Brian Cox: All the great discoveries were by people curious about nature

Nick Curtis
11 Mar 2010

Poor Professor Brian Cox. I meet the telegenic physicist and former pop star to discuss his mission to demystify science through his BBC2 series Wonders of the Solar System. And his opposition to plans by both main parties to cut Britain's £3 billion scientific research budget.

Hours after our chat, the BBC reports that the £2.6 billion, partly UK-funded Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva — on which Cox works — is to shut for a year to “address design and safety issues”.

Coming so soon after the Collider's 14-month closure following a malfunction in 2008, the story couldn't have been worse timed. It's hard for scientists to argue for more money if their most expensive, cutting-edge project breaks down twice in two years, isn't it? What's more, the practical applications of the LHC remain elusive.
It allows boffins to smash electromagnetic particles together at high speeds, which we are vaguely promised will teach us more about the universe. That phrase “safety issues” sounds menacing, too, when it's linked to 27 kilometres of underground hardware, “colder than the spaces between the stars”, that can theoretically replicate the Big Bang.

The story seemed to confirm the image Cox wants to dispel, of science as “a niche, esoteric, elitist club, that the public funds, full of people playing with their large particle accelerators”. Cox, now 42, played keyboard with the international rock band Dare in his teens, but was already studying physics when its later incarnation D:Ream gave Labour its 1997 election anthem, Things Can Only Get Better. With his perpetual smile and easy Oldham accent, he is a natural choice to be the televisual face of physics. And he needs all his communication skills in the face of the LHC's bad press.
When I catch up with him again he's “just had a rant at the poor old Beeb”, his paymaster, about inaccurate reporting. He's also been posting increasingly exasperated comments on Twitter: “ALL particle accelerators have 6-12 month regular shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how complex machines are operated!”

The basis of his argument is this. The Collider will be shut down for up to a year at the end of 2011 for maintenance and upgrades, which is standard practice. Before that, it will run at half-power for 18 straight months, during which his fellow-physicists will collect reams of data. “Normally you'd run an accelerator for nine months, then shut it down for maintenance, so the fact it's working for 18 is superb, an expression of confidence in the machine,” he says. Although the 2008 malfunction meant that the Collider originally functioned below expectations, an 18-month “physics run” now means it is operating at a more effective level than anticipated.

The team at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) is confident the machine can run completely safely at full power. But they're being extra careful. The 2008 incident was caused by defective joins in wires carrying charges of up to 10,000 amps in the LHC's huge superconducting magnets. There was a helium leak and the machine damaged itself. But it was only ever a danger to itself — “it's not a threat to workers or people” — and the CERN team have decided to wait until after the shutdown period and upgrades to the machine before running it at full strength. Just in case.

As Cox's colleague Dr Steve Myers told the BBC, the LHC is “its own protot ype”. So a level of trial and error was always anticipated. “We have become complacent with machines that work — cars, planes, computers — but these are mass-produced items, and we got them right a long time ago,” adds Cox. “The LHC is a one-off at the very edge of what we are capable of, so it's natural we should learn about the machine as we use it.” It will also have a probable operational life of 20 years, so its eventual impact is impossible to predict now.

At £2 a year for every British taxpayer, it is cost effective, he claims. “It looks expensive but the fact that 85 countries pay for it makes it massively cheap. The whole budget for it is less than the whole budget for Manchester University. And it continues the line of exploration that stretches right back to Faraday, Newton, Einstein — the line that gave us the modern world, electricity, quantum mechanics, silicon chips, transistors.” The superconductive magnets created specially for the Collider can now be mass-produced for nuclear fusion reactors, “which is probably where we'll be getting most of our energy in 50 years' time.”

So the closure of the Collider in 2011 is a failure not of engineering, but of PR. The only time a big project hits the headlines — the Hubble Telescope, global warming research — is when it's perceived to have gone wrong, or over budget, or become a political football.

“I don't think it's properly reflected that doing difficult things is a) good and b) difficult, and it would be to all our benefit if that were more widely understood.”

This is Cox's main thesis. Since the days when Harold Wilson promised Britain “the white heat of technology”, and the space race turned thousands of youngsters (including Cox) onto astrophysics, science has become increasingly seen as separate from society. Government funding of science has declined since the Seventies and is currently around £3 billion a year, with just £1 billion going to physics. Yet 6.4 per cent of Britain's gross domestic product — roughly equivalent to the contribution of the financial services sector — comes from physics-based industries.

“All the great, paradigm-shifting discoveries have come from people who are curious about nature,” he says. “Penicillin, Faraday's discovery of electromagnetism, even Einstein's discovery of relativity, which you might think is esoteric, but without which you can't build a satellite navigation system.”

The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN: a manager dubbed the original proposal “vague but interesting” before giving it the go-ahead. Cox argues that we need such places where innovation is encouraged, and that the young need to be enthused about science.
Which brings us back to Wonders of the Solar System. Every 10 years, Cox explains, the BBC needs, as part of its Reithian ethos to inform, educate and entertain, to re-explain the universe to a new generation. There was Carl Sagan's Cosmos in the Eighties, The Planets in the Nineties.

For the new series, the Corporation's head of science programming, Andrew Cohen, hit upon the idea of using fabulous locations on earth to explain the physical make-up of the universe. So the boyish, infectiously enthusiastic Cox is dispatched to the Ganges to witness a solar eclipse and to a depth of two kilometres in the Sea of Cortez to witness micro-organisms in the kind of boiling thermic currents that might also exist on Jupiter's moon, Europa. He goes to the outer limits of the atmosphere in a Lightning aircraft to see the curvature of the earth and to Norway to see the Northern Lights, the visual manifestation of the solar winds that spill from the sun.

The result, Cox believes, is that the programme packs a lot of content about physics into something that is still “cinematic”. The BBC hoped the first episode would pull in 2.5 million viewers on Sunday but it got closer to three million, with more watching the Tuesday repeat.

There is also an infant-friendly spin-off, Spacehoppers, at 7.30 on Tuesday mornings on CBeebies, “so we hope kids will watch with their families”. (Cox has a 10-month- old son and a stepson with his American wife, Gia Milinovich.)

“Inspiring kids is literally priceless, not just in an airy-fairy sense, but economically,” says Cox in conclusion. “How many kids do you need to go into science to make the discoveries that drive our economy forward? Probably not many. But you do need them. And the more you have, the more chance of finding the genius who discovers penicillin.” Or who can not only build the next Large Hadron Collider, but make the public understand it.

Wonders of the Solar System is on Sundays at 9pm on BBC2.