"In the story, the earth is created on the back of a turtle," said Johanna Gorelick, the museum's manager of education.
After Russell had made his case for atheism, a female questioner asked him, "What Mr. Russell has said is well enough, but he has forgotten that the entire universe stands on the back of a turtle".
The book's title refers to an indigenous creation story in which North America emerged from some soil placed on the back of a turtle by a woman who fell from the sky.
Gabriel, in Thomas King's The Back of the Turtle, plunges from the reality of science gone awry into a world of falling aliens and the possibilities of salvage, if not salvation; and in Joan Thomas's The Opening Sky, a fragile family structure survives its members' substantive changes.
In "The Magicians," one of Quentin's teachers, urging the class not to think too hard about where magic comes from, told the well-known story of Bertrand Russell's encounter with a woman who insisted that the world was flat, and that it rode on the back of a turtle.
"He's like a snail on the back of a turtle.
Scutes, or scales, are located on the back of the turtle's shell.
You can glue a magnet on the back of the turtle, if you want to stick it somewhere.
Try to bend up the crease on the back of the turtle to make it look more real.
I never put much stock in that image of the earthresting on the backs of four elephantswho are standing on the back of a sea turtle,who is in turn supported by an infinite regressionof turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.I mean how could you get them all to stay still?
