And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a non-comprehending parrot-like apparent competence--a duty and a duty alone--and no hint of magic or beauty of the subject might be allowed to come through.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.