Here are the three horizons of which my colleagues are trying to give me a layman’s stupid inkling: the creation of life in vitro; self-replicating molecules, which they put at ten years away (this may be conservative); and the theory of everything, which is a technical expression. A theory of everything, as Hawking and his colleagues are developing it, is on the origins of the universe and of time. We translate it more or less metaphorically. The neuro-chemistry of consciousness – the word I, moi, ego – is an arrangement of blood sugar. This is by no means fantastic or remote – for instance, we have no theory of aspirin (no one knows why an aspirin works, or what it does when you take it). We have no theory regarding the fact that there are many human beings for whom even one drink – a drop of alcohol in the cortex – can have severe consequences. And so the notion that consciousness may be a matter of neuro-chemistry is already imaginable even to the layman.

These are what they call the three “holy grails,” a curious borrowing, which at the moment concentrate the most active, adventurous minds among us. Any serious grasp of what is involved requires a numeracy of increasingly sophisticated order. It is numeracy, rather than literacy, that will enable the majority of human beings to cope with their altering world, the joy of their world.

I hope many of you remember the passage in Cellini’s autobiography when he is going to find out whether the great statue of Perseus has burst or is alright within the hot casement, the melting wax having being knocked away to reveal it. Not only Cellini, but the Florentine historians say several thousand people crowded in the street that night, hoping to see it, hoping to find out.

I guess hundreds of people were crowding in the streets of Little Cambridge, in East Anglia, the night Professor Wiles said he would announce the solution to Fermat’s last theorem. After 370 years, a solution arrived at, not by any computer or electronic nonsense, but a pencil and paper and seven years of unrelenting thought. People were crowding the street. The little hall in the Institute for Mathematics, where it was to be revealed, can take eighty people or so; the rest were in the street. And among those eighty, I was told, two could follow the demonstration. That didn’t matter. My common room that night sang like a beehive. I can put it in no less naive a way. I said, "Can you help me?" And they said, "Look Steiner, there were four roads of approach and he chose the most beautiful." And I said, “Right, you can help me. Keats chooses beauty. Beauty, truth." "No," they said, "we are using beauty not in a metaphoric sense but in a concrete sense, in an enormously concrete, specific sense." Again, I can be a great bore, so I said, "Can you help me?" Now, great scientists are generous, not like we humanists. And so they tried, and finally one of them said, "Don’t get angry. It would take twenty years to get you to the edge of elliptical curve theory, where the edge begins, so you could know what Professor Wiles has done to solve Fermat’s last theorem and the beauty of it." And so I, in a rearguard action of absolute despair, said, "That’s alright." Professor Weseltier of Harvard once said to me, "Before you are allowed to look at a page of Kabbala it is twenty-five years of preparation." I felt an ache, a physical ache, of the beauty of it, totally inaccessible to me.