I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.