On the promotional poster for his latest world tour, coming soon to an arena near you, Professor Brian Cox is dressed in a plain black T-shirt and very cool black leather motorcycle jacket. His skin is blemish-free, supple and so smooth-looking it appears to have been regularly moisturised for many years – long before it became a cultural norm for men to do so. His neck is strong and his eyes are as deep and eternal as the universe itself. The whole magnificent package is crowned with the lustrous wonder of his hair, which has not moved since it assumed its current form in the sweaty cauldron of the Manchester music scene of the 1990s. The image tells you everything you need to know about Brian Cox, which is that he is the coolest nerd alive.
Cox first achieved a level of celebrity in the 1990s when he played keyboards in cool dance band D:Ream, which had a number one smash hit in 1994 with Things Can Only Get Better, and had a smattering of other hits in the UK and elsewhere around the world. In one photo, Cox is revealed as clearly the coolest guy in the band, wearing shades and a gold chain over a black singlet, revealing surprisingly large and toned arms for someone then also in the midst of a PhD in physics. This raises a question: was his presence in D:Ream the cause of his coolness or is it merely correlated with it?
Further investigation reveals that before D:Ream, he had been in a hair metal band called Dare, whose frontman had previously been in the very famous band Thin Lizzy, which got Dare a bit of publicity even though their music didn’t make much of an impression. In photos from the time, Cox’s hair is massive, precisely and perfectly feathered, providing the ideal frame for the sharp angles of his face. His lips are fat and his famously dreamy eyes are filled with the liquid hope of youth. In summary, he was hot.
If this single photo provides evidence he was cool before D:Ream - and I would argue it does - this only creates a regression to our original question: was his coolness caused by his presence in Dare or merely correlated with it?
How far back do we need to go to locate the genesis of Cox’s coolness? How will we know it when we see it? What preceded his coolness? Can coolness spring from nothing? If so, how?
Welcome to science.
You might not believe the question of Brian Cox’s coolness is worth this sort of rigorous scientific investigation, but science doesn’t care about your beliefs, except insofar as it can explain them.
Besides Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Cox is probably the most famous scientist alive today but there’s still a lot he doesn’t know or – as he puts it, “We don’t know.”
There is no shame in admitting this. Two of the most important qualities in a scientist, Cox says, are perspective and humility. “Humility is extremely important,” he says, “because, in order to do science, first of all you have to accept that your opinion is completely worthless. It absolutely doesn’t matter what you think.”
He quotes his great hero Richard Feynman, who defined science as “a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance” and said, “Nature cannot be fooled.”
These are all good things to say in an interview for readers in cultures like ours and Britain’s, that value humility, but the truth is that some people’s opinions are worth more than others, because they understand more than the rest of us. This is why we have, for instance, the Nobel prize, which Feynman won in 1965.
“We don’t know if the universe had a beginning,” Cox says. “We do know there was a big bang when it was very hot and dense in this part of the universe at least 13.8 billion years ago, but the origin of the universe in time? Not only do we not know what time that took place but we don’t even really know what time is.”
Proving that humility is more warranted in some people than others, I said, “We do know what time is, right? It’s ‘tick tick’.”
His reply to that claim lasted five minutes and included:
* Stephen Hawking’s seminal pair of papers from 1973 and 1974, which led to the black hole information paradox.
* Hawking’s discovery that black holes have a temperature.
* Einstein and the geometry of space-time.
* An analogy involving a human being that doesn’t have feelings.
* Quantum mechanics.
* A quantum theory that doesn’t have space-time in it.
* Quantum computing
*Quantum entanglement and how a universe can emerge from it.
There were times during that five minutes when I’d thought I was about to understand something, but ultimately I didn’t, so when he finally stopped talking, the only thing I could think to ask was how all that made him feel.
His answer lasted four minutes and included:
* The concept of a Boltzmann brain.
* General relativity and quantum mechanics (reprise).
* Discussion of 19th century thermodynamics.
* The relation to information of both temperature and entropy.
* Brownian motion.
* The entropy of black holes.
* Hawking’s black hole observations (reprise).
When he finally stopped talking, I said, “You met Stephen Hawking didn’t you? What was that like?”
A hypothesis: In terms of importance to a scientist, humility and perspective lag far behind expertise.
“So, the meaning of life,” Cox said, straight-facedly, at one point in our conversation. “Let’s go straight in. What is it? Well, I would argue that whatever it is, it’s a property of brains, it’s a property of consciousness. It’s a property of physical structures that are made of atoms that are …”
As he went on, in spite of my growing humility, I was, fairly quickly, once more unable to understand what he was talking about, so I fell back on ignorance. I asked if he thought he would ever discover the meaning of life.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think about Richard Feynman. He was always asked this, and he had the Nobel Prize. He said, ‘No, I’m not in it to find out the ultimate answer to the question of everything. I just want to find things out.’”
If you start out looking for answers to the big questions, Cox said, you’re not going to get anywhere. Science begins with specific questions like, “Why is grass green?” which leads to answers about things like chlorophyll and pigments that allow energy from the sun to be converted into sugars, until, ‘ultimately the whole history of life on Earth is written into a blade of grass’.”
Our existence, he said, and the emergence of consciousness, are among the greatest of mysteries; fascinating questions that are not yet – and maybe never will be – answered.
“But that’s what’s science is, really, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re trying to explore the deepest of questions, but in a very step-by-step way.”
This kind of nerd talk might not appear as cool as playing bangers to thousands of intoxicated young people at a big music festival while wearing a muscle-revealing black singlet and cool sunglasses but, if Cox has taught us anything, it’s that the way things appear is not necessarily the way they are: on Instagram, Cox has three million followers and on his last world tour, in 2019, he set a world record talking about science to a quarter of a million people. D:Ream’s two original members made a comeback album last year. As they wrote on Facebook this July, “Sadly, the world domination we were banking on hasn’t quite come about.” On Instagram, they have 744 followers.