The Wonder of Brian Cox Read online

  For Laura

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Childhood

  Chapter 2: School

  Chapter 3: Dare to Win

  Chapter 4: University is a D:Ream

  Chapter 5: Academia, Love and TV

  Chapter 6: CERN… and more

  Chapter 7: Going to Hollywood

  Chapter 8: The BBC Comes Knocking…

  Chapter 9: Megastardom

  Chapter 10: The Future

  Chapter 11: Cox’s Laws

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As ever with a book of this kind, there are dozens of people to thank: Christina – I couldn’t do it without you, thanks for letting me be a grump when I need to be; Mum and Dad, for watching his shows even if you didn’t understand them; John Blake and Allie Collins for asking in the first place and for their guidance; and all my other friends, who chivvied me along and didn’t look too bored when I espoused a fact I’d learned. For lending help and providing material: Mick Taylor, you’re a legend; Colin Paterson and Elizabeth Alker, my northern correspondents; Anwar Brett, appreciate the delve into the archives and Tim Haughton, thanks for your superlative memory. Gregg LaGambina and Tasha Robinson from The A.V. Club, Andrew N. Holding from Skeptics in the Pub, Cambridge, Catherine Gerbrands and The Stage newspaper, Darren Rea from sci-fi-online.com, Brian Clegg of Popularscience.co.uk, Universetoday.com and Nancy Atkinson, the Press Association and Roger Crow – you all rule. And last, but not least, the incredible people who either let me talk to them or pointed me in the right direction: Amanda Groom, who went above and beyond; Professor John Dainton, Professor Paddy Regan, Imran Khan, Tony Steel, Ali Paterson, Joey Tempest, Sara Webb, Julie Dawn Cole, Alan Franks, Ian Willetts, Victoria Asare-Archer, Claire Bithell, Petri Lunden, Jude Rogers, John McKie, Andy Welch and Alex Hardy – you made this a story worth telling. Nikki Kennedy, I love your legal mind, and thanks to the dim sum place opposite Manchester University for sheltering me from the rain. And finally a big thank you to Gia Milinovich and Professor Brian Cox – interesting, intelligent people who will no doubt write their own stories one day. I hope this may at least act as a memory-jogger.

  INTRODUCTION

  There’s not an arm-patch in sight. Instead, a young-looking man with a mop of black hair settles comfortably in a chair on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall in London, bespectacled colleague to his left. He’s wearing a grey T-shirt, black jacket and trainers – the trousers, of course, black. The whoops die down. That’s right, there was whooping when these two men in their early forties walked casually onto the stage in front of 2,500 paying spectators, who had come to hear them talk about quantum physics. It’s an eclectic crowd – young, old, male, female – not the fusty audience you might expect for what amounts to a discussion about two-slit theory and how it’s possible for a particle to skip to any part of the universe in a heartbeat. Personally, I struggle to understand what they’re talking about, but then I gladly gave up science at GCSE. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the subject, it’s simply my brain is not equipped to deal with these kinds of concepts.

  Professor Brian Cox, for it is he beneath the floppy black fringe (though thin strips of grey are beginning to poke through), believes anyone can understand the basics of quantum mechanics with a bit of application and over the next 45 minutes, he and his colleague, Professor Jeff Forshaw, try to do just that. It probably works for some people; it doesn’t for me. But whether they understand it or not, the packed house is on the edge of their seats. When Cox opens up the floor to Q&A after their lecture, hands shoot up so quickly and strenuously they are practically wrenched out of their sockets. For the most part, he answers the questions patiently, stopping to rant about how angry he gets when scientists are equated to an interest group, to make fun of the way he sometimes speaks on television and occasionally gives short shrift to someone, like the man who earnestly enquires about a true vacuum and whether it’s possible to create one. The answer, says Cox, is no. Though one person does request tips on seeing the Northern Lights, no one asks if they can marry him, or have his babies, or have him sign their breasts – at least not out loud. But as he stands in his familiar way, legs fairly wide apart as he clarifies a point on a large teacher’s notepad, it’s clear that Professor Brian Cox is without doubt the most famous and celebrated scientist in Great Britain right now and possibly of the last 10 years.

  The funny thing is, it’s not because of something he’s discovered, or because of the Nobel Prize he won. Instead, Cox – labelled jokily by his friends as the ‘Peter Andre of particle physics’ – has become as famous as he is because of his ability to communicate science. His 2010 BBC series Wonders of the Solar System averaged a staggering 5 million viewers a week, while the 2011 follow-up, Wonders of the Universe, did even better, with an audience of 6 million viewers a week. Because of this, he’s mentioned in the same breath as Sir Patrick Moore, or Sir David Attenborough – science presenters who have captured the zeitgeist. A particle physicist by trade, Cox is also a professor at Manchester University, where he completed his doctorate, as well as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He has worked on the H1 project at HERA accelerator in Hamburg, a predecessor to his current official job as a researcher on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. And he has also published a number of successful academic papers in addition to four books. In other words, he really knows his stuff.

  Yet there’s another reason why Cox is so comfortable on stage at the Royal Festival Hall. His past life includes stints in the chart-topping band D:Ream, as well as the rock band Dare, playing keyboards on tours around the world and on BBC’s Top of the Pops. David Attenborough can’t say he was in the band at the Labour Party election victory bash of 1997. Nor can Patrick Moore lay claim to being one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive, a poll in which Cox was included in 2009. Furthermore, he’s universally considered a nice guy. If you’re looking for tales of drug abuse, broken hearts and plates thrown at assistants, you won’t find them here. Try as I might – and for the sake of balance I did try – I couldn’t find anyone who questioned his integrity or personality, though some took issue with his screen presence, while others showed disgruntlement at his ubiquity.

  All this and more will be examined here, including several exclusive interviews with those who knew Cox as a student at Oldham Hulme Grammar School, a post-graduate student in Germany, a big-haired rocker behind the keys onstage at Maple Squash Club in Oldham and beyond. Although he hasn’t participated in this book, there are exclusive, never-before-seen quotes from the man himself. I interviewed him just before he became really famous in February 2010 when he was starting to promote Wonders of the Solar System. According to my emails, he was very difficult to pin down, his insanely busy schedule and desire to do it all already proving tricky to manage. I finally managed to contact him at his house in Battersea, where via an occasionally poor phone line (not sure why when it was just across the river in London, shouldn’t he be able to fix it?), he talked with passion about his programmes and future plans.

  Though I knew little about him, I was already intrigued as to how someone who has been hired as a professional scientist rather than a professional presenter finds time to ensure he maintains his academic credentials and whether he senses resentment from within his own community. ‘I’m fairly sure it’s accepted now that someone needs to [do these sorts of programmes],’ he told me. ‘We’re always having funding crises one way or another and we’re always fighting for public and
governmental support. It’s changed over the last 10 years and it’s widely accepted that some people have to do it. As long as you have a small number, it works.’ Still, he continued: ‘I think the reason you’re valued on TV or writing articles is because you’re a scientist and have a particular way of looking at the world, or an attitude that comes from being a research scientist. I think if you lose it, you become less good at presenting it.’

  More than two years on and a whole load of fame later, it’s interesting to wonder whether he sticks by that edict. One former boss revealed to me that following the first series of Wonders… he bumped into Cox at a party, where the Professor told him that he was returning to science. Other fellow scientists suggest maybe his greatest achievement will be his ability as a communicator. There’s no doubt Cox has used his fame, such as it is, for the good, whether visiting schools and encouraging pupils to pursue physics, or arguing with relevant government ministers for better funding for science. Indeed the so-called ‘Brian Cox Effect’ which will be examined in more detail later has been bandied about by the media, who argue more kids have taken up science as a result of his documentaries.

  Cox’s great hero, the American writer and scientist Carl Sagan, wrote in his book Cosmos of his belief of man’s inherent desire to understand the building blocks of our world, our connection to the universe and how this would best be communicated through the language of television. Sagan’s similarly-titled TV series was three years in the making and its estimated audience was ultimately 140 million. In his 1980 text to accompany the landmark show, he wrote: ‘Whatever road we take, our fate is indissolubly bound up with science. It is a matter of simple survival for us to understand science.’ As Cox himself told me: ‘Someone’s got to do the actual science or you’d have nothing to talk about.’ But as CERN continues to learn more and more about the fabric of our universe and neutrinos fly around the world at speeds we cannot possibly fathom, perhaps it’s down to Professor Brian Cox to tell us all about it. And if he happens to have been part of a band who had a No. 1 hit, then hey, why not?

  One thing should be pointed out here. Obviously, the publishing industry cannot predict the speed of scientific progress. As such, all science facts contained herein are correct up to the end of January 2012. If aliens show up or someone decides to go back to the future after that, please forgive me for not mentioning it within these pages.

  CHAPTER 1

  CHILDHOOD

  Most of what you need to know about why Brian Cox turned out the way he did comes from the day he turned 10 years old. It was 1978 and most children celebrating their tenth year would have asked for a Han Solo action figure. Not the future Professor Cox, though: he requested a fuse box. ‘It was a four-way fuse box,’ he explained. ‘And the reason is, I had a shed at my granddad’s house with a friend of mine, who I’m still very good friends with, that we used to wire up. We had a railway transformer in his garage and ran 12 volts into this shed, and put switches in it and lights, and just sat there.’ It’s safe to say Brian Cox knew what he wanted to do from an early age. So, it seems, did his friend – he now works for the electricity board in Manchester.

  Brian Edward Cox was born to David and Barbara Cox (née Holden) on 3 March 1968 at the Oldham and District General Hospital, as it was then known. Just off the Rochdale Road, it is now best known for being the birthplace of Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test-tube’ baby, 10 years later. Cox was taken home to Oakbank Avenue in the suburb of Chadderton, where the family lived in a semi-detached house. A quaint, quiet area outside the more brutish metropolises of Manchester and Oldham, it has a small shopping area in its heart, while the environs are filled with houses that get increasingly prettier the further away from the centre you go (as well as further up the small hills). He grew up in a space-obsessed household – his father still has a newspaper cover from the moon landing in July 1969 on the wall of his home. On Christmas Eve 1968, Cox sat on his father’s knee to watch Apollo 8 go round the back of the moon. This same launch has become his own son George’s favourite. ‘When we watch it on YouTube, someone shouts “clear the tower!” really loudly,’ he says. Now whenever George wants to see Apollo 8 on its way, he shouts the same thing.

  ‘It was always on in the house,’ said Cox of footage from various space missions. ‘I don’t remember watching it, but I remember growing up in a house that had pictures of the moon landings on the walls.’ Indeed, his father made sure his son watched Neil Armstrong and his team walk on the moon for the first time in 1969. ‘I was one year old and I watched them!’ Cox recalled. Space and man’s exploration into it had a profound effect on the future scientist. ‘I was always fascinated by space exploration,’ he has said. ‘I think it was really that that triggered my interest in science and I found that I always thought of myself as a scientist. I wanted to do something. I didn’t necessarily want to be an astronaut, but I wanted to be involved – so I just latched on to everything else. My interest in science grew, but I think that was the beginning.’

  Later on, as a pre-pubescent schoolboy, he was entranced by one of the greatest television series ever made about science. Cox fans – and more specifically, those who love Wonders of the Solar System/Universe – would do well to seek out Carl Sagan’s landmark show Cosmos (and the accompanying book) to see what was intended to be its 21st-century equivalent. Sagan approached science not just as an academic, but as a poet, too. It’s not hard to see the parallels. Certainly it only added to a young Brian Cox’s desire to pursue science. ‘For me, television played a key role in making me a scientist and that’s partly down to the quality of the science programming when I was growing up,’ he revealed. ‘For me, the greatest of them all was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos – 13 hours of lyrically, emotionally engaging accurate and polemical broadcasting.’ It wasn’t only imported TV that piqued his interest, though. Patrick Moore’s The Sky at Night, which debuted on the BBC in 1957, became a soundtrack to Cox’s life. He has said Moore is the reason why he became a professional scientist. And despite all his success, one of his greatest achievements was joining the 88-year-old, monocled Moore for the show’s 700th edition in 2011. ‘He was my total hero,’ said Cox. ‘I took along a little book I won at school in 1978, Moore’s Book of Astronomy, and got him to sign it while I was there. That meant a lot to me.’

  By the time he was 6 years old, he was collecting astronomy cards and sticking them in an album. He loved a children’s book called The Race Into Space (he is even seen flicking through it on-screen during one of his later TV shows), but what got him excited then is a letdown now. ‘That’s a disappointing book when you look at it now!’ he said. ‘It says we were going to be on Mars by 1983.’ Unsurprisingly, by the age of 8, he had already received his first telescope. ‘I was a very, very, very nerdy child,’ he told the Daily Mail. He would peer up at the Oldham sky, using his star maps as a guide. ‘For as long as I can remember,’ he said, ‘that’s what I wanted to do.’

  But if the astronomy thing didn’t work out, there was another pursuit occupying much of his time. Bus-spotting was a serious business for Cox. Along with a friend, he kept a book filled with all the registration numbers from the vehicles of Greater Manchester Transport. Whenever he had the chance, he went to Oldham and ticked off the ones he saw. Sometimes they went into Manchester. He was a particular fan of the number 51, noting its nice bodywork and large pneumatic gears. ‘I like machines,’ he says. Bus-spotting parlayed into plane-spotting. On a weekend, he would head to Manchester Airport to see the departing and arriving flights in all their close-up glory. ‘I didn’t go out of the country until I was 17,’ he later revealed, ‘so it was a really romantic thing to see all these planes flying in from all over the world.’

  By this time, he had a younger sister called Sandra. Despite growing up in the same house as machine-lovers and space nuts, she chose not to follow the same path as her brother and eventually became a partner at accountants KPMG in Manchester. She married a work colleague an
d has two children of her own. Life in the Cox household was a fairly typical story for a middle-class Northern family in the Seventies. Christmas was spent round the telly. ‘I liked growing up with Christmas,’ Cox told the Guardian. ‘I liked watching Morecambe & Wise, I like the Queen’s speech because it was on and everyone listened to it. It’s a specifically Seventies Christmas that I like. I like Christmas Top of the Pops with Shakin’ Stevens on it.’

  Both parents worked in banks – Lloyds and Yorkshire banks in Oldham – his father as a manager and his mother a teller. Because they were away during the day, Cox spent much of his time at his grandparents’ house. When he reached school age, he was there most lunch times. He remembers listening to Frank Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ on a large wooden radiogram with BBC Light Service embossed on the wood. ‘I suppose like most people growing up, my dad and my granddad had records and this was one of the ones I remember,’ he said. ‘Big cover of Sinatra on the front, with this remarkable pose – it was one of the first things I latched onto, one of the first pieces I listened to.’

  Both his grandparents started off by sweeping the floors of the Oldham cotton mills, but his grandfather was a remarkable man. Born in 1900, Cox senior left school in 1914 and worked his way up the corporate ladder at the company to run it. Ironically, despite no formal training, he ended his working life as a scientist of sorts. ‘My granddad did write a couple of academic papers,’ Cox remembered to Radio 4. ‘He became a chemist and ran a dying company – he came up with a process of dying nylon black.’ Though Grandpa Cox hadn’t completed his schooling, he was keen to make sure his son didn’t suffer the same fate. ‘My dad was the first person to do A-levels and he went to a grammar school,’ said Cox. ‘My granddad and grandma both worked in cotton mills. I was the first person in my family to go to university.’ He described it as an inspirational 20th-century story – each successive generation getting more and more opportunities. ‘I think it’s a progression that I fear and I hear is less possible now,’ he remarked. ‘Which would be a disaster.’