"it's turtles all they way down"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 18, 2006, at 8:48 AM, Stephen Goranson wrote:

> good Yale Book of Quotations quotes Stephen Hawking's 1988 version
> of a story an
>  an audience member objection to an astronomer's cosmological
> description. A
> lady sareplied that the world rests on a giant tortoise. When
> challenged on
> what the tortoise stood on, she explained "it's turtles all the way
> down." YBQ
> adds that this may have been told earlier by Bertrand Russell,
> which sounds
> reasonable (I think I've encountered that attribution, perhaps in his
> Autobiography?).

Haj Ross (J.R. Ross) tells the turtles version (attributed to William
James)  at the beginning of his 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, Constraints
on Variables in Syntax.

arnold

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