quote · Legacy record
Anyway.I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.
Anyway.I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.
Approximate author period: c. 1977 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Jonathan Safran Foer
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- Approximate author period: c. 1977 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1977; activity date not established; Wikidata Q359548, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q359548 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 9620; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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