Q: To be too easy?

JB: Yes, too easy. You know and all its crucial predictions just happened to be testable by us.

Q: Are we just lucky to have come up with this theory right now?

JB: We may have hit upon this theory prematurely because of our expertise in mathematics. One of the awkward things it teaches us is that, if it’s indeed correct, is that there are all of these extra dimensions. Then the true reality, deep reality is 10-dimensions, the true constants of nature live in 10-dimensions, and what we see is like a shadow of all that 10-dimensional reality. The things we call constants of nature are not really constants at all necessarily and so we’re one step removed from the true deep structure, the mathematical structure, of nature, And we’re looking at a shadow on the wall of the cave.

Q: Einstein once asked, “Did God have any choice in the creation of the universe?” Do you think we are any closer now to answering that question then he was?

JB: Yes, I think we are a bit closer. Interestingly, when he asked that question it was during a time when people were interested in what type of complete explanation there might be of the universe. Einstein spent the later part of his life searching after a so-called unified field theory, which was his description of a Theory of Everything. It was a waste of time in retrospect. He was looking in the wrong place, in the wrong way, for the wrong type of theory, but he and other great theorists in the 1920s and 30s were much interested in this issue of whether there was one and only one theory that completely specified everything. That’s what Einstein believed and that’s what he meant by that quotation, that God didn’t have any freedom.

Q: What do you think?

JB: I think that there is more arbitrariness in the universe than we think. It’s much more flexible, almost creative, in a way we’re familiar with from living-systems. It’s not as though there is one blue print for living-systems programmed into laws of nature and they always spring into being readymade. But somehow the principles that govern complexity and how it develops allow all sorts of different outworkings, different types of complexity, and the universe seems to have this mixture of determinism at the level of the laws, but the outcomes of the laws are not set in stone in the same way. There is vast amount of flexibility that is consistent with the laws. Laws are very simple, highly symmetrical, but the outcomes of the laws are asymmetrical, deeply complicated, and, innumerable. So that’s the secret of our universe in a sense. A very small number, perhaps just one simple symmetrical law, can give rise to an unlimited number of complex outcomes. Because the outcomes don’t have to possess the same symmetries, the same properties as the laws.

Q: Let’s talk about language. Besides your scientific work, you’re also a playwright. Your play “Infinities” was a big hit in Italy in 2003. I wonder if you ever think that science could come up against the limits of a language in expressing the theoretical ideas we’re talking about?

JB: Maybe to convey them to other people. Scientists use language in a fairly carefree way. They are not like philosophers, who are very, very careful about choosing language in descriptions of what they do because the language plays a crucial role in the explication of the ideas. In science, the language actually doesn’t because it’s the mathematics that plays that role. So, the mathematics is very vigorously defined, the mathematical concepts, you know, the manifolds, differentially structures, and strings membranes. So these things are very meticulously defined, rigorously defined, and they play the role of language for the philosopher. So, you could think of mathematics as being a language but it’s not really language like French or English, it’s more like language like FORTRAN, it’s got a built-in logic. All physicists tend to do when they meet a new thing is to give it a label, you don’t know what “quarks” really are so you give them a silly name like quarks and they have certain qualities.

Q: Speaking of language, doesn’t the word “quarks” comes from James Joyce’s novel, Finnegan’s Wake?

JB: Yes, yes. “Three Quarks for Muster Mark.” Because they came in 3’s, you see. That was why Gell-Mann used that quote, because there are 3 quarks inside a proton . . . So sometimes we pick odd labels which actually have completely other meanings in ordinary language. Time is an interesting example. There are different concepts of time, different ways of measuring time. Our everyday experience of time, in the sort of conscious psychological time, is very different to the sort of static unchanging picture of time in the universe. Or the elementary particle picture of time. Or Einstein’s picture of time, where you change the rate at which it flows. It’s almost like completely different concepts. So, there certainly is a failure of ordinary language, but that’s why we don’t use ordinary language in any decisive way in physics. We try to allow mathematics to do that.

Q: What do you make of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s famous statement that science and religion are nonoverlapping magisteria?

JB: Maybe the very fact that there are people who disagree with that, refutes it in a sense. It only needs some people to find ways to bring [science and religion] together, for that not to be the case . . . It may be that some sciences don’t have an interesting interaction between science and religion.

Q: But what about the sciences that you’re involved with: cosmology, physics, astronomy?

JB: Yes, I think there is a strong overlap in the kinds of questions that are asked and both subjects have a very ancient tradition of being interested in very similar sorts of issues. One is trying to find out the structure of the universe and the other trying to interpret it, what does is it mean? Also in the past, religious persuasions play a crucial role in the development of the sciences itself by establishing faith and belief that there are things like laws of the nature to be discovered. So, the very concept of laws of nature seems to have emerged out of a monotheistic tradition in the West.

Q: Do you see your work in cosmology as having a clear link to religion and being a bridge to it?

JB: Yes, because I’m interested in many of these issues from the two perspectives. So for me they have an interesting link. There are clearly other people who feel that they want to know about what astronomers think about the universe because it matters to them for their worldview. There’s the issue of whether it matters to you, and whether it matters to other people. Curiously, I often find that it seems to matter to other people more. Maybe it is because cosmology is so familiar to me and I’m used to the uncertainties of it. I know we can be wrong about things. But I find outsiders attribute much more certainty to science than the insiders. They take it as it were as the gospel truth and they want their beliefs to somehow be confirmed by science. But cosmology, on its frontier, is rather uncertain. Right in the core it’s more certain . . . At its’ best, science is showing you all the possibilities. Its’ crucial role is removing strident false claims.

We spoke at the beginning about the universe being big and old and dark and cold as a necessary condition for life. Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, people like Bertrand Russell argued very strongly that these characteristics of the universe indicate that it’s totally antithetical to life; just a random environment that’s very hostile. But from a modern perspective you can see that this was really quite wrong. It was a wrong interpretation of the story and often cosmology can turn things around in that way.

Q: You are a widely respected scientist, you have written a number of very well received books on science. What would you have pursued if it hadn’t been science?

JB: I might have been a journalist, I suppose. Or a sports reporter. I was quite serious in track athletics when I was younger. I beat Steve Ovett once, who did become the Olympic champion in the 800 meters.

Q: What book are you working on right now?

JB: I’m supposed to be finishing a book of images and pictures that played a crucial role in the development of science and our conception of what the universe is like.

Q: For example, the blue marble from outer space that changed humanity’s concept of our place in the universe?

JB: Yes, that’s a good example; of course the double helix is another well known example, but there are others, the first graph which comes on the scene rather late at the end of the 1700s. There are hundreds of examples of this sort.