'God,' says Marcus du Sautoy, 'is the things we cannot know.' Such is the imposing tone of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science's talk on his latest book, What We Cannot Know. Du Sautoy wants to take his audience on a journey to what he terms the 'seven edges of knowledge', currently impassable frontiers of human understanding from across the scientific and philosophical spectrum. Over the course of Professor du Sautoy's hour-long presentation, we were delighted with a galactic expanse of subject matter ranging from consciousness to postmodern literature to Brexit, all handled with du Sautoy's trademark crystal clarity and indefatigable enthusiasm. As with all of his public facing work, this talk is a thought-provoking stroll through some incredibly complex questions in the company of a master explainer.

Is the universe infinite? Can we know what happened in the time before the Big Bang? Where is human consciousness located in the brain? These are some of the questions that du Sautoy wants to address and, despite what you might think, he doesn't know everything. He's quite clear about this: he recalls being phoned up by a journalist to be asked about biological breakthroughs surrounding telomeres, which he confesses he answered by reading from a Wikipedia entry (take note, aspiring undergraduates). Such cunning makes perfect sense – scientists are in the business of finding solutions to problems that they don't currently know the answer to, but are there questions that they (or indeed anyone) will never get the better of? Such mystery both drives and confounds scientific progress. In du Sautoy's words, 'The unknown is the lifeblood of science; the unknowable is our nemesis'.

Hearing him take on each of his 'edges of knowledge' in turn is a pleasure. His inviting articulation of some of humankind's hairiest conundrums is both inspiring and entertaining. This particular presentation, however, was unfortunately hindered by a lack of time. There was only time for two of his seven questions in anything like the kind of depth that they each deserved, which was disappointing and verged on the event having a TED-talk-ish feel of surface scratching of its main tenets. This is ultimately a promotional event for the book, though, which inevitably means that the audience is watching a powerful engine in a very low gear – du Sautoy's really forceful and thoroughgoing brilliance is let loose in his writing.