Brian Cox

15/03/2010

Rock-star physicist on why we’ve got to push boundaries, despite huge pressure on science funding

by Laura Kelly

With cuts in university and research budgets now reaching crisis point – luminary Professor Stephen Hawking last week threatened to quit the UK in protest – science in this country needs a champion. Thank physics, then, that we have Brian Cox, who is willing to battle his way through frozen wastelands, mosquito-ridden jungles and boiling hot volcanos to convince the British public that we should take an interest in what’s going on in our solar system.

The 42-year-old so-called rock star physicist, a professor at Manchester University who played keyboards on D:Ream’s New Labour theme ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, says he is appalled that things are actually now even worse for UK science than they were under Margaret Thatcher.

Although we are “living through the greatest age of discovery our civilisation has known” – thanks to revelations from satellites that have revealed the moons around Saturn and Jupiter to be far more interesting than we could ever have guessed, and discoveries about how the world works from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, where Cox also works – science is woefully low on our list of priorities. Cox’s fascinating new series for the BBC, Wonders of the Solar System, is not only packed with amazing discoveries and beautiful images of space, but also contains a very clear message for viewers – we can’t uncover these remarkable discoveries unless we’re willing to stump up the cash to get out there and explore.

“I always have a bit of an agenda,” Cox admits, on the phone to The Big Issue from his kitchen table at his home near Manchester. “I want science to be better supported. Exploration is really important. I genuinely think that a species or a civilisation that doesn’t explore doesn’t just stand still, it dies.”

Passionate though he is, Cox has no intention of hectoring – instead, the series emphasises what we have already achieved in an attempt to show people what their money is spent on.

In the first episode, which went out on Sunday and is still available on iPlayer, this includes a jaw-dropping photograph taken from the surface of Mars, showing a sunset on that alien world. “Everybody paid for that,” he says. “It’s a tiny amount of money, but it’s taxpayers’ money and I think it’s good to be able to say this is what we’ve done.”

Cox has also adapted the material into a kids’ version for CBBC, called Space Hoppers, to try and inspire youngsters to become astronomers. “We need more scientists in general,” he explains.

Although not quite stretching to visits to other worlds, Wonders of the Solar System sees Cox explore some of the most extreme locations on Earth in order to understand their relationship to environments in the rest of the solar system.

With expeditions to India, Ethiopia, Mexico, Iceland, the bottom of the ocean and the top of the atmosphere, it seems like a hell of a gig for a particle physicist who you’d expect to be desk-bound rather than hiking across the jungle. Yet Cox insists it was no holiday. “You get to go to amazing places but it’s not relaxing in any way,” he says. “It’s bloody hard work.”

Once Cox and at the crew arrived at their destinations, it was noses to the grindstone; 12 to 14-hour days came as standard. On top of that, they had to deal with some of the most difficult conditions that exist on this planet. “The last filming block was in the jungle in Mexico in a cave full of acid and with these creatures called snottites – bacteria that breathe hydrogen sulphide and secrete sulphuric acid that they drip on you,” Cox recalls. “It’s full of mosquitoes and bats and it’s just horrible.”

As well as being eaten alive by bugs, Cox dealt with a stomach-churning vertical ascent to 60,000ft aboard an old plane called an English Electric Lightning, to see the curvature of the Earth; a descent in a tiny submarine to 2km below the sea, and an expedition to one of the hottest places in the world, the Erta Ale volcano.

“They fly you in on an army helicopter, throw you out and then come back four days later to collect you,” he says of the Ethiopian trip. “It’s 40-45 degrees. You’ve got this water in plastic containers with chlorine in because otherwise you can’t drink. It’s like drinking a hot swimming pool and you’ve got to drink 10 litres of it a day. It really was horrible – but it makes good telly.”

Somewhat more photogenic than your standard-issue grey-haired, tweed-wearing scientist, Cox does tend to make good telly, and has found himself with a sizeable female following that may not always tune in entirely for his insights on quarks and neutrinos.

Despite the appreciation groups on Facebook and his growing reputation as a science hunk, Cox says he’s far from vain. He couldn’t afford to be in the kind of locations they were filming in. “Somebody asked me, ‘Do you take care of your appearance?’” he says. “And it’s funny because in this series, you see as it goes through, I turn wilder and wilder. By the end I’m an unshaven mess. I just didn’t give a shit any more.”

Cox’s newfound pioneer spirit – he admits that he’d normally rather be “in a cocktail bar with a swimming pool” than on an adventure holiday – is all the more amazing when you consider that he became a dad right in the middle of filming this series. Born in May last year, George Cox is his first child with wife Gia Milinovich (although he already had a stepson, Moki, from Gia’s previous relationship).

Now nine months old, George is making his presence known in the background as he happily gurgles away over daddy’s interview. Cox says that for all the long days and snottites, the hardest thing about his travels was being separated from his newborn son. Unsurprisingly for a man who is currently trying to convert all the UK’s kids into budding astronomers, Cox is very keen that George follows in his footsteps.

Although not old enough to talk or feed himself, “little George” is already going in the right direction. “He plays with plugs and wires a lot so he’s definitely heading down the engineering track. He doesn’t want his toys, he wants switches and remote controls,” Cox laughs. What a shame Fisher-Price don’t make particle accelerators.

Wonders of the Solar System is on Sundays at 9pm on BBC Two