Can a Tortoise Really Beat a Hare?
You’ve probably heard the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, but if you haven’t you can find it here.
This morning, my pre-algebra students were discussing a problem involving comparing rates, and we came up with the question: Could that really happen? How long would it really take a tortoise to beat a hare in a race?
The fastest tortoise in the world (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) won a race traveling at around 0.6 mph. The race was only a few meters long, but let’s give Bertie (the tortoise) the benefit of the doubt, and assume tortoises can run at that speed for awhile. The race was in the UK, so for the sake of validity, let’s have our theoretical race there too.
The European hare is prevalent in the UK and can travel at 43 mi/hr.
If you’re wondering what the difference is between turtles and tortoises, remember that all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. It’s a square-rectangle thing.
According to Aesop’s fable, the race begun and the tortoise was “soon far out of sight”. Even in a dense forest, “far out of sight” must be at least a quarter of a mile (which is close to the distance around a track). The actual race was probably much longer, and in The Aesop for Children in the Library of Congress, the illustration next to the story shows the bottom of a sign marked “miles”, implying the race was multiple miles. The hare then woke up when the tortoise was just approaching the finish line and couldn’t catch up in time.
If the race was a quarter of a mile, the story wouldn’t quite make sense. At the speeds given above, it would take the tortoise about 25 minutes to finish the race. The hare could do it in 20 seconds. It’s possible the hare ran for 10 seconds, napped for almost 25 minutes, then couldn’t catch the tortoise in the last 10 seconds. That doesn’t seem very likely, although the purpose of the hare’s nap was to embarrass the tortoise for even daring to race in the first place, so it could happen.
If the race was a standard cross country 5K (3.1 miles), it would take the hare 4.3 minutes to finish. It makes a lot more sense to run for 2 minutes, then take a nap, and then struggle to catch up in another 2 minutes. However, it would’ve taken the tortoise over 5 hours to finish the race. Did the hare really nap for 5 hours? That seems excessive, even for a gloat-nap.
Besides, the race was refereed by a fox. Why didn’t the fox eat the hare?
In conclusion, I’m skeptical this “race” ever happened. I suspect the details may have been, at the very least, exaggerated, for the sake of the story.
On the other hand, two tortoises were launched into space in 1968 and orbited the Earth at about 23,000 mph. Space tortoises would definitely win the race.
Sources:
http://read.gov/aesop/025.html
https://naturemuseum.org/2017/06/whats-the-fastest-turtle/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_hare