The Observer profile: Brian Cox | Science | The Guardian The Observer profile Putting the fizz into physics The former keyboard player with D:Ream is set to become the nation's favourite scientist after talking us through the subatomic goings-on at Cern. Just don't mention the end of the world... Saturday 13 September 2008 19.01 EDT First published on Saturday 13 September 2008 19.01 EDT Share on Messenger Close In the transient media parlance, Gordon Ramsay is a 'rock star' chef, Dan Snow is a 'rock star' historian and Sarah Palin is now a 'rock star' politician. In the case of Dr Brian Cox , the soubriquet is not so much tired as justified. The scientist who leapt to ubiquity last week, enthusing over what he describes as mankind's 'biggest project since Apollo', had a previous life in a Nineties band with regular gigs on Top of the Pops. Cox played keyboards for D:Ream for the last time in May 1997. The occasion was New Labour's election night party at the Royal Festival Hall, and the song was 'Things Can Only Get Better'.

In the years that followed, Britain got Blair and physics got its own ambitious, telegenic communicator in Cox. Today, as Blair's heir is apparently sucked into a black hole, Cox is poised to slip the surly bonds of geekiness and become the god of small things. A youthful 40, without a boffin whisker in sight, and articulating in the kind of regional accent that TV executives find 'warm', Cox became the acceptable face of physics last week when the world's most powerful particle experiment was switched on at the Cern international science centre. In vast underground caverns near Geneva, the £5bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where Cox works on a particle detector called Atlas, has begun recreating the conditions present in the universe less than a billionth of a second after the big bang. The event captured the public imagination, or at least the media's, on the day with blanket coverage on Radio 4 and an image on Google's homepage, which the internet company told Cox will have been seen by around half a billion people.

To Cox himself fell the role of public oracle, conveying the strange beauty and violence of subatomic particles, 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. He reeled off facts and figures of undeniable wow factor: the accelerator's circumference of 27 kilometres, buried about 100 metres underground; the temperature inside the tube, -271C, colder than space, making it the biggest fridge in the world; a proton beam whizzing around one way - 11,000 times a second, with as much energy as an aircraft carrier going at 30mph - and another proton beam whizzing around the other way; the beams smashing together up to 600 million times a second. Among the aims of the biggest experiment of all time: to isolate the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle', which gives the matter in the universe its mass. As Cox put it, with his gift for user-friendly terms, that really means: why is this table solid?

Some marginal scientists warned that the LHC might conjure a black hole that would gobble up the entire planet, a gift to any headline writer who ever dreamt of plastering 'End of the world is nigh' on sandwich boards. Cox and his colleagues received cranky emails including implied death threats. Eventually, as peeved as Richard Dawkins at a convention of creationists, he delivered a blunt riposte: 'Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.' In this plain-speaking professor from Manchester University, television might have discovered its evangelist for science. Just as history has fresh-faced Tristram Hunt or Bettany Hughes brimming with passion for the subject, so Cox's enthusiasm for physics could be the biggest boost for the subject since David Tennant flourished a sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who. He has the looks, the likes-a-drink-or-two street cred, and still a lingering rebellious streak: he married his American wife, glamorous TV presenter Gia Milinovich, in secret. She runs a blog where threads include a discussion of whether her husband is gay (he isn't).

Cox has also been making a good fist of one of television's toughest assignments: presenting a subject matter so tiny that no one can see it. Professor Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society, said yesterday: 'As an astronomer I'm lucky to work in a subject where there is already public interest, and where it's not too difficult to convey the key ideas and new discoveries in a non-technical and accessible way. It's far harder to make particle physics accessible and interesting. Brian Cox is one of the few scientists who succeed in doing this, and I much admire him for it.' It all began with a boy inspired by rockets, spacemen and the mysteries of night sky. Even at the age of one, he has been told, he was fascinated by the moon landings, and he remains enchanted by the phrase 'Apollo's children', a generation who grew up to become scientists and engineers (he hopes that the LHC might have the same galvanising effect). For Christmas he wanted a telescope, and he dreamt of flying to Mars. He recalls a happy childhood in Oldham that included geeky pursuits such as plane spotting and even bus spotting.

But at 16 he discovered music and 'went completely the other way', going to nightclubs and gigs and ending up with a grade D in his maths A-level. Cox became a keyboard player with local rock band Dare, formed by former Thin Lizzy's Darren Wharton. They went on tour but broke up after a fight in a Berlin bar. Cox came home, called Manchester University and told them: 'Right, I want to come to university now and do physics.' He was 23. But he wasn't finished with music. In 1993 he joined D:Ream 'by accident' and achieved something like stardom. The band were nominated for the MTV Europe music awards and the Brit Awards for Artists of the Year in 1994, and Cox made his Top of the Pops debut in an unforgettable tartan suit. It was different from the typical student existence of pubs, libraries and dank flats. Cox has recalled: 'Once I was in the lab all day and when I finished I walked up the road to support Take That at the G-Mex in Manchester.

My friends at university just thought it was so funny.' D:Ream's dance hit 'Things Can Only Get Better' reached number one in the UK in January 1994 and gained a second lease of life as the New Labour anthem during the 1997 election. But Cox found he could no longer fully combine his twin careers and had to back out of D:Ream's Australian tour so he could finish his physics degree. He gained first class honours and stayed at Manchester to pursue a PhD, attending lectures given by Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics. 'He was a breath of fresh air - he'd done something else with his life,' Forshaw recalls. 'The first impression was of someone enthusiastic and very capable. We worked together during his PhD, have written a lot of papers together since then. We spend a lot of time drinking wine and beer and talking physics.' Certainly Cox, who has lobbied the government over cuts to research budgets, never regretted the decision to quit music: 'After about five years' touring, it's not glamorous any more, it's just knackering.' In fact he now travels more than ever, giving talks and lectures around the world.

He has a flowering media career on Radio 4 and with BBC television's Horizon, as well as writing for magazines and newspapers. He idolises the late Carl Sagan, the great populariser of astronomy, and would love to emulate his series Cosmos. He was also hired as scientific adviser on the sci-fi film Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame. Boyle said: 'He somehow makes it accessible and puts it in human terms.' Cox worked closely with the cast including Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who played the ship's young physicist and, somewhat similar in appearance, became Cox's fictional alter ego. Cox now divides his time between Oldham and London, where his wife lives with 11-year-old Moki, her son from a previous marriage. The couple's first date was on 11 September 2001, and they married four years ago in her mother's front room in Duluth, Minnesota. He only told his own parents when he got back. 'I'm a northern man. I don't like any fuss,' he explains. Milinovich's most recent blog post says touchingly: 'There have been many times over the years when I've been extremely proud of my lovely husband.

His appearance on Newsnight is right at the bloody top of the list.' When in Geneva, he uses computer 'iChat' to keep in touch with Gia and Moki before going for dinner. A recent newspaper article, in which he described rambling back to his room having usually drunk about a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape, annoyed his colleagues who said it implied that Cern was a tax-funded drinking den. Cox admits that he hates waking up in the morning, staying in bed until 9am if he can. But he is hardly unfit, running half-marathons and playing football with university colleagues; he used to have a season ticket at Oldham Athletic. These days his taste in music is jazz and singers such as Billie Holiday. Cern's grand experiment may or may not reveal the secrets of creation. In the meantime, Cox believes the revival of science in the national culture will do. The BBC is planning to bring back a popular science strand in the tradition of Tomorrow's World and will need a presenter. Don't bet against this D:Reamer getting the job. The Cox lowdown Born in Oldham, Greater Manchester, 3 March 1968. His parents were bankers.

Married to Gia Milinovich, a TV presenter and new media consultant, and has an 11-year-old stepson, Moki. He lives with them in a house in London and on his own in a flat near Oldham. When working at Cern, he stays at a Holiday Inn at the foothills of the Jura mountains in France. Best of times Now. For Cox, professor of particle physics at Manchester university, and other scientists working on it, the Large Hadron Collider is an 'Apollo moment', the chance of a generation. It could be his ticket to a career as champion populariser of physics in the media. Worst of times Cox started university late and combined the physics lab with playing keyboard for D:Ream. This led to a career crisis when the band went on tour to Australia, forcing him to choose between pop and physics. He stayed in Manchester and finished his degree.

What he says 'The LHC really has the chance to change our view of the world in the way that Copernicus, Newton and Einstein did.' What others say 'There is a danger that the media work takes over and Brian's well aware of it, but he's passionate about the way science is seen, and communicating this whole process has immense value.' Professor Jeff Forshaw, friend and colleague at Manchester university Rock star scientist Professor Brian Cox is made an OBE for services to science Rock star scientist Professor Brian Cox is made an OBE for services to science Share on: LinkedIn <a href="javascript:prompt('Google')"> <div class="pp_shareusitem shareus_google" title="Share this release"> <span class="pp-visually-hidden">Share on: Google+</span> </div> </a> <a class="addthis_button" addthis:url="" href="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=xa-4ca449677c512874"><img onmouseout="this.src='//manager.presspage.com/images/button_library_sharethis_over.gif'" onmouseover="this.src='//manager.presspage.com/images/button_library_sharethis_over.gif

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12 Rock star scientist Professor Brian Cox is made an OBE for services to science 5837_large.jpg Professor Brian Cox, who has become an international media star thanks to his hit TV series on the origin of the solar system, has been made an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

The 42-year-old professor, based at The University of Manchester School of Physics and Astronomy, has had a meteoric rise to worldwide stardom in his field. Professor Cox visited locations around the world to explain how the laws of nature carved spectacular landscapes throughout the Solar System for his acclaimed BBC TV series "Wonders of the Solar System". The Oldham-born scientist’s informative and accessible style of explaining even the most complex of subjects has led to him be hugely in demand wherever he goes. He now spends much of his time, along with thousands of other scientists, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the famous scientific research centre in Geneva. The team there hope to recreate conditions in the Universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang and uncover some of its unsolved mysteries. This is Professor Cox’s second taste of fame, having been a member of nineties pop act D:REAM while studying for his PhD at The University of Manchester. With the band, he played “Things can only get better” at the famous Labour Party victory celebration at the Royal Albert Hall after the 1997 General Election.

Professor Cox is also a regular presenter on the BBC flagship science programme Horizon and acted as scientific advisor on the 2007 film Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. The OBE is just the latest in a long line of honours bestowed on Professor Cox for his efforts to publicise science. In 2002 he was elected an International Fellow of The Explorers Club and in 2006 he received the British Association Lord Kelvin Award for this work. His TV series was described as ‘utterly contagious’ by the Guardian. In these, he told how Earth, of all the planets in the Solar System, is the only one to have a moon that completely obscures the face of the Sun. Professor Cox described how every molecule of every drop of water is moved around our planet by the Sun’s energy for the series praised by BBC Radio Two DJ Chris Evans as one of the best he has ever seen. In Norway he witnessed the battle between the Sun’s wind and our planet, as the night sky displayed the beautiful Northern Lights. And in California he made contact with Voyager, a space probe that has been travelling since its launch 30 years ago.

Now, 14 billion kilometres on, Voyager has just detected the solar wind is beginning to run out of puff. Professor Cox said: “This is a wonderful accolade for me personally but credit must also go to The University of Manchester and the Royal Society as well for allowing me to pursue these projects. “Many employers would not have gone so far to support me, or could have made it hard for me to have the freedom to do the TV work, but the University has been totally supportive. “I could never have dreamed when I was a student here that I would be receiving such an important honour as an OBE. “Every time I receive an award or honour such as this I feel as though it is further recognition of science. I feel there is a need to take science more seriously in this country and hopefully we are beginning to turn around the public perception. “This is a fantastic way of promoting science and I am delighted to accept the honour.” Brian Cox: Life on Mars, 2nd law of thermodynamics and date world will end | Daily Mail Online comments He looks more like a pop star than a particle physicist (but then he did have a No1 hit single).

But how did Britain's top TV scientist go from touring alongside Take That to working on the Large Hadron Collider? 'I want people to have an emotional response to science, because that's what I have,' said Brian Cox Scientists shouldn’t look like this. They should have wild hair like Einstein or wild eyes like Patrick Moore, not amble into the room looking as if they’ve just come off stage at Glastonbury. But this is Professor Brian Cox, known as the ‘rock-star scientist’ and described by People magazine as the World’s Sexiest Quantum Physicist, a title that makes him sigh. ‘They were doing an A to Z of desirable people and needed to put someone in the Q category. Who else could it be?’ Cox prefers to call himself a particle physicist, which is apparently all about ‘trying to understand what everything is made of and how everything sticks together’. But suddenly he’s also become the nation’s favourite scientist, able to make television viewers swoon – or at least watch in rapt attention – as he explains the wonders of the universe. Lots of women say the professor makes their particles accelerate – and quite a few men do, too. ‘Yeah. Well. There you go. I take that as a compliment.

Gia says she thought I was gay when we first met, and therefore she could have a non-threatening night out with me.’ He’s talking about his wife Gia Milinovich, the American producer he met ten years ago. They got off to a bad start. ‘She saw me on television with the sound turned down and thought, “Oh no, they’ve hired another mindless pretty idiot from a pop band.”’ That was a fair guess. Cox had only recently stopped playing keyboards with D:Ream, whose No 1 single Things Can Only Get Better had put him on Top Of The Pops. Gia was a serious-minded woman working on science shows for an internet television channel. She took a look at his pop-star clothes, Stone Roses haircut and wide smile, and groaned. ‘Then she saw that my email address was from CERN (the research centre in Switzerland and home to the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator). She is a geek herself, so she was like, “Oh, wow. Maybe you’re not mindless after all.”’ That story illustrates the two sides of Brian Cox perfectly. On the one hand he’s a boyishly handsome performer who looks good on camera.

On the other he’s a serious scientist who was studying for a first-class degree in physics even while he was with D:Ream. ‘I was into science as far back as I can remember. The Apollo Moon landings happened when I was only a year old, but my dad loved all that and had posters up on the wall. Then when I got into music later, it was because of the electronics, the synthesisers.’ Cox gave up playing with D:Ream in the late Nineties to become a research scientist at Manchester University, and was sent on secondment to CERN – hence the email address that impressed Gia so much. It was his work there, leading a team, that earned Cox a professorship. Still, when they got married his name was only really known to academic peers. 'I am a geek. To me, that's someone who is immersed in science and engineering and all the real things about the universe and who values exploration and discovery. Not fluff' Then came the Big Bang, or rather CERN’s attempt to recreate conditions as they were at the creation of the universe, by firing particles at great speed around a vast underground loop and smashing them together. The launch transformed his life.

Cox was nominated as a spokesman, and although charming he also had an edge to him, sounding like Liam Gallagher in a lab coat: ‘Anyone who thinks LHC will destroy the world is a t***.’ The BBC swooped. His first series, Wonders Of The Solar System, attracted six million viewers last year. The reason for that was Cox himself. Even in the flesh, you’d guess Cox was ten years younger than 42. Expect to see lots of close-ups this month in his new show Wonders Of The Universe. But it also contains a hefty dose of science. ‘I insist on that. I like there to be some piece of science in it that’s done really well. You can’t do many because it’s not the Open University and I’m as aware of that as the BBC schedulers are, but in the first programme of the new series we talk about something called the second law of thermodynamics, which is notoriously difficult to explain. We’ve had a really good go at it.’ I’ve heard his explanation before: ‘The second law of thermodynamics means that if you want to process information, if your brain wants to work, then you need an energy source. We put energy in by eating things.

When you’re alive, everything works. When you die, it’s like pulling a plug out of the wall. The law says that everything tends to disorder.’ He smiles when he talks about concepts like that, but then he smiles all the time. Some scientists are intimidating but Cox comes across as a matey Lancashire lad who just happens to have a brain the size of a planet. ‘I am a geek. To me, that’s someone who is immersed in science and engineering and all the real things about the universe and who values exploration and discovery. Not fluff. I think pop music is less interesting than the Apollo Moon landings. That’s a geek.’ As for his new-found celebrity, if the paparazzi tried to snatch a picture of Cox he’d probably ask what camera lens they were using. ‘I got used to attention from people when I was with D:Ream and we were touring with Take That and so on. There’s more now, and it does make some things difficult, like when you’re walking down the street and people recognise you. But it doesn’t bother me that much.’ The young Cox did science and maths at A level, and at home in Oldham he loved watching The Sky At Night.

‘That show was really big for me. Patrick Moore influenced a lot of people of my generation. I filmed the 700th Sky At Night this week with Patrick. I took a book down with me, a school prize I won in 1979, a Patrick Moore Observer’s Book Of Astronomy. I got him to sign it. That was brilliant.’ Moore won over people with sheer enthusiasm and Cox does the same today. D-Ream on stage in the mid-Nineties. Cox played keyboards (rear of picture) ‘I want people to have an emotional response to science, because that’s what I have. Thinking about the stars throws you outside of your own world and into the universe, and it is inspirational. Think about how rare life is, for example. 'The universe has been going for 11 billion years and will carry on until that moment in the future when it might end, which we predict might be around a year that can be written as ten followed by 100 noughts. In all of that time, the period when conditions have been right for life to exist will have been ludicrously small, a tiny sliver. 'Now think about the size of the universe, which may be infinite.

So far, we can only say that there is life on this one tiny Earth. So in all that time and space life is very rare indeed, and rarity makes things valuable. That can make you feel extremely small but it should also make you feel special because we live in a moment and place that is so rare and precious.’ So is there only life on Earth? ‘There are missions going to look for life on Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Europa. If I was to put money on it I’d say that they’d find microbes on Mars in the next ten to 15 years. The big question is whether it is the same as life on Earth. If it turns out that it evolved separately, and is very different, then I think that will be huge; probably the biggest discovery in human history. I do expect that will be the case.’ So there is life on Mars, you heard it here first. But he’s talking about microbes and I want to know about aliens. ‘Are there little green men up there? Ha. You would think there must be. It’s a paradox which Enrico Fermi, the great physicist, pointed out.

He said that because there are so many planetary systems and there has been so much time, then even if just one other civilisation has arisen, say a million years before us, the evidence should be there to see, it should be all over the place. 'If we don’t mess up we will be all over the galaxy in a thousand years. So my instinct would be yes, the galaxy should be crawling with civilisations. But we’ve looked and there’s no evidence. I honestly don’t understand it.’ Cox is a science-fiction fan who fell in love with his wife when he saw what was in her flat. ‘Any woman who collects Star Wars toys is fine by me.’ It remains to be seen whether their baby son George will turn out like his dad and be a ‘bus spotter’. ‘When I was a boy I had a book of all the serial numbers of the buses working in Greater Manchester and I ticked them off. I like buses. I went on to spot planes after that.

Then when I got into music at 15 it was all about the electronics, with bands like Kraftwerk and early Ultravox.’ The large Hadron Colider is an attempt to recreate conditions as they were at the creation of the universe, by firing particles at great speed around a vast underground loop and smashing them together He might have been obsessed with electronics, but the first band he joined was all about guitars and mullets. ‘Dare were adult-oriented rock just at the point when the clubby music of Happy Mondays came out and torched all that. We were two or three years out of date, although we did get to make an album in Los Angeles.’ Dare had a fight on tour and split up – so Cox, then 23, applied to Manchester University and got in. ‘Then while I was waiting for the academic year to start I joined D:Ream by accident. My friend Peter Cunnah needed someone to drive him and his DAT tape up and down the country to gigs.

He got a record deal and asked me to play keyboards.’ D:Ream had a No 1 with Things Can Only Get Better in 1994, and it was a hit again three years later, after being taken up as the anthem of New Labour. Cox played keyboards at the election victory party on the South Bank. ‘Everyone was dancing. I remember all that optimism.’ What does he think of it now, 14 years later? ‘What it says to me is that Britain is a really small country, with a sense of optimism. Opinions can catch fire and really take hold. It took a while for it all to wear off.’ So is he still a Labour man? ‘No, I’m not. I’m rather single-issue. I am quite political but not in a party-political way. I have a few agendas, and one of them is to get more attention for science and more investment. It’s said that 6.7 per cent of our gross domestic product in this country comes from physics-based industry. That is more than the City. Yet if you look at the investment we make in physics, it’s tiny. ‘We are going backwards.

While the level of funding for research has been preserved, other nations are increasing their spending fast. I do have a very clear message. I said it to (universities minister) David Willetts, I’ll say it to Cameron if I get to him: make Britain the best place in the world to do science and engineering. It’s a realistic ambition. Science is astonishingly cheap, small change compared to the money we spend on other things. Making science a national priority means spending £1bn or something. It’s not ludicrous.’ Britain is second only to the U.S. for the quality of its scientific research, he says, yet we spend less on it than other European countries. ‘We’ve got so little money that we only fund things like CERN and the European Space Agency, which are absolutely excellent and bound to work. Any venture capitalist will tell you that you don’t just want to fund things that are guaranteed to work.’ Cox is also scathing about the rise in tuition fees. ‘The aspiration of our country should be to educate everybody who wants to be educated to as high a standard as possible. It just seems obvious, right?

If you get to a point where you are discouraging people who haven’t got a lot of money from going to university, then first of all it’s immoral. Second, it’s ludicrous to think that if there is an Einstein or a Newton out there, then they are going to come from a rich family.’ Do his colleagues resent the attention he gets? ‘They know that it’s about the science. I want to get younger people involved and I want to use the platform I have to put pressure on the Government and on decision makers to support science. I’m completely open about that.’ The truth is that he only has the platform because he’s good-looking, surely? ‘You’ve got to use what you’ve got, haven’t you? So if I can talk with some level of eloquence and, you know, look all right on television, then yes, I will.’ Wouldn’t he be devastated if the BBC threw him back into obscurity? ‘No. I don’t see myself as a TV presenter. I don’t have an ambition to have a career presenting programmes. I like being an academic.

In the end, I would like people to be left with the feeling that science is delivering not only useful things but also something more profound, and profoundly human. ‘When I was very young, I got caught up in the wonder of the Apollo Moon landings and I thought that looking at stars was just really powerful, a beautiful thing to do. I just want people to share that feeling.’ ‘Wonders Of The Universe’ is on BBC2, on Sunday March 6, at 9pm Prof Brian Cox: 'There’s a naivety in saying there is no God’ - Telegraph Prof Brian Cox: 'There’s a naivety in saying there is no God’ Professor Brian Cox talks about religion, alien life and the Reithian ideals behind his new TV series Brian Cox on the BBC show Human Universe Photo: BBC By Matthew Stadlen Comments Once he was a scientist who used to be a rockstar, now he’s a rockstar scientist. So successful have his TV programmes become that Professor Brian Cox is more in the limelight now than he ever was as a member of the chart-topping D:Ream in the Nineties.

“I was playing keyboard so I was always at the back,” he tells me, when we meet to discuss Human Universe, his cosmology series starting tonight on BBC Two. Early last year, Sir David Attenborough himself hailed Prof Cox as his heir apparent. “If I had a torch I would hand it to Brian Cox,” said the giant of natural history programming. Time will tell whether Prof Cox can scale Sir David’s broadcasting heights, but he already has two things that the 88-year-old lacks: a professorship and a No 1 hit. Prof Cox is returning to our screens to ask profound questions about our existence. Why are we here? How did the universe make us? What made the universe? The series is, he says, a love letter to the human race. “During the shooting I realised that we are rare and therefore valuable and quite remarkable and worth celebrating.” In the first programme, he takes us on a fast-track journey from monkey to the space station. Tall but slight, Prof Cox is a youthful 46, though his trademark fringe is beginning to grey. He was born in Greater Manchester to parents who worked in a bank and was privately educated at Hulme Grammar School in the Eighties.

He excelled in physics but got a D in his maths A-level (he was “more interested in New Order and the Smiths”). Today, he lives in London with his wife, the American television presenter Gia Milinovich, their five-year-old son and her son from a previous relationship. The Wonders of the Solar System, in 2010, was the TV series that tipped him over the edge into mass appeal, and since then he has fronted, among others, The Wonders of the Universe and Stargazing Live. Related Articles Revealed: Sir David Frost's final will 08 Oct 2014 Prof Cox acknowledges the confidence shown in him by the BBC, but he’s not lacking in confidence himself. “You make things for yourself ultimately and the biggest mistake you can make in television is to make it for somebody else. If you start to second guess what an audience wants, you’re on a road to formulaic television. So I’ve really no interest in people who say, 'Well we’ve had some focus group meetings and this is what we think.’ They should go and work on baked bean packaging.

And even then they’ll make the wrong baked bean packet.” He laughs as he says this, but he’s being serious. “If someone gave [the first programme] a one-star review, I’d think, 'You’re an idiot.’ ” He laughs again. “It’s not meant to be cocky. What I’m saying is that I’m happy with it as a piece of television. Hopefully it’s a Reithian thing – it educates, informs and it entertains. That’s what television should be.” Prof Cox is, before anything else, a scientist and still does research and gives an annual lecture course. “I’m a Manchester academic. I don’t do TV because I want a career in the media. Science is very important. It’s undervalued and underinvested in and it’s a force for extreme good in education, in society and economically. So there’s a polemical element to what I want to do, but I enjoy making these films. I like learning curves and it’s brilliant to work with creative people.” When I suggest that he might be out of his comfort zone in the latest series because he isn’t dealing exclusively with physics, he disagrees.

“Science is going in the other direction, actually,” he says, adding that there is now a multi-disciplinary, rather than compartmentalising, approach. The Institute of Biology has made him a fellow, for example, and a lot of particle physicists are starting to work in medical physics. Particle beam therapies, such as that being used to treat Ashya King, the five-year-old whose parents removed him from an NHS hospital to Prague, are “potentially one of the main new cancer treatments”. He argues that there is a “special status to scientific knowledge” and that it is a necessary framework within which we can discuss wider questions of existence. Take inflationary cosmology. “There may have been more than one Big Bang and probably, in these theories, there are an infinite number of universes being created all the time. So what does that mean? What does it mean that our existence is inevitable, that the universe may have been around forever?” He hasn’t got the answers but he wants a debate. “These things have not been discussed widely; they need novelists and artists and philosophers and theologians and physicists to discuss them.” When I ask him how God fits into his understanding of the universe, Prof Cox says: “It doesn’t at all.

I honestly don’t think about religion until someone asks me about it.” And that’s because, he explains, science is not about asking grand questions but very simple ones. The way to find out answers to big questions is “almost accidentally”. Using physics that is beyond me, Prof Cox explains how his fridge shows that there is no afterlife (thermodynamics, apparently). But then he qualifies himself. “Philosophers would rightly point out that physicists making bland and sweeping statements is naive. There is naivety in just saying there’s no God; it’s b------s,” he says. “People have thought about this. People like Leibniz and Kant. They’re not idiots. So you’ve got to at least address that.” He suspects that another civilisation exists in the observable universe, given that it contains 350 billion galaxies. But they would be so far away that we’d never make contact. “In our galaxy, the question is really, 'Are there any now that we could communicate with?’ And we could easily be the only one at this moment. Are we the only one ever to have existed? That seems less likely, but it’s possible.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a flying saucer appeared – in that it’s possible – but I actually think civilisations are probably rare. For biological reasons, primarily.” The next big discovery, he believes, might involve finding life on Mars. And if such life were to have a different biochemistry, it would tell us that there’s a sense of inevitability about life. “Because it would say that it evolved twice on two neighbouring planets independently.” Are we, though, making as much progress in science as we should? Prof Cox has a two-part answer. In one sense, it’s remarkable how far we’ve come. We’ve moved, he says, from thinking the earth was at the centre of the universe to walking on the moon in 400 years. “But if you ask the question now, 'Can we do better?’, then obviously we can.” Prof Cox’s dream for Britain is that it should become the best place in the world to do science. “Maybe if you doubled the spending on research it would be the best. And that’s an investment. It would come back very quickly in increased economic growth.” And he is positive about the aspirations of the Government.

“Osborne has said it – he’s said that he wants to make Britain the best place in the world to do science.” There aren’t, however, enough women in science. “There should be 50 per cent. It’s not just a sense of moral obligation about equal opportunities. It’s about the talent pool. It’s about how do you fill this massive gap in skills that we have in the economy.” Where, amid all his grand theorising, does Prof Cox derive meaning in his own life? “I used to think about meaning a lot when I had a secondhand overcoat, wandering around Manchester listening to Smiths albums aged 16, drinking Woodpecker cider,” he jokes. Now that he’s a rockstar scientist, how has he coped with stardom? “It’s a process – you learn to be famous. If you don’t, you end up going crazy.” He has, he says, changed his habits. “Do I walk down Oxford Street on Saturday? No. I don’t tend to get on the Tube. I probably could, actually, but I don’t like it.

I don’t mind people staring at me if I’m walking in an open space, but I don’t like getting enclosed with a load of people because then they start talking and taking pictures. “You end up knowing people who’ve been through similar experiences, so you get to know more 'famous’ people. If you’re balanced, you don’t really want to talk about yourself. It’s quite nice sometimes to go and be friends with people who also don’t want to talk about themselves, which tends to be people who have a lot to talk about. The balanced person who handles life in the public eye is the person who doesn’t really find themselves particularly interesting.” 'Human Universe’ is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm. An accompanying book, by Prof Cox and Andrew Cohen, is published by William Collins on Thursday, priced £25

Question: BBC TV science presenter Brian Cox played keyboards with which nineties band ?
Answer: D-REAM