Brian Cox: 'I'm not anti-religion. I'm anti-maniac'

As a visual metaphor, Brian Cox’s fingers are hard to improve upon. They are long, slender and supple and, as he talks through some of the knottier problems of quantum theory, he crosses two of them at once, on the same hand.

That he earned a living as a keyboard player in a band before becoming a professor of particle physics does not surprise. Indeed, with his dark, floppy “Madchester” hair he looks like a missing Gallagher brother. He still dresses like the pop musician he used to be. Diesel jeans. Black, long-sleeved collarless shirt. No watch.

On the subject of which, he once said that the correct answer when someone asks you the time is to say you don’t know, because no one really knows. It was a philosophical point, as well as a scientific one. “I can’t even tell you at the moment what ‘at the moment’ means,” he added, just to clear things up. But when I ask if that is the reason he doesn’t wear a watch, he says: “No, I just use the clock on my mobile.”

Harry Hill did a sketch about how Cox tends to over think things. Does he mind being teased in this way? “There is a strange nexus between physics and comedy that I seem to be a part of. It’s a powerful if strange alliance. Dara O’Briain did mathematics and physics, and is passionate about it. Ben Miller did a PhD in physics. Robin Ince is a very good friend of mine.” (They do a comedy and science show together on Radio 4, one that they are about to take on a nationwide theatre tour.)

The 42-year-old professor does have a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour. Last year, when asked what he thought about being hailed as a sex symbol by the Daily Mail, he said: “People say things like: ‘He’s quite good looking for a scientist.’ But it’s a very low bar. There’s basically me and Patrick Moore.”

He also has an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, an impression compounded by a quirk of his physiognomy: he always seems to be smiling as he talks. There is a wonderful spoof of him on YouTube. It uses footage from Wonders of the Solar System, the critically acclaimed series he made for the BBC last year. It shows him looking up into the night sky and musing: “Sometimes I look at the stars and I wonder: what the f--k is going on?”

Has he seen it? “Yeah, and actually that is not far from the truth. You should see some of the out-takes from our new series. They have one out-takes film which is just me swearing. Five minutes. It would be great to get it out there, but the BBC will never allow it.”

He does have a reputation for plain speaking. The Creationist belief that the world is 6,000 years old is dismissed as “b-----ks”, anyone who believes the world is going to end next year because of the Mayan calendar is “a moron”. And people who believe Cern’s Large Hadron Collider will suck the universe into a black hole are “t--ts”.

But that is off camera. On camera he is articulate and lyrical, almost Attenborough-like. The sun, he will say, is “a colossal fiery sphere of tortured matter”. And while the Northern Lights are the visual manifestation of the Earth’s magnetic fields protecting us from the solar wind, those green shafts of light nevertheless “look like spirits drifting up from the mountain into heaven”.

The new series to which he refers is Wonders of the Universe and it looks every bit as good as Wonders of the Solar System. That one pulled in six million viewers, about five million more than a “successful” science programme would expect. Sales of telescopes, meanwhile, doubled. And applications to study physics at university also increased dramatically. “Brian Cox” even became the answer to a question on University Challenge.

“The episode from the new series I’m most proud of is the first one,” he says. “In some ways it is a deeply miserable piece of work because it explains how the universe is going to end one day. But life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And with life comes death. It’s a beautiful thought, but also a miserable one.”

Tell me about it, I say. My six year-old walked in while I was watching the preview of it and he said: “Is the world going to end, Daddy?” I said it was, but not for billions of years, so he needn’t worry. I’m not sure he was convinced.

Cox’s own son is too young for such existential angst. He’s one, and an awareness of mortality tends not to kick in until you are five. “No, he’s fine so far,” Cox says. “He does have a favourite Apollo launch though, Apollo Eight, and it’s not my doing. Everyone thinks I bombard him with this stuff but he just happened to walk in while I was watching Apollo launches on YouTube and with Eight they shout: ‘Clear the Tower!’ So now when he comes in and wants to watch Apollo Eight he will imitate the noise: ‘Claar da twer!’”

This brings me onto a theory I have heard, that good physics is all about having a childlike wonder and curiosity. “Good science, actually,” Cox corrects with a nod. “The language of curiosity is science. It’s about the value of perspective, about taking you off your own planet and getting you to look back at it, see it in the context of space.”

In his new series there is an amazing image of the Earth as a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. It was taken from Voyager and seeing it made me feel an almost vertiginous sense of loneliness. “I know what you mean,” he says, “but it also gives you a sense of time. And I don’t think it should make mankind feel insignificant, because actually perspective helps us evaluate ourselves.”

Like that great line by the Scottish comedian Arnold Brown: “I sometimes look at the stars and think: how significant I am.”

“Exactly. There ought to be civilisations everywhere, but ours is the only one we know about. Our civilisation is a tiny flickering flame, but rarity confers value. And that is why we should look on our planet as a village, that way people might start behaving differently.”

In his films, Cox is good at simplifying complex theories and explaining them through a simple visual image. In his new series, for example, he explains the second law of thermodynamics by building a sandcastle. At the risk of messing up his elegant argument by paraphrasing it, you probably wouldn’t find a sandcastle on a beach that had been shaped by the wind – as opposed to a child with a bucket – because thanks to time’s arrow and the idea of entropy, order is less likely than disorder.

“Yeah, I do try to do that,” he says. “The great physicist Paul Dirac said that in science one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry it is the exact opposite. Some try and aggrandise science, and make out you have to be very clever to understand it but I think it is actually simple and straightforward. It’s almost like plumbing.”

He says it’s easy, but it is not. Anyone can parrot e=mc2, but only a few can do the pages and pages of maths that get you to that equation. “True, but I liken the maths to playing an instrument. You just have to put in the hours of practise. I found that myself, because I wasn’t instinctively good at maths. Most professional scientists just know enough maths to get by.”

Cox fell into presenting almost by accident. He was one of several scientists interviewed for a documentary that was being made about the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. The producers of Horizon saw the clip and spotted his potential. But has television been a distraction for him, taking him away from his job at Cern?

“Well it sort of still is in a way. I enjoy television because there is an artistic side to my character. It’s useful to me at the moment because I have a political agenda. Not party political but a mission to persuade politicians to look at the future of science and engineering, and invest in it. I think Cameron should say: ‘I want Britain to become the best place in the world to do science and engineering’, like Kennedy did when he said he wanted to go to the moon.”

Cox believes that science will help Britain out of the doldrums and he told the Tories as much at their party conference last year. Does he find everyone wants a piece of him these days?

“Yeah, but you have to make the most of the access television gives you. I’ve spoken to David Willetts [the Science and University Minister] a few times now and I think he really understands the importance of science. But I’m rather single issue, I see science as investment.

“I’m not a reliable political supporter. I am belligerent and if I think a party has done something idiotic I will say so. The Coalition almost did something idiotic with their round of spending cuts last year, but they eventually agreed to freeze the R&D budget for science, which was the best we could hope for.”

Einstein saw God as a useful metaphor, saying that physics helped man know the mind of God, but Richard Dawkins criticises this use of the word as it has too much cultural baggage. Where does Cox stand?

“I’m more practical about it. There is a lot of goodwill toward scientists among the religious communities in this country. I met the Dean of Guildford Cathedral when I was an atheist on a panel and we got on well. After that I took him to Cern and we became good friends. I also recently got invited to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s house because he liked Wonders of the Solar System.”

And? “Rowan Williams is a very thoughtful man. 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. So it’s OK to say that if you believe the world was created 6,000 years ago, as the Creationists do, then you are an idiot. There is nothing wrong in saying that because you are an idiot. But setting yourself up as an atheist who is against all religion is not a battle that needs to be fought.”

I’m guessing he finds climate deniers frustrating? “Yeah, they are incredibly irritating. Climate modelling is difficult science, but there is a consensus about the modelling. Putting CO2 into the atmosphere will warm the climate. Science makes no claim to be true, what it does is give us theories and models of nature that work, given what we know. It is also about finding data that disagrees with the model, that way you can make a better model.”

Where and when does he do his thinking? “I tick along all the time. I want to give some lectures at Manchester University… I find preparing lectures and writing books forces me to think deeply about physics. When you try to explain things in a lecture or a book it helps you to understand it better yourself.”

Cox’s grandparents worked in the Oldham cotton mills; his mother was a teller in a bank, his father was a junior branch manager. They found the money to send him to a private school where in physics lessons he learnt to replicate the electropop of Kraftwerk and Ultravox using a box wired up to a high-hat.

After school he became the keyboard player with a local band, Dare. The group released a couple of albums but split after a fist fight in a Berlin bar. It was then at the age of 23, that Cox applied to Manchester University to study physics. He got a first and did a PhD, but along the way he ended up joining a second group, D:Ream. They went on to support Take That on tour and have six top-20 hits, including a No1 with Things Can Only Get Better in 1994, a song most people remember from the New Labour election campaign three years later.

He seems to prefer jazz and classical to pop these days. Indeed his great passion, apart from physics, is Mahler. “If it had been down to me I would have had Mahler as the soundtrack to the episode about time. But then it would have ended up on BBC Four at midnight.”

Mahler’s music is often tender, does it move him to tears? “Ideas make me emotional, powerful ideas. When I saw gamma rays bursting on the film it made me emotional. It was quite Mahleresque.”

There is something of the eternal student about Brian Cox. He loves to lie in, for example, avoiding rising before nine if he can help it. And as well as being a physicist he is also an aesthete, as overwhelmed by the sublime in nature as any poet.

Cox describes himself as “laid back, to an extent”. But he does seem to have an impulsive side. When he got married in 2004 he didn’t even tell his parents. He doesn’t think they were “‘entirely pleased”. A judge, a family friend who had the authority to do it, married them. Cox says he really should check to see if the marriage is legal “at some point”.

A common Google search to do with Brian Cox is the question: “Is Brian Cox divorced yet?” His wife, Gia, takes it all in her stride. She has written about the day she realised how famous her husband had become:

“A paparazzo ran backwards snapping at us with a long-lens camera as we took a stroll with our baby. Wherever we went, people would stare, take photos with their phones or shout his name excitedly from passing cars.” The novelty soon wore off. “Pre-fame, I was asked for my opinions; now, I’m asked what Brian thinks.”

While Wonders was on television, many women – and men – declared their love for Smiling Brian. All Gia could think was: “Really? Sure, he’s cute, but he really is a massive nerd.”

I’ve read that they had their first date on 9/11. “Well we’d met before that in London,” he says. “But on that day she was coming up to Manchester to see me and it was while she was on her way that the Twin Towers collapsed. We were both stunned. She’s American and we both had a lot of friends in New York. So on our first date we sat in and watched CNN. It was a very bonding day.”

He doesn’t wear a watch, but I do and I know we are coming to the end of our time. So here it is. The big one. It is hoped that the Large Hadron Collider will reproduce the conditions that existed in the second after the Big Bang. From this it is hoped that physicists will be able to unify the theories of general relative and quantum mechanics. But when?

“We know at least that we will see the origin of mass in the universe, because we know exactly where to look for that. And we know that there is a lot more stuff out there than we can see, and that it is not made of this.”

He taps the wooden table in front of him. “Cosmology has become a precision science so that we can see exactly what it is we don’t understand. We can see, for example, that the universe is accelerating in its expansion, it’s just we don’t understand why… yet.”

‘Wonders of the Universe’ begins on Sunday 6 March, on BBC Two