I've got no religious beliefs at all.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just 'virtual reality.'

I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can’t conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.

I’m not a specialist in the science but I have followed it fairly closely and it seems to me that there is among the experts a clear consensus that potential climate change is something to worry about.

It’s better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science-it’s a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.

The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that’s a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.

I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it’s not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.

Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it’s the one culture we can all share.

In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure – error rather than terror.

Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity’s role in nature. One thing we’ve learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life.