ABOUT THIS PROJECT

This website is organized around the challenge of historicising the term ‘Turtles All The Way Down.’ Our project focused on the historical and cultural aspects of the turtle and its chelonian cousins. Responding to the term’s original use in an anecdote popularised in A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, we approached the same term in a novel manner. Hawking used it to describe a contradiction levied upon an astronomer’s lecture. That audience member – possibly influenced by world turtle stories – argued that the earth was in fact resting upon the back of a turtle. When questioned about what the turtle was resting on, they answered, it was “turtles all the way down.”

The material presented here is differently inspired by the term and provides a methodological example of how something which, upon seeming esoteric, can be studied and appreciated as a case of practice-based knowledge production. The turtle, a symbol native to the many Asians who called port at Singapore, lends its namesake to two eponymous places: The Live Turtle and Tortoise Museum and Kusu Island (also known as Turtle / Tortoise Island).