Turtles All the Way Down is a narrative constructed from different stories that intertwine debated fictional belief and documented scientific accomplishment. The video starts with the retelling of a story that most famously appeared as the first paragraph in physicist Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. The story describes a debate between a scientist and an old lady about the nature of the universe. The debate ends with the old lady claiming that the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. When asked “And what is the tortoise standing on?” She responded, “It’s turtles all the way down”. Moving on, in the next chapter, to Edwin Hubble’s milestone discovery that the universe is expanding, followed by the story of The Great Moon Hoax as published in the New York Sun in 1835. The film ends with the artist proposing the initiation of a cosmic search for what he called the “Super Universal Fossil”; a sponge-like meteorite, that would carry the genetic code of the universe.
