Volume 35, Number 10 · June 16, 1988
The Ultimate Turtle
By Martin Gardner
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
by Stephen W. Hawking, introduction by Carl Sagan
Bantam, 198 pp., $18.95
Stephen Hawking opens his new book with a marvelous old anecdote. A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: 'You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's turtles all the way down.'
Review, 3768 words
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