astrophysicist’s treatise would be accessible to the 
general public. So it’s taken a long time for people 
to really understand what he meant when he’s 
paraphrasing Bacon, for example. I mean, who 
knows these things?

So how does he sound to people? He sounds a little 
off the wall. He doesn’t make clear, immediate 
sense. He used to say, “Beware clarity. A man 
speaking to you in clear language is clearly using 
obsolete ideas.” Well, that threw people off. People 
said, “Well, what do you mean? We love clarity.” 
The other thing was that the world was in love with 
specialism. They were telling their kids to be