We still don't understand how the big bang and evolving all the way to the human species and so on. So all of this is going to be a very, very exciting to the new people.

Although the Nasser revolution of 1952 was secular, the culture remained deeply religious - but it was a faith of moderation and tolerance. Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.

I do feel quite strongly about this that probably one of the things that unfortunately this age now to get a Nobel Prize is to really use part of it to help the young people get excited about science.

When I give a lecture on Egypt there are thousands of people in the lecture hall, so obviously they would like to go to science and they would love to do science, but you really have to get the correct science base in order for them to interact.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that's really not the way it worked.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint's and things of that sort. So, I'm an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.

I found with my students they don't necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what's relevant to what's he doing you see.