The principle that I would most want people to understand is that of emergence. This principle does not have a nice, neat, mathematical formulation, like E = mc². But it is actually equations like E = mc² that I would like emergence to be an antidote to.

Our ability to reduce complex and beautiful phenomena to simple equations has led many people to fear that science explains such beauty away, and diminishes it - as if a simple equation implies that the phenomenon it describes is simple too. Yet nobody is foolish enough to think that the Mona Lisa's smile can be reduced to a chemical assay of the pigments involved. We know that a painting is not a property of paint, but a property of the organisation of paint. And so it is with nature. The beauty does not lie in the desiccated equation, but in the surprising things that the equation can give birth to, when we water it with data.

If more people saw scientists balancing their analysis with synthesis, then the poetry of the universe might not be so badly obscured by the prose. But it runs much deeper than this. The same error of reasoning leads people to assume that things are never more than the sum of their parts, so they look for the secrets of life and mind among the particles and fundamental forces of the universe. And when people do not find the secrets of life there, they look for them in metaphysics and religion.

In truth, the universe is an endlessly creative place, in which genuinely new things can emerge from the dullest of components. Life and mind are recent, but glorious innovations, in the universe's drive towards complexity - the top of the tree, not the bottom. A few paragraphs cannot hope to explain what happens to one's worldview, when this idea really begins to sink in. But if I could plant any seed in people's minds, then the notion of emergence would be the one I would choose.

Steve Grand is author of Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in 20 Easy Steps (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)), and Creation: Life and How to Make It (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). See his website.