by Ben Falk
Boyle himself reflected on what he was trying to say afterwards and indicates his discussions with Cox were an important influence, especially their debates about science versus something bigger, as well as the potential consequences of CERN. ‘One of the themes for me is how arrogant science is. You talk with Brian Cox enough and you get this slight sense that they can do anything. And with [the Large Hadron Collider], they clearly think they can find this particle that existed after the Big Bang. He said there is a less than 10 per cent chance that it could create a black hole and you think, wouldn’t that mean we’re all dead? And he said you wouldn’t know anything about it, nobody will know anything about it – the whole galaxy will collapse into this black hole if it happens. He said it’s probably not going to happen and anyway when they exploded the first atom bomb, they told Congress there was a small chance they could set the world on fire – the whole planet – and they decided to go ahead anyway. So you have to be vainglorious in that way.’
Cox wasn’t so interested in the concepts of scientific hubris. Rather, the movie was about reconnecting with his love for nature and its awesome power. He was also keen to use Sunshine as a cog in one of his familiar treatises: we have to get out there and explore. What moved him was: ‘Those issues, the fact that nature is violent and it’s not necessarily safe on this planet and the only chance we’ve got of doing anything about that is learning about the universe. It seems obvious, but I can’t think of another film that actually says that. And it’s true, it’s correct and that’s why I love the film.’ The collaboration with Boyle and co. was so successful that there were promises of working together again. ‘Danny said that he’d bring me back on board if he ever made another science-fiction film,’ Cox told Shortlist. ‘But he’s since told me that he never will, so there you go.’
Sunshine was the first and biggest cinematic experience Cox has been a part of so far, but it’s not the only one. It’s worth noting that he received a credit of thanks on Departure, a short made by a group of students from the Arts University College at Bournemouth as their 2011 graduation film. Telling the story of two astronauts (James Lance and Camilla Rutherford) on a faraway spacecraft who have to make some tough decisions when their ship springs a leak, it echoes some of the themes of Sunshine but also takes its cue from other meditative sci-fi movies such as Moon or Silent Running.
‘One of our lecturers had worked with [Cox] before and she recommended we get in contact with him,’ says Ali Paterson, who produced Departure through his Inopean Films shingle, as well as contributing to the story as a writer and acting as art director. They phoned Cox’s agent to be told he was busy, but to phone back a couple of months later and it would be possible for the director Duncan Christie to have a chat. ‘Essentially, we were looking for a [scientific advisor],’ says Paterson. ‘I believe Duncan Christie spoke directly to him and about the technical aspects of the film.’ The agent also put them in contact with the National Space Centre in Leicester (the crew were told to mention Cox’s name and they would get in for free). And so the production designers and those who built the sparse but effective sets travelled up to Leicester and Cox was as good as his word. ‘They all had a good look round,’ says Paterson. ‘Brian got a thanks because we got that from them. We also spoke to Colin Pillinger from Mars Rover.’
The quietly haunting and well-acted short looks especially impressive for its student background and has proved to be Cox’s second at least critical hit. Explains Paterson: ‘It’s just got into the Berlin Film Festival, so I’m pretty chuffed.’
CHAPTER 8
THE BBC COMES KNOCKING…
Back at CERN, the countdown had begun to switch on at the Large Hadron Collider. In May 2007, Cox participated in another BBC Horizon show, The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, in which he faced the camera against a black background and talked about the switch-on date. When the programme was made, it was scheduled to be 26 November of that year, but it was of course put back. During this time, the price of the project was often being mentioned and the cost to the taxpayer, even though the scientists working there constantly said this was nothing compared to what they would be achieving.
Money was an easy target for the UK press, whose front pages were filled with stories of a financial crisis and recession. Why, some said, should the British public be spending money on something that might discover a new particle? Cox reiterated the technological advances CERN had brought to the world, such as the internet. ‘Also, medical imaging,’ he said. ‘Pretty much all of the medical imaging technology that we use today came from particle physics. It’s a spin-off of trying to understand how the world works. Again. Virtually everything is, but that’s a direct one – PET scanners, or positron-emission tomography. Positron is anti-matter. You need to understand anti-matter to have a PET scanner.’ But he was firm on the fact that in his eyes, the project was incredible value for money. ‘Its budget,’ he said, ‘as of which it was built and as of which it operates, is the same as my university. It’s the same as the budget of the University of Manchester, but 85 countries pay for it so it’s like one medium-sized European university. You also only need one in the world, fortunately. It’s either expensive or cheap, depending on which way you look at it. So whether or not that’s expensive is a matter of perspective, isn’t it? I think it’s pretty cheap.’
To counter-act any negative publicity, CERN launched a PR offensive and Cox was brought in to help. Beginning in April 2007, he hosted a series of podcasts, explaining that he would be inviting a series of famous people to come to CERN and experience what it was like there. ‘We’re going to get a sense through their eyes of what it means to look back in time to the origins of the universe,’ he said. He received a £10,000 grant from the Science and Facilities Training Council (STFC) to do so, with the remit to produce the podcast and an accompanying blog, which would include a section about the particle of the month. His first guest was the actor John Barrowman, star of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, who Cox described as, ‘one of the most famous people, I suppose, in science fiction.’
Chatting in the canteen and then on a tour round the facilities, Cox explained the concept of the multiverse to the wide-eyed star, who joked about the presenter’s ‘big ring’, adding: ‘It’s nice to be able to see where all of these questions that we have hopefully one day will be answered.’ It was clear that Cox was already becoming the public face of the LHC, especially if they were going to host British ‘celebs’ on the podcast. Standing in the LHC tunnel, Barrowman marvelled at its size, suggesting a scene where he ran the length of it. ‘We could call it “The Collision”,’ he said, ‘waiting for me to collide with somebody running the opposite direction. We could simulate what is happening down here.’ Cox laughed, replying: ‘It would be an extremely boring Torchwood episode!’
The pair joked about what kind of quark Barrowman would be and Cox was asked to sign a picture from the cameras on ATLAS (‘It looks like some kind of jet engine,’ said the actor), so that Barrowman could put up a framed picture of some atoms smashing together in his office. The positive publicity continued to the end of the programme. ‘Having seen it today, I’m totally amazed at the minds of the people and the creativity that goes into the creation of finding out where everything was created,’ said a rather muddled Barrowman. ‘You might just be the answer to world peace.’
The raft of famous people for the remaining 11 episodes never really materialised, though and instead Cox chatted to characters such as MP Ed Vaizey and comedian Kevin Eldon. Television presenters Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly expressed an interest in visiting, something Cox had not arranged at the time of writing. He did manage to get someone to visit which caused a small flurry in the Web-o-sphere – notoriously taciturn satirist Chris Morris. The writer and director behind the film Four Lions and shows such as The Day Today is a friend of Cox and a huge science fan. Though Cox preferred to talk about politics when they met, he always felt Morris steered the conversation towards CE
RN. ‘He doesn’t usually do things like that, but he was really fascinated by what we were doing there,’ said Cox. ‘So I said, “You should come out and see it for yourself.” He’s fanatically interested in everything.’
Enjoying his tour around the LHC, Morris managed to stump his friend when he said Cox had told him the LHC could destroy the universe, a charge he denied suggesting he merely wanted to scare his friend into putting more chilli into the meal he was preparing for him at the time. One thing CERN certainly didn’t do was pursue a rather deadly and anti-Swiss strategy for getting young people to see the complex – a far-fetched gag, which Cox explained in a comedic interview on the website www.neonbubble.com. ‘I realised that kids simply weren’t getting to see inside CERN in Geneva owing to the general Swiss fear of small people,’ he said. ‘Well, I like kids – I used to be one – and so I devised a competition where we would place special tickets inside special bars of special chocolate and allow the winners to tour. It was a great success. All the children died in horrific ways – high doses of X-rays, falling in the particle streams, accelerating to near the speed of light, that sort of thing – but the small print covered us. The Swiss were quietly pleased. They don’t like small people. It’s those clocks where the small people come out, you see. There’s a collective terror in Switzerland.’
Those who were part of the LHC were working non-stop and unconcerned about conspiracy theories coming from the outside world, fuelled by the many coffee machines dotted around the laboratory. In November of the previous year, Cox’s experiment ATLAS had made a huge leap forward, revving its barrel toroid magnet – the largest superconducting magnet ever built – up to its maximum current (21,000 amps). By June 2007, the team were lowering its two end magnets, each weighing 240 tonnes, into the tunnel. A month later, the new biometric system was being finalised, which meant Cox had to have his retinas scanned every time he went down into the LHC tunnel for security. That was important – people were beginning to talk about the project and with ATLAS alone costing £245 million just in materials, there was a lot to lose.
With almost 3,000 scientists from 38 countries represented too, no one could wait to get started on recreating the conditions less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang in order to see what must have happened and how the universe as we know it was formed. Not only that, but physicists were itching to begin the search for the Higgs boson. In his trademark style, Cox described this on The Six Billion Dollar Experiment. ‘The best theory we have for the origin of mass, or what makes stuff stuff, is called the Higgs mechanism,’ he said. ‘And the Higgs mechanism works by filling the universe with a thing, it’s almost like treacle. And by the universe, I don’t just mean the void between the stars and the planets – I mean the room in front of you. And some particles move through the Higgs field, and talk to the Higgs field and slow down, and they’re the heavy particles so all the particles that make up your body are heavy because they’re talking to the Higgs field.’
His fellow scientist Leon Lederman added to the description. ‘The Higgs brings simplicity and beauty to a nature that looks too complicated,’ he said. ‘It makes nature simpler than we think it is. It introduces a kind of symmetry, a kind of beauty that gives us an understanding of one of the most puzzling features of the Standard Model.’ Cox, however, was one of the scientists at CERN who believed that while the LHC was partly built in order to discover the Higgs boson, the fact that it might not be found would prove equally valuable and make the LHC just as valid.
‘It can be argued that the most interesting discovery would be that we cannot find the Higgs – proving, practically, that it isn’t there,’ said his colleague, the Spanish physicist Alvaro de Rujula. ‘That would mean that we really haven’t understood something. That’s a very good scene for science. Revolution sometimes comes from the fact that you hit a wall and you realise you truly haven’t understood anything.’ His views echoed those espoused by Cox, even during his tenure as Sunshine’s scientific advisor: that he doesn’t mind being wrong if it means he has the tools and the next steps to try and find out what is correct.
While he waited for work on ATLAS and the LHC to be finished at CERN, Cox was busy furthering his television career. ‘There was a period of getting celebrities to do science programmes,’ he told an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival, ‘but now it’s academics doing it. There’s a conscious decision to turn academics into presenters and celebrities. It’s the opposite of The X Factor.’
He was drafted in by his local BBC news magazine programme North West Tonight as their science guru; radio presenter Tony Livesey later said this was Cox’s big break, an over-exaggeration but it proved a useful, if brief practice ground. Fronting a series of segments dubbed ‘Appliance of Science’, he visited colleagues and places of interest in and around Manchester, examining the region’s influence in the building of the world’s first computer and exploring the importance of mathematics. As with later programmes, he demonstrated real-world examples of essentially abstract concepts, showing how Boeing used maths to help test the capacity of their airplanes to withstand lightning and how the fire service predict the ways fires will spread to help train their fire-fighters.
The beginning of 2008 also saw the first of three Horizon programmes broadcast that year. Titled What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity?, it’s the first time viewers were really able to witness the style for which Cox later became famous. Though previous television efforts had seen him either as a contributor or a talking head, finally the BBC were making good on what he thought they had first seen in him, back in 2005. The Beeb described the show thus and you can see how they were beginning to groom Cox to fill what they perceived to be a gap in their presenting roster – the cool scientist: ‘Particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the universe is built the way it is. He believes the answers lie in the force of gravity. But Newton thought gravity was powered by God and even Einstein failed to completely solve it. Heading out with his film crew on a road trip across the USA, Brian fires lasers at the moon in Texas, goes mad in the desert in Arizona, encounters the bending of space and time at a maximum security military base, tries to detect ripples in our reality in the swamps of Louisiana and searches for hidden dimensions just outside Chicago.’
Speaking at the time, Cox explained why he wanted to tackle the subject. ‘The biggest question in science is gravity at the moment,’ he said, obviously ignoring the huge number of magnets getting ready to fire at his day job, about which he had waxed lyrical for some time. ‘It’s the force we thought we understood for the longest time, since 1680, but it still baffles us and stays separated from our understanding of everything else. We tried to work out a way of [conveying it] and ended up doing this road trip, because most of the places we wanted to go ended up being in the States.’
He was paired with writer/director Paul Olding for the project, a collaboration that would continue through Wonders of the Universe and beyond. ‘We annoy each other with our questions,’ said Olding. ‘My physics questions to him and his biology questions to me (I am a biologist by training, you see – we compliment each other quite well).’ Driving across the country, Cox sang along with Manchester band Inspiral Carpets to their single ‘Saturn 5’, while criticising the coffee for tasting like gravel. He had grown to love coffee, mainly thanks to his American wife and even blamed her for making him not able to function without it. Asked what luxury he would take, if stranded on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the answer was a coffee machine.
Filming wasn’t all easy and his poor sense of direction did for them in Colorado. ‘We got lost going to the Sat-Nav headquarters in Colorado Springs, using Sat Nav,’ he remembered. ‘It took us into a field instead of getting us to the military base.’ Outtakes from the show reveal a man excited by the new challenge and still a little raw, not yet media-trained to within an inch of his life. He joked with the crew about looking young but insisted he did work in a physic
s lab and that he had the ‘prowess’ to present a serious TV programme. And he made fun of their accommodation, suggesting they had to stay in shoddy motels rather than decent hotels because of BBC budgetary constraints. He even put on a comedic working-class Manchester accent, observing that documentaries on the BBC were not about delivering information anymore, but about the audience experiencing a journey through the presenter’s eyes.
It was also clear that Cox wasn’t going to lose his physicist’s knack of giving short shrift to those who asked silly questions. At a diner in Tucson, Arizona and obviously tired, he and Olding got into an argument about the exact nature of gravitational waves. When the director struggled to understand what Cox was trying to say – as the scientist simulated a wave using his napkin and asked if Olding was being deliberately obtuse – there was a brief, but fascinating insight into the way the programmes were made. As Cox grew more annoyed and the director tried to explain what he was asking, the suggestion was it was the directors as well as Cox who helped to make the shows more accessible to an audience, who would likely ask similar questions about a gravitational wave sitting on their sofas. That’s not to say Cox was about to change the way he reacted to things he perceived as idiotic. ‘I don’t know whether it’s because I’m from Oldham, but I believe in a straight-talking version of science,’ he once said. ‘There’s nothing mystical about it. We are too delicate with people who talk crap sometimes.’
When Olding asked if they should mention that the moon landings have been alleged to be fake by some conspiracy theorists, Cox again grew tetchy, equating this to saying that America was never discovered. As Olding pushed him, Cox argued back that it would be inappropriate to talk about faked moon landings in a documentary about gravity and the matter came to a close. He admitted subsequently that he enjoyed getting angry, his friend and collaborator Robin Ince suggesting that he liked ‘fighting with people and going, “look at those idiots.”’ Cox agreed, answering a question about his dream dinner guest with Deepak Chopra. ‘I quite like controversial people – I like people I can argue with,’ he said. ‘I like being angry, so people who make me angry would be my ideal guests.’
