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Still, it is important to note that we don't see any time travelers from the future; this means either that this is never going to be done or, more likely, as is the case with the wormhole, that you can't travel back to an epoch before you made the time machine. So the idea that we'll just wait and be given a time machine from our descendants when they come back and visit us doesn't work. That neatly explains why there aren't any time tourists around at the moment.

I want to move on to your role as a popularizer of physics. What drew you into writing for a general audience? I imagine that some of your colleagues must have thought that you were abandoning the real work and becoming a journalist.

Indeed, that's exactly right. First, I should say that I never had any facility for writing. I barely scraped through English at school, and any writing ability I have has came as a bit of a surprise. I just blundered into it.

When I went to King's College, London, it happened to be more or less next door to the offices of the journal Nature, and they used to get me to help from time to time with their manuscript assessment. Then they asked if I would like to write a little column for them, and I thought that it might be fun to try. My first skirmish with attempting to sit midway between the specialist's world of science and the general public was that column. It grew from there. My first book, which I was already working on [The Physics of Time Asymmetry], was one the publisher just asked me to write. That was an academic book, not a work of popularization. There was a knock-on effect, because that book created a stir and publishers requested that I write a book for undergraduates. So I wrote one for Cambridge University Press called Space and Time in the Modern Universe, and then another publisher saw that and suggested that I write something for the general public. So, with each stage the level came down, but the sales went up!

I know that you have been thinking about design ever since you were a little kid, but when did you start reflecting on it in the philosophical way that you began with God and the New Physics and continued in The Mind of God? That idea seems to have captured you in a lot of ways.

I suppose that what really fascinated me at the time of my thesis work, which I was doing at the age of 22, was the link between the large and the small, the idea that the physics in a local region might depend in some way on the largescale structure of the Universe, the connectedness of things. That still fascinates me as a philosophy, as a way of looking at the world. That was a very deep part of my thinking in those early days.

What do you think is the most compelling evidence of design in the universe?

There is nothing that is totally compelling. Steven Weinberg or Martin Rees can look at exactly the same set of facts and say, "No, that isn't evidence of design." At best this is circumstantial evidence. I have thought long and hard, though, about the nature of the laws of physics and the fine-tuning of those laws and the way it all fits together so well. It's not just the fine-tuning; it's both aspects. So, for me it is in those laws.

Now, I am well aware that we should not commit the fallacy that William Paley committed and look at the natural world and say: "The contrivances of nature look so clever that they must have been made by a Creator." I accept the fact that all the physical systems that we see, from the biological realm right through to the galaxies, are the products of natural physical processes, and I wouldn't use the word design in connection with those. It is only in metaphysics, when we look at the laws that underlie all this—at the total package, in other words, not the specifics—that I would say that there is evidence for design. You can look at it all and not draw that conclusion. Everybody will have a threshold, and this is an interesting point: what would it take to convince Richard Dawkins that there is design in nature?

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