Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass were among the first books I read as a child. I was Alice: I shared her name, long hair, dreamy absent-mindedness, and preference for logic and imagination over common sense. I too was bewildered by the blindness of grown-ups, especially their failure to recognise that children were smarter than they were. I still am.

At 20, Alice changed my life. I went to the University of Oxford instead of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and became an empiricist psychologist instead of a Chomskyan philosopher – all because of a sun-dappled row down the Thames and a glimpse of gardens through a gate.

At 50, Alice is with me again in my work on theories, imagination and consciousness. The books exemplify the link between logic and imagination, and between both and the wide-ranging consciousness of childhood. Our unique ability to understand our world by creating theories is the same ability that lets us imagine possible worlds: science and fiction have a shared foundation.

For children, theorising and imagining are intense activities: they spend every minute learning and pretending. Charles Dodgson, shy Oxford don and mathematical logician, and Lewis Carroll, wild, uninhibited master of nonsense and imagination, were united in the little girl in the garden.

I think every scientist and every child is the grave, wide-eyed little girl who fearlessly follows evidence and logic wherever it leads – even through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.