by Ben Falk
When CERN appeared to have fired sub-atomic particles known as neutrinos 453.6 miles from the lab near Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near Rome at a speed faster than the speed of light, it looked as though Cox would have to revise some of his core theories. He had been asked about the possibility of time travel before and always had the same answer. ‘Travel into the indefinite future is absolutely possible,’ he told Metro. ‘If you flew around space close to the speed of light for about four years, you’d come back to earth 40,000 years in the future. Amazingly, Einstein predicted it in 1905.’
But there were theoretical exceptions, thanks to Uncle Albert. ‘The precise thing is that in special relativity – that’s Einstein’s theory for space and time, not gravity– in that theory, time travel is prevented 100 per cent,’ he explained. ‘In his theory of gravity and general relativity, it’s possibly just about permitted, but most people think that will be closed off. It’s thought that it is probably a problem with our understanding of the theory. There are things called wormholes that can exist in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which are little tunnels through space and time. They are the science-fiction wormholes, essentially. Like in Deep Space 9. Those things are valid solutions to the theory, but most people think they’ll be unstable when we get a better understanding of gravity – quantum gravity, actually. There’s a tiny, tiny crack in the door where you could say, “Maybe.” But I think most sensible people doubt it. Being able to go back in time and stop your parents from getting together isn’t a fantastic way to run a universe anyway.’
Because of the scientific consensus of a cosmic speed limit – hitherto considered to be the speed of light – he was able to say to this. The Gran Sasso experiment potentially threw some of these comments into doubt. It was an area of science that would seek to challenge him – and cause him to receive a lot of time travel-related questions – as it progressed.
As a celebrity, however, Brian Cox is an anomaly. He’s the kind of person who can talk with conviction and knowledge about astronomy and particle physics, as well as make comments such as: ‘I don’t want to scare anybody, but it is overwhelmingly likely that we’ll get hit by a very large piece of rock from space at some point in the future – we’ve got to be prepared for that.’ All without getting laughed at while he does so. He’s famous enough to be asked whether he has ever contemplated a guest spot on Doctor Who and appears to have such influence that he once said: ‘I read that Courtney Love and Anne Hathaway both said, about a week apart, that they were reading books about quantum physics. I think it’s becoming a Hollywood badge of honour.’
He’s also a celebrity described by one commentator as having ‘backed into the limelight’ – a humble, average guy who is now seen as the face of UK science. And it’s a position that his peers are happy for him to occupy. ‘I’ve seen him on the telly – he’s got pretty good communication skills,’ says Professor Paddy Regan from the University of Surrey. ‘He’s passionate about his science. He’s as qualified as anybody else to speak about it. From everything I’ve seen from Brian Cox, I think it’s genuinely true that he passionately cares that science is important for culture and society.’ So far, he has managed to stay on the right side of the fame game, mainly through sticking to advice given by his friend and collaborator Dara O’Briain – ‘We were in a bar in Soho one night and I told Brian the first rule of showbiz: What would David Attenborough do?’ said O’Briain. ‘Nothing with the word “celebrity” in the title, nothing involving eating kangaroo parts in the jungle and no hosting light-hearted quiz shows.’ And he does it all with a smile, convincing his audience that the intricate formulae and theorems he talks about are simple to grasp.
‘I don’t think physics is easy,’ says Professor Regan. ‘It’s a discipline.’ Yet Cox has apparently sparked a renaissance in the topic among young people while managing to convince the right people, at least publicly, that his chosen career is one worth investing in. Science programming has always had a place on television, from Sir Patrick Moore and Carl Sagan to David Attenborough and Tomorrow’s World, but rarely has it enjoyed such primetime status or had so many TV hosts reaching for the chemical engineering degree for which they thought they had abandoned the need the moment they took off their mortarboards. Much of this is thanks to a man who once sported a terrible mullet while playing keyboards in Oldham squash club, who sported a tartan waistcoat on Top of the Pops, who taught his toddler son to love rocket launches and who got a D in his mathematics A-level.
Just remember, as a Northern man, he doesn’t like any kind of fuss.
CHAPTER 11
COX’S LAWS
Any scientist worth his salt has their own law. Whether it’s Einstein, Newton, or the Newcastle-born physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964 came up with the concept of the God particle (otherwise known as the Higgs boson), one of the main reasons for the creation of the Large Hadron Collider. Brian Cox once proclaimed his own law to Shortlist. ‘Cox’s law,’ he said, ‘states that the size of your audience is directly proportional to the amount of shit people talk about you.’
While this may be true when you are a famous television personality on top of being a scientist, it’s not something that will be cited in academic papers for years to come. On the other hand, Cox is never, as is clear from the above statement, afraid to speak his mind and there are a number of issues to which he continually returns in almost every interview. They’re his passions, his bête-noirs, the things he holds dearest and those he gets most angry about every time he sits down in front of a microphone. Herewith the Five Laws of Brian Cox.
1. Creationism is a crock
And he’s not afraid to say it. Of course, it comes from a position of science, rather than a specific antipathy to the idea of faith. At least it has since he became an adult. He told the Observer about his early religious forays: ‘I was sent to Sunday school for a few weeks, but I didn’t like getting up on Sunday mornings.’ His views have matured a little since then. Asked by the Guardian what he would do if confronted by a ghost, he answered: ‘It’s my view that the existence of ghosts would contravene the second law of thermodynamics. The principle of the conservation of energy and the fact that entropy always increases, you’d be hard put to throw that away. You’d have to rip the book up – that’s what it would imply if you saw a ghost. I would say, “I could not be more surprised than I am by the fact that thermodynamics appears to be shit.”’ In a vodcast with fellow TV presenter Robert Llewellyn, he was asked a similar question, about whether he could countenance the afterlife. The answer? A convoluted explanation about the heaters on the back of fridges and how if he ended up in heaven, he would be confused as to how a fridge manages to work. So, what is the second law of thermodynamics? The first law, better known as the Law of Conservation of Matter, basically means matter and/or energy cannot be destroyed. The amount of it within the universe remains the same.
The second law is otherwise called the Law of Increased Entropy. This means that as energy is used productively (for example, in keeping a human alive), it is turned into unusable energy. As such, the usable energy is lost forever. Physicists would then conclude that since no more energy is created and more and more is being turned into something unusable, nothing is eternal. Which means, in some people’s opinions including Brian Cox, there is no God and no afterlife.
He has displayed his anger towards those who believe the world will end in 2012, calling anyone who thinks this a ‘moron’. ‘We’re going to do some shows, by the way, end-of-the-world shows on December 21st in 2012,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be great – in London. We’re going to do another one on the 22nd to give a refund in case we’re wrong and the world ends. We’re going to do a full-ticket refund on the 22nd. I thought, it’s ridiculous – the world isn’t going to end. But then I thought, actually, for the people who believe that the world is likely to end more quickly because they’ll probably just get hit by a bus. Because they’re such idiots, they are probably
unable to effectively cross a road, so I think there is some kind of truth in it. If you really believe that stuff, you’re probably going to go anyway – staring at the sky, waiting for the big hand to come down.’
But interestingly, he’s not entirely dismissive of those who do have faith – unless they happen to be fundamentalists. ‘You got to be blunt,’ he says. ‘I’m not saying religious people are full of shit, but if you believe the earth is six-and-a-half thousand years old, then you are.’ He argues while he finds a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins ‘very funny’, he doesn’t think it’s the way to go about convincing people to change their belief system. ‘I think creationism should be taught in science classes,’ he says, ‘because it’s legitimate to say, “I think the earth was formed six-and-a-half thousand years ago.” Then you can go, “How do you know that it wasn’t?”
‘We know, for example, about the Grand Canyon: we know that rivers erode, we can look at it knowing how deep it is and we can work out how old it is, and it’s older than that. There are many other things, too but that’s good because it tells you how to be a scientist – that’s what science is. So, I have no problem with people putting forward theories about how the universe began because that’s what you do: you guess and then you go and test it. You keep going, and you keep finding out you’re not wrong knowing what you know, and you carry on. And eventually you get to a point where you were wrong and you replace it with something else.’
In fact, he’s keen to argue that while many people try and create a schism between religion and science, he has encountered a different mindset from his ecclesiastical colleagues. After meeting on a panel about atheism, he became friends with the Dean of Guildford Cathedral and following the success of Wonders of the Solar System, he received an invitation to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s house, who happens to be a fan of the show. ‘Rowan Williams is a very thoughtful man,’ Cox has said. ‘If you want to move society forward in a more rational direction, religious leaders can be useful because they share that view. Setting yourself up as anti-religion is not helpful. You can set yourself up as anti-maniac, that’s different. Setting yourself up as an atheist who is against all religion is not a battle that needs to be fought.’ However, that doesn’t mean he is prepared to alter his opinion – unless a new law of thermodynamics can be discovered. Instead, he believes we should turn to scientific solutions for our answers and be able to accept uncertainty in the same way as scientists do.
‘Science to me is just the application of common sense. What you have to do is accept what you don’t know. You have to draw a line and say, “Here’s what I know and here’s what I don’t know, and how will I get there? If I want to find out this stuff, what should I do?”’ But while he’s keen to turn away from the idea that there is something bigger than us, that there may be things we can never understand and it might be because there is something bigger than the universe, it’s ironic that Cox actually revels in the things he doesn’t know. Whether this is an attitude genuinely shared by his colleagues or just Cox himself is hard to confirm but it’s clear the sense of doubt, the desire to be constantly proved wrong does, somewhat bizarrely, drive at the heart of his quest for knowledge.
‘The best thing a scientist can be is completely devoid of dogmatic belief,’ he told Discovery.com. ‘That’s what I have – nothing I cling on to as a sacred view of the world. Science is the process of going to the edge of your understanding, that’s a character trait I have. The ability to say “I don’t know that” and then not be scared about that. I get asked when I go to talks in schools, “Well, how did the universe begin?” and I say, “I dunno” and it gets a laugh. And I say, “Don’t laugh, that’s actually the scientific answer. Don’t know, but I’ve got some ideas to go and try to find out.”’
This crunching of data, even on such ambiguous issues, is where Cox feels comfortable. And it could be construed as a different kind of fanaticism: one borne through solid facts. ‘Religion and science come from the same position, in a way,’ he says. ‘They originated in people who were interested in nature and fascinated, and wanted to ask some questions about how the world works. Why are we here? How did we get here? I think it’s important to recognise that there are three types of people and I have time for two of them. There’s people who notice the world is beautiful and interesting, and worth explaining. That can engender a sort of religious feeling in some people. There’s other people who notice that as well and it engenders a scientific feeling, which is to go explore it and use the scientific method to understand it better. And then the people I don’t have much time for are the people who haven’t noticed anything. If you don’t notice there’s something interesting at all, to me, that’s the worst possible position.
‘I don’t have any issue pointing out that religions had had a positive effect on civilisation. Obviously they have. The feelings they are designed to play off are the same feelings that scientists have. The world is very interesting, so you want to find out how it works; that is a common feeling.’ Yet while others search for an answer as to why we’re here, Cox is focused on how. He’s doing that in his work at CERN, but as he explains, ‘The difference is that in a religious person’s head, you tend to say “I’m not happy here, I don’t like this, I don’t know what happened at the Big Bang”. I’m happy to say from a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, we pretty much know what happened. Less than a billionth we’re not doing so well. I don’t know it, and I’ll gladly go and try to find out. Or you can invent something and say it was God. Then you’ve stopped, because you “know” what happened. Why would you do that?’
He’s not worried that his beliefs and the way he presents his television programmes might offend either – even in places like America, where there are more extreme levels of evangelical Christian belief. ‘I don’t make the [Wonders of the Universe] in order to get the biggest possible audience. That’s not why I do it,’ he says. ‘We just want to make good programmes. The moment you start trying to triangulate off people and try to follow the path of least sense – especially in a science programme – you’re just lost straightaway. There’s nothing I can do about it. The universe is 13.73 billion years old. When you make a programme that is about the beginning of the universe, you’re going to have to say that it was 13.73 billion years ago. There’s not a lot you can do about that, really. There are more scientific people in the US than there are in Britain because there are more people. So, there are more religious extremists in the US too, but that’s just because there are five times as many people living in the country. What can I say? Those people are not going to watch my shows anyway.’
‘Sagan wrote a very famous essay called Religion and Science: An Alliance, where he pointed out that really what you want in the world is a coalition of people of goodwill to move things forward,’ he told writer Gregg LaGambina. ‘He was thinking at the time about nuclear disarmament because in the ’70s that was the great threat. Now, you’ve got threats to the climate; you’ve got threats with conflicts, which are in part driven by clashes in civilisations and clashes of extremist religions so I think you can be quite pragmatic about it and say, “Even if I thought it was a good idea, I’m not going to convince everybody in the world that they should give up religion.” It’s not going to happen.’ He continues: ‘I’ve pointed to some writing by St Augustine, a venerated Christian theologian from many years ago. He pointed out that once you begin to read the Bible literally then you open it to ridicule and ultimately, that’s the path to the downfall of the religion. It is – because it’s not a textbook. St Augustine knew that. It’s not as if this is new thinking, it is a statement of the obvious.’
2. We should be doing more space exploration
Why? Because we need to prepare for when that asteroid hits. ‘We’ve already started,’ he told The A.V. Club. ‘There have been humans off earth now for over a decade on the International Space Station. We’re vulnerable on earth. Carl Sagan always said, “If the dinosaurs
had a space program, they’d still be around.”’ And as someone who grew up thinking the moon landings were the most significant piece of scientific progress in history, Cox considers the future of space travel. He told BBC Slink: ‘In ten years’ time, you could probably get married in space. You’ll be able to fly on commercial flights, weightless flights into space. Possibly not into orbit, but certainly these weightless hops that people like Virgin are going to do. In ten years, you’ll be able to do that and I suspect people will be able to get married on them. Around the earth, not on the moon or anything like that, but in space.’
It won’t be Cox, though he is thought to have signed up to a place on one of the first Virgin Galactic flights, due to offer passengers an astronaut-esque experience. And it’s all very well pushing forward with space tourism, but Cox believes searching to definitively discover if we are alone in the universe is the one area where the scientific community is really falling behind. Don’t call him a UFO-ologist, though – this is just microbial life. ‘I’m sure it won’t be much bigger than a microbe,’ he says. ‘We found an ocean on Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter that probably has twice as much water than the earth underneath the surface. It’s salt water, it’s incredible – bigger than the oceans of earth. In the last show of [the Wonders of the Solar System series], I go two kilometres down under the ocean in a submarine to see these geo-thermal vents. And there’s little crabs running around there. We know from the earth that you don’t need the sun – life exists anywhere there’s liquid water. And we’ve found it on Europa. We found it on one of the moons of Saturn; we’ve almost certainly found it on Mars. We’ve found ice, but we think there’s probably liquid beneath the surface. There’s methane on Mars, which is seasonal. With the seasons you get more or less methane in the atmosphere and the only way you can do that on earth is by life or by geological processes. But Mars is geologically dead, we think. It’s exciting, actually. Very exciting.’
