Well, I'm proud of my gender. I think, you know, and I've said this to my Berkeley colleagues this morning, but my feeling is that I think among women and girls that, you know, sometimes there's a sense that no matter what they do that their work will not be recognised the way it would be if they were a man. And I just … I hope that this prize and this recognition changes that at least a little bit, and that it's encouraging to other women who are in science, or even in other fields, to realise that, you know, their work can be honoured and that their work can have a real impact.

Now according to me, and this is my cosmology scheme, which I'm having trouble persuading the cosmologists about, is that when the universe is rid of pretty well all its matter, it in a certain sense forgets how big it is. Now that's a crazy idea, but you see if you don't have any mass around you don't have any way of scaling the size of the universe, and so it in effect becomes the big bang of the next aeon as I'm calling it – A E O N. So according to my scheme, the universe as we currently understand it, which is from big bang, and then there's this inflationary phase which I don't believe in, which is supposed to take place very, very early on, and then the universe has this more sedate expansion, and then it has another exponential expansion, and that's it. According to me, that's not it. It morphs into the next big bang.

As I was starting my academic career, it was almost considered to be a negative signal to your career to get involved in politics ... But to me that was a sign you were doing something useful.

And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems.

Now my job is to defend everybody. But I don’t mind. Because I travel, and I like to talk to people and really listen to them. And I have no prejudices. I figured out a long time ago that, whatever I think I know, I don’t know anything. Once I realized that, I really started learning. That’s a great strength: I know that I don’t know.