Nature rarely does anything mathematically perfect, and naturalism results from imperfections and deviations.

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".

When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined.

I believe that there is a love that moves the sun and the other stars.

I don't know of any science writing going on in women's magazines, unless you count medical stories about things like breast cancer. I still think there's a huge problem about how we can actively engage a wider range of women. I'm not saying women must be a separate audience - I'm just responding to the reality that the majority of people who do read science magazines are male. That's not a value judgment; it's a statistical fact.

This is what I call the "cosmological problem" of science. Science has the instrumental function that has given us computers and so on, but its cosmological function is to give us a picture of the world we inhabit as human beings, and on that level it's failing a vast number of people.