The Wikipedia, that giant repository of everything we think we know, has an interesting and amusing List of Holy Grails. Were you wondering what the Holy Grail of Historical Linguistics was? Or how about the Holy Grail of High-Energy Physics? It’s all here.
What’s noticeably absent is—well—anything that actually looks like the Holy Grail. Wouldn’t the Holy Grail of All Holy Grails be something like meeting God face to face?
That’s what the best of the Grail romances were about. The memory of those romances still inspires us when we think about the possibility of “solving the equity premium puzzle” or “a proof of the Riemann hypothesis” (to mention two of the Holy Grails listed in the Wikipedia article).
But these lesser Grails are nothing compared to the big one. And we can have the big one! That’s the amazing message of those medieval romances—and, of course, the message of our book.
