When we tweeted about your interview we had some questions about what you think about how science is taught in schools and why children don’t seem to be that interested in it.

I am not sure about what happens in the US but I think there is a real problem in the UK with how education has been very much constrained by the national curriculum and endless targets and league tables, and I think that is a very great pity.

It is also rather sad that there is nothing like the moon landings going on because they turned on a generation of people to science. It was such a miraculous achievement. In fact we are now very close to finding other planets on which there might be life but unless we actually find life there won’t be a dramatic moment. You can’t predict when you are going to do something like that. And the enormous advances in gene technology and stem cells are actually quite subtle and getting more and more complicated. We are certainly making huge advances but they don’t make the headlines. And I think kids now are so keen on their computer games and they don’t find time to get stuck into science which is a great pity.

Your first choice, Micrographia by Robert Hooke, written in the 17th century, was the first scientific bestseller.

Yes, this is a fascinating book. Robert Hooke was a really interesting bloke. He was born on the Isle of Wight. He had no money. His dad died and left him a little bit and then he went and got himself educated at Westminster School in London. Then he was hired by Robert Boyle as a sort of assistant. He was working with him mainly in Oxford. Then Boyle went to London and when the Royal Society was founded in 1660 Hooke was around and he was absolutely brilliant with his hands and very clever at the same time. He became curator of experiments.

He was a sociable bloke but a little bit irascible and he had a terrible row with Newton. But he remained a great friend of Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley and they used to go together to coffee shops every day. In 1665 he produced this extraordinary book. I have a facsimile edition here, not an original. It is big, about a foot high and nine inches wide. It is beautifully printed – there is all this old-fashioned type with the long S and so on and it contains lovely pictures. He was, luckily for us, a very good draftsman. And some of the drawings are just the same as the pages and some of them pull out to make a picture about two foot square. The most famous of all is this picture of a flea. He was almost the first person to use a microscope as a scientific instrument and he looked at things like fleas and drew wonderful pictures of them – and showed people a new world.

A lot of it is all about the things he could see through his microscope.

Yes, and it is beautifully written and written in English. People before him had all written in Latin. Harvey had written about the circulation of the blood in Latin and Gilbert had written about magnetism in Latin, so to write in English was a big step forward. And Pepys said he sat up all night reading it, so that was lovely.

You only have to look at the busloads of tourist milling around Stonehenge to know that thousands of people around the world are fascinated with it. What does Gerry Hawkins’s book Stonehenge Decoded have to offer us?

Well, this book was really interesting for me because it was the first popular science book I had come across. It was published in 1965 originally. I was doing my PhD at the time and this book came to me because I had just joined one of those new-fangled books clubs! I was surprised that there were science books that were readable. I had heard about treatises on the electron or whatever it is but I had never come across a book like this.

And it was fascinating and fun. Computers were brand new and what he had done was use ‘the computer’ to analyse all the various sightings you can make across the stones at Stonehenge and tried to show that it was a great astronomical instrument. I think it’s not now largely believed. Some of things were right but many of them are clearly wrong. But the fact is that he used a computer, a scientific instrument to examine what was really a beautiful ancient building and this was a very odd and interesting thing. And it was certainly quite important to me to see that science could be made popular in this way and I think it influenced me quite a lot. I think it showed a lot of people science could be written for the layman.

I met Gerry Hawkins many years later at the Explorers’ Club in Washington DC; he is a very nice chap and I talked to him about the Nazca lines in the Atacama Desert.

What do you think makes a science book accessible?

Clear simple writing. It doesn’t want to be too heavy. It doesn’t want to go off into high-falutin’ stuff. When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time he says that his publisher told him that every equation he left in would halve the number of readers, which is a bit of an exaggeration but it is not very far off.

Well, let’s talk about A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which is another book on your list.

It was fascinating because when it came out I was working at Yorkshire Television and I saw a review in The Sunday Times. I went in the next morning to the library which was underneath our office and I said to the ladies there I would really like to see a copy of this. And Sheila, who was the boss, said, ‘I’ll have it on your desk in the morning’, which was actually quite unnecessary because I had just said I wanted to see a copy at some stage. But she then rang up her favourite suppliers and they had sold out. And she rang bookshop after bookshop but they had all sold out.

I know I am playing devil’s advocate here but don’t you think it is one of those books that people buy because they feel they ought to – but do they actually read it when they have it?

Well, I actually did read it. I got stuck in Chapter Six and I then read it again recently and it is a lovely book. It is very hard because he is trying to describe very complicated things, but he has actually done a very good job. I have started on his latest book, The Grand Design, which I think is rather easier. But this book is important not just because he is stuck in a wheelchair and is a brilliant cosmologist but also because it is a really difficult subject aimed at the general reader. This sort of cosmology, looking at whether or not black holes emit radiation, is a very esoteric sort of question. It is not like Stonehenge where people ask things that we can all understand, like, if you look through this gap can you see Capella.

Whether or not black holes emit radiation is a much more difficult question even to think about. So it was quite brave of him to try and I think he did a grand job. And, of course, it was enormously hyped because of his awful condition and that didn’t do that book any harm at all. And I think for anyone like me who is interested in science even if we can’t understand it all, it gives us some insight into what these chaps are thinking about. If someone asks me what cosmology is I haven’t a clue, but if I read this at least I have more of a clue. I may not get it all but I get some gist of what is going on in the minds of these physicists.