If I’d left this biography to others, they would have copied things from my Wikipedia page so I thought I’d do the same. It says that my hobbies as a child were dance, gymnastics, plane and bus spotting. That’s 50% correct. It also says that I was born on March 3rd 1968 in the Royal Oldham Hospital, later living in nearby Chadderton from 1971. In my book Human Universe, I reflected on my childhood in Oldham, which was a wonderful place to grow up.
“Oldham looks like Joy Division sounds, and I like Joy Division. There was a newsagent on the corner of Kenilworth Avenue and Middleton Road. On Fridays, my granddad would take me there and we’d buy a toy, usually a little car or truck. I’ve still got most of them. When I was older, I’d play tennis on the red cinder courts in Chadderton Hall Park, and drink Woodpecker Cider on the bench in the grounds of St Matthews Church. One autumn evening, after a few sips and the start of the school year, I had my first kiss there, all cold nose and sniffles. I suppose that’s frowned upon these days. The bloke in the Off License would have been prosecuted by Oldham Council’s underage cider tsar and I’d be on a list. But I survived and, eventually, left for the University of Manchester.”
As I also wrote in Human Universe, this was the beginning of my accent into insignificance; the gradual realisation that the Universe is very large and each of us is very small.
“John Updike once wrote that ‘Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil’. For me, the choice between fear and elation is a matter of perspective, and it is a central aim of Human Universe to make the case for elation. This may appear at first sight to be a difficult challenge – the very title Human Universe appears to demonstrate unjustifiable solipsism. How can a possibly infinite reality be viewed through the prism of a bunch of biological machines temporarily inhabiting a mote of dust? My answer is that Human Universe is a love letter to humanity, because our mote of dust is the only place where love certainly exists. This sounds like a return to the anthropocentric vision we held for so long, and which science has done so much to destroy in a million humble cuts. Perhaps. But let me offer an alternative view. There is only one corner of the Universe where we know for sure that the laws of nature have conspired to produce a species capable of transcending the physical bounds of a single life and developing a library of knowledge beyond the capacity of a million individual brains, containing a precise description of our location in space and time. We know our place, and that makes us valuable and, at least in our local cosmic neighbourhood, unique. We don’t know how far we would have to travel to find another island of understanding, but it is surely a long long way. This makes the human race worth celebrating, our library worth nurturing, and our existence worth protecting.
So that’s my childhood. Buses and rain and Joy Division and Cider. I attended St Matthews Infant School, Chadderton Hall Primary School and Hulme Grammar School in Oldham, and in 1986 was on my way to study electrical and electronic engineering at The University of Leeds when I got distracted by music and joined a rock band called Dare, fronted by ex-Thin Lizzy keyboard player Darren Wharton.
Dare recorded two albums for A&M records, Out of the Silence and
Blood From Stone, and toured as support act for Jimmy Page, Gary Moore and Europe. Towards the end of a support tour with Doro Pesch in the autumn of 1991, we had a disagreement in a bar in Berlin and I left the band to study physics with astrophysics at the University of Manchester.
Whilst waiting for my degree course to begin, I needed a job, and managed to find one as sound engineer and driver for a band called D:ream. In the spring of 1992, the band signed a record deal and secured an appearance on a London regional TV show. Because I had long hair and played keyboards , Peter Cunnah, the lead singer and songwriter, asked me to step in and mime the part. In this way, I accidently joined D:ream, who subsequently had a number one hit single with “Things Can Only Get Better”. The song had a second life in 1997 as the anthem for the New Labour election campaign which saw Tony Blair enter Downing Street. Being a member of D:ream allowed me to fulfil one of my lifetime ambitions, which was to appear on the legendary UK music show Top of The Pops, a gift for which I will be forever grateful.
On one of those appearances, I managed to persuade the Bee Gees to sign my University of Manchester undergraduate physics syllabus.
In the spirit of cutting and pasting stuff from other sources, here is a slightly modified extract from my academic CV, should you be interested.
I graduated with a 1st class honours degree in 1995 and a PhD in experimental particle physics in 1998. My thesis, “Double Diffraction Dissociation at Large Momentum Transfer”, was supervised by Professor Robin Marshall, based on research on the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. On graduating in 1998, I received a 3-year PPARC postdoctoral fellowship, followed by a 5-year PPARC Advanced Fellowship. I continued to work on H1 and at the D-Zero experiment at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab near Chicago, before joining ATLAS at CERN and becoming the spokesperson of the FP420 R&D project at the Large Hadron Collider. In 2005 I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which I held until 2013. In 2009 I was appointed Professor of Particle Physics at The University of Manchester. In 2016 I became a Fellow of the Royal Society. This makes my full title:
Professor Brian Cox CBE, FRS, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester and Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science.
In mid-2009 I was offered the chance to make my first big documentary series, originally titled “Seven Wonders of the Solar System”. I vividly remember the first filming day in Tromso, Norway; March 22nd, 2009. The person in the photograph had no idea that television would become a third career after music and alongside academia.
The series was broadcast in March 2010 on BBC2, but clashed with a history series on BBC1 called “Seven Ages of Britain”, presented by David Dimbleby. Much to our annoyance, somebody at the BBC decided that the viewers might get confused because both series began with the word “Seven”, and so we had to change our title at the last minute to “Wonders of the Solar System”.
The idea of describing a series of “Wonders” remained, however. The rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s ocean-moon Europa, the great storms of Jupiter and the methane lakes of Titan were all there, but we chose to return to Earth for the final scene. Here is my closing piece to camera.
“You could take the view that our exploration of the Universe has made us somehow insignificant; one tiny planet around one star amongst hundreds of billions. But I don’t take that view, because we have discovered that it takes the rarest combination of chance and the laws of nature to produce a planet that can support a civilisation, that most magnificent structure that allows us to explore and understand the Universe. That’s why for me, our civilisation is the wonder of the solar system, and if you were to be looking at the Earth from outside the solar system that much would be obvious. We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon that identifies our planet as home to life.”
I followed Solar System with two more “Wonders” series, “Wonders of the Universe” in 2011 and Wonders of Life in 2013, Human Universe in 2014 and Forces of Nature in 2016.
In 2019 I made a series called The Planets, which was in a sense an update of Wonders of the Solar System.
In 2021 came “Universe’. The series was filmed in unprecedented times during a global pandemic predicted by science, and ultimately alleviated by science. I think the experience shaped the series and made it more philosophical and perhaps more polemical. After all, the reliable knowledge upon which our understanding of genetics and viruses and vaccines rests was not acquired by fashionable cynics but by people driven by wonder. The foundations of that wonder lie amongst the stars because astronomy is the oldest science, and therefore a celebration of astronomy felt both apposite and necessary.
My introduction to the series on screen was, as ever, shorter than the piece I originally wrote. To end this short biography, here’s the full version.
Contemplating The Universe is exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Nobody, professional scientist or otherwise, understands how to internalise the fact that we exist, alone as far as we can tell, in a void illuminated by two trillion galaxies. Perhaps that’s why, there is a sense of relief that rises with the dawn. The brightening sky hides the stars, and the question that they pose. What questions? Questions that run the risk of sounding naive because they are profound. Questions, perhaps, we feel we should not ask in educated company. Wonder is unfashionable amongst fashionable cynics. How did The Universe begin? How will it end? What is the meaning of it all? Childlike? Maybe. Childish? Certainly not. The first two are eminently askable because they fall comfortably within the domain of science. That’s not to say we are able to answer them, but the study of the origin and fate of the Universe are the province of Cosmology, the foundation of which is Einstein’s theory of General Relativity published in 1915. For a hundred years, we have possessed a scientific theory that forces us to contemplate the beginning of time, supported by a century of astronomical observations. We live, certainly, in an expanding Universe. The distances between the galaxies are increasing today, and that implies that in the past the galaxies were closer together. If we run the equations backwards, we find that everything was very close together 13.8 billion years ago and we call that the Big Bang. We have even detected the afterglow of the Big Bang as ancient light known as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. In the old days, I’d tell you that it formed part of the static fuzz on a detuned TV set and you could have watched the ghosts of creation dance for yourself.
We know, therefore, that the Universe has not always been like the one we observe today in our cosmic neighbourhood; old, cold, almost empty, save for occasional islands of light scattered as snowflakes on the wind. Long ago, it was hot and dense and highly energetic, and out of those fires we emerged.
The story of our emergence is written today not in ancient texts but in textbooks, because we have observed it rather than invented it. The way to understand Nature is to look at it. Inside our supercomputers we build simulated Universes and watch as great lanes of dark matter condense as morning dew on a spider’s web in patterns laid down by sub-atomic-scale fluctuations when our Universe was far less than a billionth of a second old. We see stars and galaxies form around the scaffolding of the web and planets condense from the leftovers. On our planet we have seen active geology encourage carbon atoms to form into long chain molecules that encode information, and we understand in broad scope how evolution by natural selection allowed those molecules to write symphonies.
Today, the questions posed by the heavens still stretch the human mind beyond its capabilities, and without such challenges to our insular vanity there will be no progress. From the greatest of galaxies to the supermassive black holes at their heart, the sky is populated by natural objects we don’t yet understand, and that’s why the sky is so valuable a resource. Who knows where the new knowledge will lead, but long experience tells us it will lead to something wonderful.