What made you decide to write this book?

I wanted to share something I find very exciting, but also [show] how we do science and the fun in doing it. I think we are all scientists in that we can all explore and understand. Most of all, I wanted to connect with people who don’t realize how much they have it in themselves, in their curiosity, to address some of the questions we all ask. That they are part of this human endeavour, this human journey of pushing the frontiers of knowledge.

Why did you call it The Beauty of Falling?

The book explains how our understanding of gravity evolved – how Einstein’s general theory of relativity provides a very good description but fails at a point. The “beauty of falling” is that the theory does fail. It shows us that there’s not an ultimate truth, there’s not an ultimate knowledge and that’s “it”. Science is always a continuous endeavour.

So failure is a good thing, right?

Failure is the best feature that a theory can have because it tells us where to look for new discoveries. We don’t need to do lots of observations and wait until there is a mismatch between observations and the theoretical projections. We know from the outset that eventually we’ll need to uncover new layers of physics – and that to me is very exciting. When you know something will fail, how do you embrace that and move forward?

How do you convert mathematical ideas into language?

For me, the symbols on a blackboard: this is the language. Theorists use mathematics to express thoughts in a rigorous technical way. But after a while, this almost becomes second nature so you don’t even think about the symbols themselves. The concepts, and how they fit together, become much more natural. Setting those equations back in words, and [explaining] what it means practically for the real world, is very important as a physicist. Having a real intuition for how things work is important.

• Click here to read Kate Gardner’s review of The Beauty of Falling.