Over the past two centuries, our nation has moved from being an agricultural economy, to a manufacturing economy, to a service economy, and now to a predominantly financial economy. But our financial economy, by definition, subtracts from the value created by our productive businesses. Think about it: while the owners of business enjoy the dividend yields and earnings growth that our capitalistic system creates, those who play in the financial markets capture those investment gains only after the costs of financial intermediation are deducted. Thus, while investing in American business is a winner's game, beating the stock market before those costs is a zero-sum game. But after intermediation costs are deducted, beating the market—for all of us as a group—becomes a loser's game.

If we have children, we risk pay cuts from our sponsors during pregnancy and afterward. It's one example of a sports industry where the rules are still mostly made for and by men.

I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don't think it's fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.

I don’t like the concept of not being allowed to go somewhere just because you’re not part of the gang. In London, it seems like everywhere is a club. I hate the fact you’ve got to be a member of one to get a late-night drink in the center. It’s horrible. And I mean, I’m a member of one there, but I never go to it. There’s something about them that is kind of culty, actually—the idea that we are the in-crowd.

Yes, in 2018, I was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery. I was a bit dumbstruck, never expecting that kind of thing to happen. I was keen that the money should be used well and the best way to do that seemed to be to encourage a more diverse research student population from under-represented groups.

My contemporaries were more upset about the Nobel than I was not to be recognised. One of them labelled it the 'No-Bell' prize! But it was fine by me. There's no Nobel Prize in astronomy and I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

I was very, very thorough, making sure I really understood how that telescope worked, and that it was working properly. I was quite convinced that I wasn't clever enough to be in Cambridge and would be thrown out at some stage. My policy was to work as hard as I could so that I'd know I'd done my best. We now label this as impostor syndrome, but we didn't recognise, and certainly didn't name it, back then.

They have a lot of extreme physics going on inside them and scientists use them to test theories of relativity on a cosmic scale. Einstein’s theories are checking out pretty well so far.

From one particular piece of the sky an unclassifiable signal sometimes recurred and my brain started to say: “You’ve seen something like this before, haven’t you? You’ve seen something like this before from this bit of the sky , haven’t you?” I got out previous recordings from that bit of sky. It often wasn’t there, but when it was, it was keeping its place amongst the stars.

Tony was cautious. He suspected I’d wired the radio telescope up wrong. So we checked on another radio telescope on the site. The thing was pulsing nicely on mine but as we stood by the pen recorder of this other telescope, nothing happened. It was a horrible moment. And suddenly there it was, five minutes later because we had miscalculated when the telescope would see it. If we’d miscalculated by 25 minutes, we’d have all gone home and the story would be different.