Jim Al-Khalili

This reminds me a bit of what you took away from Stephen Hawking's book, Brief History of Time, a realisation that you could go to places in your mind far beyond what you had imagined.

Did you have dreams of going into space, becoming an astronaut?

No.

And so have you now ruled out any possibility of going to space or do you still have sightings?

But I still want to go.

Well, fingers crossed for getting into space.

But back in your teenage years, you did create your own journey through the solar system.

Hiranya, during your teens, the Sri Lankan civil war was escalating from simmering ethnic tensions to full scale conflict.

Your parents decided to bring you and your sister to the UK.

What can you say about leaving Sri Lanka?

You settled in Manchester.

You had an uncle and aunt who lived there.

Oh, coming from an all-girls school in Colombo.

That's right.

I was 16 when I came over with my family from Iraq.

I went to a school that had originally been a girls' grammar school and then it became a mixed comprehensive.

So I was one of only three boys...

In a year group of 120 girls.

So doing A-level maths and physics, it never occurred to me that these were boy subjects rather than girl subjects.

We were in the minority.