Сэр Роджер Пенроуз написал новую книгу

«Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe»

в основу которой положил лекции, прочитанные им 13 лет назад в Принстоне. Её пафос критический: «Something is rotten in the state of physics». В частности, его не удвлетворяют теория струн и состояние космологии.

Есть в книге и о шекспировском вопросе. Как известно, отец автора Лионель был известным генетиком, и Пенроуз пишет:

I always felt that Lionel had a powerful instinctive feeling for what was likely to be the truth (although he was not always right). His instinctive feelings were not necessarily in areas of science, and one thing that he did feel strongly about was the Shakespearian authorship issue. He had been fairly well persuaded by a book by Thomas Looney (1920) that the true author of the Shakespeare plays was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and Lionel even went so far as to try to test this authorship by a statistical analysis of de Vere’s acknowledged writings, as compared with that of the plays (somewhat inconclusively, as it turned out). Most of Lionel’s colleagues thought that this belief was going several steps too far.

For my own part, I found the case against the normally accepted authorship very strong (as it seemed to me most unlikely that the author of these great works would have owned no books and left no evidence of his handwriting, save a few illiterate-looking signatures, but I had no real views as to who the true author might be). It is interesting to see that a strong case has recently been made for de Vere’s authorship in a book by Mark Anderson (2005).

Имелась в виду книга: John Thomas Looney. «Shakespeare» identified in Edward De Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford«.  Да, в своё время этот опус английского школьного учителя Томаса Луни (1870–1944) произвел на многих сильное впечатление — даже на такого проницательного человека, как Зигмунд Фрейд; оксфордианская версия популярна и сейчас.

В своей новой книге Сэр Роджер сравнивает степень трудности смены парадигм в мире физики и мире литературы:

No matter how difficult it may be to shift a scientific viewpoint that has become generally established, it would seem that to do the same in the literary world – particularly for such a firmly entrenched dogma with huge commercial interests – would be simply vast by comparison!

Да, задача невероятно сложна. But, with a little bit of luck, with a little bit of luck…