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".

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.

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

All gradients of reality, all existential distinctions, have finally been annihilated.

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.

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

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.