This was a comment I wrote in reply to the jab that “god does not exist in higher dimensions any more than paying taxes in higher dimensions satisfies the IRS”.

Which, besides the obvious joke, warranted this kind of response from me.

Multi dimensional thinking requires a bit of out of the box thinking. A square is two dimensional, but a line is one dimensional. Yet a square is just 4 lines connected together. If you told a line that a square could be made from 4 lines, it wouldn’t be possible to visualize since a line only exists in one dimension.

The same is true of hyper volume physics. An area is 2d, a volume is 3d, and a hypervolume is adding another dimension to the third’s volume. Which means, if you can visualize it, it won’t look like anything you were taught in school it should look like. It’ll look impossible, because it is impossible from a 3d pov.

That’s more or less accurate, if I recall. Although there’s a couple of complications if I remember, concerning points and cross slicing a hyper volume which I never did accept fully: mentally speaking.

Like most things in life, humans need to train, change, and improve themselves if they want to exercise sound judgment. You can always sit around and let Authority tell you what to do, what to believe, and what is true, but we all know how that ends.

If we were to say, anchor an objective reference point somewhere else, would it not then prove conceivable that the sun indeed orbits the earth?

neo, I get your drift; I’ve dabbled in cosmology since undergraduate school. The philosophers’ answers do strike me as little better than the little old lady’s answer. Once we insert God into the cosmology, however, it gets different. God always was, God transcends time, etc. But then it veers into theology rather than “just” philosophy/cosmology.

But we’ll disagree in that I do think the little old lady is being patronized, because of course (*everyone* knows) it’s not turtles all the way down — whereas the philosophers’ answers, being more erudite and impressive-sounding, are intellectually acceptable (whereas the turtles are not).

While we’re at it . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O4TqdhtDJQ

Somethings can not be explained by rationality, science, or faith. Turtles all the way down is a way of admitting one does not have the answer to that which can not be proven by faith, rationality, or science. So, some people adhere to religion, others to science, and others to turtles. I readily admit I have no answer to those vast questions about our sentient existence on a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy that is just one galaxy in a universe filled with an unknown number of galaxies. IMO its all beyond our feeble intellects and imaginations.

If you have the answer good for you. I envy your certainty. But, turtles all the way down is as good as any other answer as far as I am concerned. Think Rumsfield: there are things you know you do not know, and there are things you do not know that you do not know. Its a mystery.

It’s a gag based upon an early seismograph that was artfully crafted as a fresh water turtle with marbles set such as to roll in the orientation of P-waves.

This instrument has to be the true source of the zany notion that the earth is riding on the back of a turtle. ( writ large )

I’d bet my last dollar that the joke was first used on the Chinese kids — who would be so young as to believe such a tall tale.

The British have at least one of these, sort of a technological exchange for the mechanical clock. At the time, the British didn’t even realize that P and S waves were involved. Britain is simply not subject to many earthquakes. Not so for China and Japan, so their gadgets were thousands of years ahead.

Actually, maybe I’m odd, but I do not agree. I don’t think the speaker is being ridiculed any more than anyone else—at least if you really reflect on the story.

Note, for example, the first sentence of the Wiki entry for “turtles all the way down” that I linked to:

“Turtles all the way down” is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox.

The speaker in the story sounds silly, but no more silly than the cosmologists dealing with the same problem; merely less erudite. I’ve always seen the joke as a very philosophical one, rather than a simplistic one that ridicules the speaker. The scientists are just as essentially unable to truly explain as the lady. When they say “the singularity” is it really any more comprehensible even to scientists, much less to the rest of us, than “turtles all the way down”?

But we all [except maybe for parker, 6:47 pm (good natured grin)] agree that despite the audience member indeed having the last word, it’s really not “turtles all the way down”, and the “turtles” point of view is in fact being held up for ridicule.

The audience member is not being held up for ridicule, but she is being patronizingly indulged out of respect for (I’m guessing) her longevity on this planet, and because the Bertrand Russell / William James character has sufficient class so as to not get into it with a dear little old lady.

Are you saying it really is not turtles all the way down?

😉

I think it’s fairly obvious that the story is meant to be just that: a story, and a joke. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously as a narrative of an event that actually happened at some scientific lecture or other.

And I actually don’t think it ridicules the religious any more than it ridicules anyone else. I think it ridicules all attempts to understand and explain the mysteries of the universe (including the scientist who’s telling the story). Because it is unanswerable, isn’t it? And science has no answer to the mystery of the uncaused cause, either.

Notice that it’s the person in the audience who has the last word, not the scientist.