![]() I have a vivid memory of Cox, in one of his earlier programmes, discussing the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5m light years away) and instinctively pointing that way, as if it were a couple of streets over. You’re not gonna tell that story in any detail! So it’s an impressionistic thing.” In an episode of Human Universe, for example, Cox gets just under an hour to explain “the whole of human history – agriculture, cities, bit of writing, and suddenly we’re in space. His TV work requires considerably more concision. “It takes me 24 lectures, each an hour, to teach introductory relativity,” he says, happily. At about the time it broadcasts, Cox will be back in Manchester, seeing to the non-public-facing side of his career as an academic, this term lecturing a fresh crop of undergrads on relativity and quantum mechanics. In Human Universe he’ll be seen prowling among Ethiopian baboons, also dressing up in an astronaut’s compression suit to simulate a space walk. “An attempt to humanise cosmology,” as Cox describes it.ĭown to earth: Brian Cox in the new BBC show Human Universe. These are just some of the topics explored in his new BBC series, Human Universe. I’m on the coffee and almost tearful with the effort of keeping up with Cox’s rapid chat about inflationary cosmology and exponentially expanding space-time, “a fractal tree of universes”. Cox, 46, is wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and has a dark helmet of hair striped with grey. We’re sharing breakfast outdoors on a sunny September day in London. “In terms of volume,” Cox says, smiling, “it’s the same as anyone else’s.” “B rian,” it comes over me to say, as I’m teeing up a question about this or that, “you have a large brain.” And because he has a large brain, stretched and improved over two decades’ work as a physicist at the University of Manchester, not to mention his last five years as a BBC TV personality making hard science seem half-way intelligible to the majority of us dumbos, Brian Cox can’t help correcting me. ![]()
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