"Paul Di Filippo - Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Plumage From Pegasus:
Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven...
by Paul Di Filippo


тАЬ[Ettore MajoranaтАЩs] promising career was cut short with his sudden
disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and
Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations,
and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or
changed his identity and started a new life.

тАЬNow, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii ... is suggesting that the
ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered
by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition.... Majorana
wanted to mirror the paradox with events in his own life....тАЭ

тАФтАЭThe man who was both alive and dead,тАЭ New Scientist, 5 August
2006.

****

Covering the religion beat for a big city newspaper, I thought I had
encountered pretty much every possible variation in mainstream faith, and
every minor cult imaginable. Among the major religions, I had interviewed
and sympathetically written up worshippers from JehovahтАЩs Witnesses to
Mormons, Transcendental Meditators to Wiccans, Nichiren Buddhists to
Scientologists, Moslems to Shintoists. Once I had even spoken to Cardinal
Ratzinger, before he became the Pope. We had been at a charity banquet
together and I had asked him to pass the salt. But still....

Yet none of my fieldwork had prepared me for the Majoranists.

My editor called me in that eventful day and brusquely gave me my
new assignment.

тАЬApparently thereтАЩs some kind of strange new church on the corner of
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. Why donтАЩt you check it out?тАЭ

Armed with a small digital voice recorder, a backup notebook, and my
tattered copy of LarsonтАЩs New Book of Cults, I set out.

As soon as the taxi discharged me, I knew I was in for a unique
experience.
 The building hosting the new church literally hurt my eyes.

I couldnтАЩt seem to focus on its shape. Rooms and wings and
extensions appeared to sprout and dissolve, coming and going. Eventually
I gathered an impression of some kind of matrix of cubes adjoining each
other at impossible angles.