In an interview on The Quantification of Everything

Next book?

This is really extremely famous and I think rightly so – The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins: I love that book. When you look at theories in physics, they are really phrased very precisely with mathematical formulae, and if you are trying to make a prediction of a physical system you can do this extremely well with very high precision. So, for example, if you want to know where Mars will be in 10,000 years’ time, then our laws of physics are so accurate that actually you can really do that to an extremely good precision. However, when you look at more complicated things like biology and you want to say: well, can I look at a species and say what’s going to happen in terms of evolution in 10,000 years, then of course it’s very difficult, and I don’t think anyone has a clue how to make this more mathematical. But the first time I saw how far you can go, and I was really surprised, was with The Selfish Gene. Because the theory of evolution seems to a physicist much less rigorous than any theory that we have in physics – it just doesn’t have the power to predict things in the same way. You’ve got these two basic principles – the random mutation of the genetic material, and then the subsequent deliberate selection by the environment of whether the resulting individual survives or doesn’t survive these genetic modifications. Dawkins’s book was the first time that someone tried to make the theory very mathematical, and explain it fully, and tried to make predictions based on it. He’s saying, how far can I go down in terms of simplicity, and try to explain everything in the biological world just in terms of very simple units – in this case, of course, this would be genes. Dawkins’s approach, just the way he writes, is extremely nice and I think he’s the best popular science writer. No one else really compares. It made me think that you could ultimately apply physics to biology and really reduce it even more, because you know once you reduce biological behaviour to genetics, then of course you now are working with genetics and molecules, and that’s the subject of chemistry, which itself is based on quantum physics. So, in a way, you’ve got this beautiful pyramid of explanations: starting from quantum physics, then explaining basic chemical laws based on quantum physics and then from chemistry you try to explain genetics and then more complicated living organisms. Somehow the whole fits this nice scientific logic.