Russell's teapot is an imaginary teapot that the philosopher Bertrand Russell described in 1952 to make a point about proof. He pictured a china teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars. Russell never gave it a size, so the 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) shown above is an assumed size for a household teapot. It is measured from the tip of the spout to the back of the handle.

Size

Because the teapot is imaginary, it has no real size to measure. Russell's essay describes it only as a china teapot, in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, and "too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes." Any size is a choice, and the explorer uses the width of its teapot picture.

The space Russell chose is enormous next to the teapot. On average, the orbits of Earth and Mars are about 78 million kilometers (49 million miles) apart.

Size comparisons

At 25 centimeters, the teapot is about as wide as a basketball, the next smaller object in the explorer.
A person 1.7 meters (5 feet 7 inches) tall is about as tall as seven of these teapots stacked on top of each other.
About 51 million teapots lined up side by side would stretch across Earth.
About 310 billion teapots would be needed to span the gap between the orbits of Earth and Mars.
Seen from 78 million kilometers away, the teapot would look as small as a human hair seen from about 31,000 kilometers away, two and a half times the width of Earth.

Russell's argument

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher who did pioneering work in logic and mathematics, and he won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1952 a London magazine, Illustrated, asked him for an article on whether God exists. He wrote the essay, but the magazine never printed it. It was first published in 1997, in a volume of his collected papers.

The teapot appears in a passage about who has to prove what. Russell argued that the duty to prove a claim belongs to the person making it, not to the person who doubts it. Nobody could disprove his teapot, since it could not be seen, but that would be no reason to believe in it.

Russell then imagined the teapot described in ancient books and taught as sacred truth every week. In that case, he wrote, doubting it would come to look eccentric. He used the comparison to argue that a belief is not reasonable only because many people hold it.

Sources

Report a Problem

for Russell's Teapot