by Ben Falk
Back then, he may not have been the superstar he has since become, but it’s clear Cox knew even in those days what he would and would not do. Despite being scared about all the poisonous creepy-crawlies when he visited an experiment in Louisiana (and he seems genuinely frightened), Cox enjoyed the experience. It was a mostly a success too, garnering solid reviews if not entirely for the content, then for the presenter himself. ‘Dr Brian Cox is an interesting presenter,’ wrote a blogger on The Medium is Not Enough. ‘He’s personable, funny, knows what he’s talking about, can explain it in simple terms and isn’t a stereotypical science geek. He’s also not afraid to scribble the occasional equation down, which is nice.’
Where the reviewer didn’t get on board was with the very issue which Cox had brought up during the filming – the desire of the channel making the show to concentrate on the personal journey. ‘Thing is, about 60% of the documentary was all about Cox’s journey around the U.S.,’ they wrote, ‘lots of shots of him in a truck; lots of shots of him on the subway; lots of shots of him standing looking up at telescopes. It’s the kind of “people-centric” thing that appeals to the science-light science networks in the US, such as the Discovery Channel and Nova, and it’s much in keeping with current trends in TV documentary-making, but it gets in the way of actual content.’ The BBC, however, were not going to worry about such criticisms. After all, getting the audience to identity and empathise with their presenters was exactly what they wanted. And watching What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? it appeared that they might well have a star on their hands.
Though he had filmed two more Horizons to be shown later in the year, by mid-to-late summer Cox was consumed by the LHC. Because of his BBC profile – and Britishness – he had now become the designated spokesperson for the UK media on CERN and the switch-on date. During the open days at the beginning of April 2008, 76,000 people had visited and now people wanted action. In June, ATLAS was one of two experiments to close the LHC ring by installing beam pipes at their heart. Cox’s experiment, his job, was now one of the biggest collaborations ever attempted in physics. The computer systems to record the information from what was essentially a giant digital camera were in place. Though ATLAS would only record fractions of the data it saw, this would still equate to the 27 CDs per minute. If all the data from ATLAS were recorded, it would fill 100,000 CDs per second. That’s a transfer rate equivalent to 50 billion phone calls happening at the same time. Students, as Cox had been back in Hamburg, were working alongside the professional scientists in CERN and came from 172 institutes around the world.
Of the impending switch-on, CERN wrote: ‘We will be re-writing our children’s science textbooks, chapter by chapter. This experiment is the culmination of a lifetime of effort and the excitement is unlike anything we have experienced as scientists.’ Cox was certainly feeling a change in atmosphere whenever he wandered into the complex’s canteen for lunch. ‘Particle accelerators are born very rarely and the LHC will be the lone explorer at the high-energy frontier when the smaller Tevatron collider in Chicago is decommissioned in the next few years,’ he wrote in the Guardian. ‘All our eggs will then be in one basket.’
There was a definite sense of the responsibility to get things right. And despite all the ingenuity and hard work that had gone into creating the enterprise, there was no way to escape the challenges they would face. When the machine was first turned on, Cox had told John Barrowman that they would be lucky to get two particles to bang together, let alone the millions they were eventually hoping for. ‘A few weeks ago in the LHC control room, I asked one of the accelerator’s designers what he would feel on switch-on day,’ he said. ‘“It will be like threading a wet piece of cotton through the eye of a 27km-long needle,” he said, “but we’ll do it.” He meant it, and I have no doubt that the LHC and its detectors will deliver the goods. I have no doubt that we will look back at the year the LHC switched on as the most exciting time for fundamental physics in a generation, or possibly in the long history of the subject. Everyone here knows it and this is what it feels like to be at CERN in 2008.’
Of course, the world might not have existed after the machine was turned on. At least that’s what a lot of naysayers were talking about in the press and on the Web, arguing that the LHC would create a black hole which would swallow up the world, or that the collider was one of Nostradamus’s predictions about the end of days made true. A journalist who interviewed Cox in 2008 recalls their conversation: ‘I said to him jokily, “I’ve seen Event Horizon, I know if you create a black hole it creates a gateway to Hell.” Very drily, he replied, “No one would be more surprised than me if that happened.”’ Not all the comments were so jocular. It was then that he uttered one of his most famous quotes, responding to the Radio Times’ question about the dangers of the LHC in saying: ‘Anyone who thinks that the LHC is dangerous is a twat.’
Papers dubbed him the ‘Liam Gallagher’ of physics. The press officer at CERN even phoned to say thank you. Cox himself wrote that he was glad to be able to challenge the image of scientists as tweed-wearing old men with elbow pads, ‘carefully crafting their public pronouncements while strolling through hushed quadrangles beneath dreaming spires.’ It got him headlines and when he gave a talk in Florida some time afterwards, he said that people almost saw it as his catchphrase. ‘If you’re lucky, you get one quote on your gravestone and that’ll be mine,’ he said.
In fact, he and his colleagues would have been pleased if the LHC had created small black holes, since that would suggest the existence of multiple universes, one of the very things ATLAS was set up to explore. He told Oreilly.com: ‘Someone once said to me the trouble with conspiracy theories is because they’ve got no concept, no contact with reality anyway, then anything you say to them will be disregarded because the whole basis of their existence is that they ignore common sense. So you can’t say anything to these guys except that come the day we turn the LHC on when nothing happens and the world doesn’t end, I would like an apology from all of them for the shit that they’ve spoken for all these years. It won’t come, though!’
Inevitably, his comments led to him being misquoted on several websites, who insinuated that he was anti anyone sceptical about new scientific endeavours. With hindsight, he offered a slight olive branch, but it was clear he was more interested in clearing up discrepancies than actually apologising for his tough words. Writing on the Scientificconcerns.com forum, he said: ‘I’m quoted in [an] article posted here as being rather abusive to people who are worried about the LHC – I’d like to clarify! I certainly don’t think that people who are worried about new scientific endeavours are “tw*ts”! Scepticism is a valuable and vital part of our society, and one which is perhaps sadly lacking in public debate. For the record, the concerns about LHC are certainly wrong from a scientific perspective – nature is rather more robust than we give her credit for, and nothing we can do at the low energies we can manage at LHC or anywhere else in the foreseeable future will affect us in any way. But I would always encourage a rational debate about future advances in science, and in that sense I support the goals of this forum.
What I would say is that it is not sensible to hold an opinion in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Whilst I understand that much of the language of particle physics is opaque, there does come a time when it is worth accepting the views of experts. The analogy I would give is the design of aircraft wings – I am happy to trust an expert in aerodynamics to get it right rather than offer my own opinion about what shape they should be. It’s really the case that the particle physics community are sensible, rational human beings who go about their research because they believe that exploring the subatomic world is good for our civilization, not to mention interesting. It is also true that if anyone, including myself, had any doubt about the safety of what we are doing, we would stop immediately. I and all my colleagues consider our personal safety and the safety of our families to be FAR more important than the search for the Hig
gs particle – indeed, if the risk were even as high as 1 in a billion, or whatever people quote, then I would be campaigning with you to stop it. But honestly – the case advanced against the LHC is based on the rather loud pronouncements of a couple of people who really do not have the knowledge to make them. This “jtankers” chap who posts all over the place began one statement claiming that we collide particles together at twice the speed of light, and Otto Rossler, whilst clearly a distinguished biochemist, has based his argument on a pretty basic error in General Relativity. Now I am not criticizing these gentlemen for offering an opinion, but wisdom comes from noticing when one’s opinion is disproved by evidence. This is the key to science. So, in summary, I support this forum as a place where sceptical voices can be raised, but scepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on.’
To much fanfare and no Armageddon, the Large Hadron Collider was switched on for the first time on 10 September 2008. There was blanket coverage on Radio 4 and Google posted an image on their homepage that was seen by an estimated half a billion people. Gia tweeted her pride when her husband sat down on Newsnight with host Jeremy Paxman and the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir David King, to argue the importance of the LHC. Paxman was glib about whether it was useful to spend money on a machine of this nature and Cox leapt passionately to its defence. More disappointingly for him, King also seemed ambivalent about the project, saying he was excited that it was happening, but also wondered whether money should be spent on more focused research.
It wasn’t that surprising coming from a former science advisor to the British Government. Cox managed to restrain his anger, but it was obvious he was annoyed that King – the head of a body that champions the progression of science – should be negative about something drawing physics and science into the headlines. For someone on a mission to bring science into the mainstream conversation, he saw the LHC as a perfect metaphor for his life’s work and why he wanted people to recognise its importance. ‘The LHC has captured the public imagination,’ he wrote in the Daily Telegraph in the week of the switch-on. ‘Which is wonderful because scientific exploration on this scale is a prerequisite for our survival as a species in this dangerous and challenging universe and yet a significant fraction of the population would usually rather watch The X Factor. It would be a shame if the ultimate result of billions of years of nuclear alchemy in the heart of billions and billions of suns were considered by the majority to be a pattern of atoms called Simon Cowell.’
Unfortunately, neither Cox nor his colleagues had much time to revel in their success. Just nine days later, an electrical problem occurred, causing the LHC to break down. ‘What we know indicates there was a faulty connection between two cables joining two magnets together that warmed up to the point of melting and that resulted in helium being leaked into the tunnel,’ said CERN media liaison James Gillies at the time. The resulting repairs would take longer than expected and it wasn’t restarted until over a year later, in November 2009.
Luckily for Cox, the media and the public at large had already cottoned on to the scientist from Oldham, who had become ubiquitous during the run-up to the switch-on. He was written about in glowing terms in various papers, with David Smith in the Observer remarking: ‘Cox became the acceptable face of physics last week. To Cox himself fell the role of public oracle and making unfathomably complex science accessible to the man in the street via BBC2’s Newsnight, Radio 4, Australia’s equivalent of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross and countless other media. Cox is poised to slip the surly bonds of geekiness and become the god of small things.’
He was now 40 years old, a successful scientist and part-time television presenter on the cusp of reaching the next level of fame. First up was another Horizon in early December 2008. Do You Know What Time It Is? saw him explore a concept dear to his heart. As someone who never wears a watch, he didn’t like knowing the time and considered the titular question stupid. Nevertheless, his love of Einstein and fascination with the idea of what we consider to be the fourth dimension meant it was a subject with which he had a lot of kinship. During the making of the show, he met the Earth’s Director of Time Dr Dennis McCarthy who spends his career monitoring the planet’s rotation for slight changes which alter the atomic clock – so-called leap seconds – and discovered a day is never 24 hours. He also visited Mayan temples in Mexico, where they built temples to time. After getting sunburnt when his director made him stand outside on the previous programme and speak his piece to camera in Chicago, he wore a scarf – this time he wasn’t taking any chances. Still, he found something to complain about: those darn creepy crawlies!
Joking that it never specifically stated in his contract that he wanted a room which didn’t have poisonous insects in the bath, he said: ‘We decided to come somewhere that was riddled with scorpions. Don’t ever say you don’t get value for money from your licence fee because when we make things, we have to stay in hotels that have scorpion in the bath.’ Somewhat surprisingly, the Beeb came in for another spot of jovial battering as Cox berated the trend for documentaries on the network to employ self-shooting presenters. He thought them poor and was pleased that the BBC had hired a proper cameraman to make his programmes look good. The desire for his films to be aesthetically pleasing as well as informative was something that stuck. Audiences enjoyed Do You Know What Time It Is? while critics continued to praise him as a presenter. Reviewer John Beresford noted on TV Scoop how different he was to the usual scientists on television: ‘With Prof Cox we’ve got someone younger and less eccentric and as such, a bloke who you would love to go for a pint with so he could blow your brains out with weird scientific and philosophical ideas.’
Joking that Cox lives just up the road from him and so that pint may come sooner than he thinks, Beresford rounded off his review by saying: ‘This was, by miles, the best science show of 2008. In fact, this is a show I’ll talk about for years to come, no doubt. I feverishly sent texts to friends to make sure they catch this on iPlayer. It was a phenomenal piece of television that has left me completely ga-ga. In Prof Cox, we’ve got a new and friendly face of science on TV. What a guy and what an astonishing television programme.’ It would be hard to top that, but before the end of the year, Cox managed to squeeze in another Horizon programme, Can We Make A Star On Earth? Searching for a future energy source – that of nuclear fusion, as seen in and used by our sun – he travelled to some of the most ambitious fusion experiments around the globe. This included a bomb-testing facility in America, access to the world’s most powerful laser and a trip to South Korea, where he had the opportunity to go inside the reaction chamber of K-Star, the world’s first super-cooled, superconducting fusion reactor.
Crossing the planet, seeing his media profile soar and witnessing the switch being thrown on an experiment he had dedicated several years of his life to, 2008 was a good year for Cox. And there was good news at home, too. Gia had been hard at work, tapping into her geeky side by working on web materials for the sci-fi sequel The X-Files: I Want To Believe and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. She was also pregnant for the second time. On top of being a stepfather, Cox was to have a child of his own. He saw the scans and described them as ‘amazing’. Now they were living in a house in south London that was a little too small for them.
Gia reached her second trimester by Christmas and Cox bought her an iPod Touch as a present. For a tech-savvy mum-to-be it was the best present she could have received. During her pregnancy, she used it to listen to hypnobirthing sounds as she fell asleep and as her due date approached, she began watching birthing videos on YouTube while lying in bed at night. When labour came, she downloaded the Labor Mate app, which timed her contractions. ‘I can’t tell you how incredibly useful this little application was,’ she said. George Eagle Cox was born around 1.20am on 26 May 2009. Cox was present at the birth, holding his wife’s hand as she squeez
ed it incredibly hard in return.
‘Saturn 5’ by the Inspiral Carpets was the first piece of music little George ever heard. The song that had turned Cox’s mind towards the moon landings (and provided a good singalong) seemed highly suitable. ‘We thought, what would be appropriate for his entrance into world?’ said the new dad. ‘He’s already got the swagger.’ George’s ornithological middle name was, of course, given to him because it was the name of the lunar module for Apollo 11’s mission to the moon.
At nine days old, the newest addition to the Cox family was falling asleep after Newsnight and waking up every four hours. Cox was spending as much time as he could with his son because he was on a break from filming Wonders of the Solar System. So busy had he become, he needed to book time off from the BBC to witness the birth of his first child. Just three weeks into George’s life, Cox had to jet off again to continue filming. It was hard, both for him and for Gia. She herself found it particularly tough. ‘It’s a LOT harder to have a newborn when you are almost 40 than when you are in your 20s,’ she wrote on the website Parentdish less than a month after the birth. ‘My newest son, however, seems to be taking after his daddy and enjoys a lie-in.’
There were some problems, though. George didn’t seem to be feeding properly and after calling in a lactation consultant, he was diagnosed with a posterior tongue tie. This meant the piece of skin connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth was too short and so he couldn’t move his tongue in the way that it was supposed to, which made breast-feeding tricky. Gia took him to London’s King’s College Hospital and after a brief procedure, George was back to normal. She started co-sleeping with him. While Moki had been an easy baby, she described George as ‘much more needy’. ‘I’ve been almost completely on my own with him,’ she wrote in September 2009. ‘My husband is off travelling the world, filming a huge series for the BBC, so I’ve been single-handedly doing everything – from dealing with a very needy and difficult baby to dealing with my nearly-a-teenager and running the house.’
