When you're in a room with twenty people who've all got the True Theory of the universe, it's difficult to know what to do. And the paradox is that so much important science is now being done by huge teams. With Higgs boson, for example, it's estimated there were around ten thousand scientists and engineers involved in building the machines that made this discovery possible.

For ten years, I wrote regular columns about science for women's magazines, and to my knowledge I'm the only person in the world who can say that. This has no kudos in either the science-writing world or the academic world, but it's one of the most challenging things I've ever done. It's much harder to write about cosmology for a magazine like Vogue than for the New York Times, which I've also written for, because you have to imagine that on the page opposite there'll be an advertisement for eyeliner, or an article about the latest trends in skirt length.

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.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

When you're in a room with twenty people who've all got the True Theory of the universe, it's difficult to know what to do. And the paradox is that so much important science is now being done by huge teams. With Higgs boson, for example, it's estimated there were around ten thousand scientists and engineers involved in building the machines that made this discovery possible.

Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.

One way to think about a pure hyperbolic surface is that it's the geometric opposite of a sphere. If you look at a sphere, the curvature is the same everywhere, as opposed to, say, an egg, which clearly does not curve the same everywhere. This is what makes spheres geometrically important. Mathematically speaking, a sphere has positive curvature and a hyperbolic surface has negative curvature, but both have constant curvature everywhere.