. “I know what that’s referring to!”, I thought to myself, feeling achieved for once.
You see, prior to hearing about the new release of Green’s book, I read “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking, and I was really surprised to see the “turtle thing” in there. The last time I had heard the statement prior to reading ABHT was when I overheard some random UC Berkeley student talking to his friend when I visited the campus for a Science Olympiad tournament. As soon as I heard him say that I thought to myself “I guess that’s just some weird lingo that probably has to do with something abstruse, such as an unsolved conundrum or something”. I didn’t really think of it at the time, and little did I know that my typical “far-fetched philosophical presumption” proved to be true.
Anyways, so before I get more into Professor Hawking’s book, the first statement of John Green’s book is quite intriguing. The opening sentence of of the book begins with, “At the time I first realized I might be fictional”. Many other writing critics (with myself being respectively included) first believed that the book was going to be a an attempt at postmodern literature, aka a bootleg “Jorge Luis Borges” type of metafiction. When you actually read the book then it’s not the case, but the point is that the opening statement really had me thinking: hey, that’s essentially breaking the 4th wall, kind of what they do in a ton of kids cartoons that start to make you question your life and existence, and the truth of the world you live in. That statement went beyond the conceptual sphere of metafiction. In fact, it was slightly metaphysical..
Anyways, so back to “A Brief History in Time”. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“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!”
Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these long standing questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun — or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.”
- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Ch. 1. Our Picture of the Universe
What Hawking wrote right there was probably the best presentation of the idea of metaphysics and the origin of “turtles all the way down”. To break it down, the expression “turtles all the way down” is kind of like a cosmology joke, as it refers to the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox. The metaphor refers to the anecdote discussed by Hawking, where the women believed that the world is flat and is on the back of a giant tortoise. This is surprisingly a popular notion held by some people. The theory is that Earth is actually flat and is supported on the back of the World Turtle, with the turtle itself being bolstered by a chain of increasingly larger turtles indefinitely.
So, you’re probably wondering “ what the heck is the “unmoved mover” paradox, what is an infinite regress problem, if skeptics were so bound to skepticism, doesn’t that make them dogmatic because questioning so-called undeniably true principles is ultimately the undeniably true principle of skepticism??”, and maybe a few other things (well, perhaps not the last thing though; I think that might have just been me).
Well, in order to explain the concept of the “unmoved mover” paradox, I have to talk about another concept: metaphysics. Contrary to popular belief, it has nothing to do with physics. And thank goodness too, because I would prefer leaving quantum field theory out of philosophy. According to dictionary definition, metaphysics is defined as “the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space”. It encompasses everything that exists, including the nature of existence itself. Hmm.. once I think about it, I guess it it does relate physics (sad face). Not the actual math that makes you want to cry, but theoretical physics (which is equally as painful). I’m talking about the space time continuum, wormhole theory, and that one movie Interstellar (which had an incredible soundtrack, by the way; props to Hans Zimmer for that musical masterpiece).
You know, Interstellar is a really great example of the concept of metaphysics being presented on the big screen in a way that somewhat makes sense to the human mind. Remember the part where there were alien things who turned out to be human beings from the distant future who helped Cooper go behind the bookshelf to help his daughter manipulate gravity even though that technically could never happen and made no sense? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. If you control yourself from admiring Nolan’s cinematography and ignore the organ swells courtesy of Hans Zimmer, you find yourself questioning every bit of the film because it makes no sense. I mean, it can’t be true, can it? That’s the thing though. We will never know the truth. We may come close to the truth, but who’s to say that there is a TRUE truth? What does it mean to be true?
The unmoved mover is essentially a paradox that attempts to explain the origin of space, time, existence, and everything we know and don’t know. Aristotle pretty much was like “there’s some entity that is unmoving which moves the things in the universe around and essentially made the universe”. However, where did this “unmoved mover” come from? Can the unmoved mover move? It’s quite odd because Aristotle essentially said that there’s a connection between physics and metaphysics. And that does hold to be true, but it’s ironic because physics attempts to determine what is the origin of everything in the universe, but metaphysics is essentially abstract theory with no basis in reality.
What even is the point of metaphysics? What does it mean to be metaphysical? Metaphysics involves cosmology (the study of the physical universe), and ontology (the nature/essential characteristics of being and existence), but how is the universe truly existent if you can’t even prove that it is existent? The biggest irony is from the actual word metaphysical. “Meta” (from the Greek prefix μετά, meaning “after”) is a prefix used to “indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept”. It essentially means to “go beyond”. However, the word “physical” means “relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete”.
The word “metaphysical” itself is a paradox, because it is attempting to say that there are things in this world that are both intangible yet also somehow tangible? Is something that is beyond the physical plane even humanly perceivable? Can a human being even process something that transcends the physical plane? Here’s the thing though: who’s to say that’s not possible? Are human beings just blind to the truth, which is that all things in relation to the universe can hold as neither true nor false? I mean, if you look at a tomato and come up with the null hypothesis that “this is a tomato”, your null hypothesis remains true. But for something like “the universe is infinite”, can you prove that?
The thing about human beings is that in order to uncover the “truth”, they require a finite response. Evidence that is perceivable. However, for infinite things, there is no way you can find anything to prove this, because you’ll be waiting indefinitely for the answer. And though that may be a “finite” answer, the fact that you can NEVER prove something like that means that even as you come close to the truth, you are simultaneously deviating far from the “truth”. You can never solve your problem, so though you may come close to a solution, there are parts that remain unsolvable, so it’s almost pointless.
A good example of this is attempting to integrate the expression “e to the x squared”. This infamous integral remains to be the bane of all calculus students and all mathematicians because the “answer” would be “erf(x)”, aka “error function”. There’s NO possible way you can come up with a definite answer for the definite integral. No Taylor series or polar coordinate can give you the true answer. You just have to be happy with the truth, which is that there is no true truth. I suppose that you can ultimately define the infinite regress problem as an argument that proposes an explanation, but the mechanism proposed stands just as much in need of explanation as the original fact.
Well, enough about calculus and all that. Ultimately, though scientists may feel “satisfied” with the fact that the universe was started by the Big Bang, are they really? They will never know what came before that, and how the Big Bang came to be. I guess you could say that they’ll just keep searching for that bottom-most turtle.
