THERE’S an oft-repeated story, probably an urban myth, of a cosmologist accosted by an old woman after a lecture. The universe, insisted the woman, is flat and rests on the back of a turtle. The cosmologist asked what the turtle rests on. “You can’t make a fool of me that easily,” said the woman. “It’s turtles all the way down.”
It is easy to mock any cosmological thinking that strays from the mainstream as “turtles all the way down”, but that is short-sighted. Our best attempt at describing the history of the universe – a big bang followed by a…
