Brian Cox (physicist)

• 1. A Grade of D

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  Brian Cox, the English physicist and musician, once admitted to a chat show host that he did badly in A-level maths. "I got a D... I was really not very good... I found out you need to practise." That grade belongs to a man who now holds the title of Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science. He also works as a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. How does a D in maths lead to a professorship? What pulled a working keyboard player toward one of the largest experiments ever built? And how did a particle physicist become one of the most recognisable voices of science on British television and radio?

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• 2. Oldham Childhood

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  On the 3rd of March 1968, Brian Edward Cox was born in the Royal Oldham Hospital. From 1971 his family lived in nearby Chadderton. He has a younger sister. Both of his parents worked at the same branch of Yorkshire Bank, his mother as a cashier and his father as a middle-manager.

  Cox remembers a happy childhood in Oldham. He took part in dance and gymnastics, and he spent time spotting planes and buses.

  From 1979 to 1986 he attended Hulme Grammar School, a private school in Oldham. When he was 12, he read Cosmos by Carl Sagan. He has said in many interviews that the book was a key factor in making him want to become a physicist. Years later he told that same story in an episode of Wonders of the Universe, the series he would present himself.

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• 3. Keyboards and Bands

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  In the 1980s and early 1990s, Cox played keyboards in the rock band Dare. The band released two studio albums with him, Out of the Silence in 1988 and Blood from Stone in 1991. He then became a live and session keyboardist for the pop group D:Ream. His discography also lists D:Ream on Volume 1 from 1993 and an album called The Name of the Rose, credited to Ten, from 1996.

  The music he loved as a teenager came from another band. Cox describes himself as an "obsessive" fan of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in his youth. He wrote the foreword to the band's official biography, OMD: Pretending to See the Future, published in 2018. Of their songs he said, "They shaped my character and inspired me to make music."

  He has never fully put the keyboards away. In 2015 he was a guest keyboardist when New Order played "Your Silent Face". In 2022 he played "Enola Gay" live with OMD frontman Andy McCluskey. On the 29th of June 2024, he joined D:Ream at the Glastonbury Festival for "Things Can Only Get Better".

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• 4. Manchester and CERN

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  In 1991, Cox earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Manchester, with first-class honours. He had studied while his music career was under way, and the degree arrived in the same year as Blood from Stone.

  D:Ream disbanded in 1997. In 1998 Cox completed his Doctor of Philosophy in high-energy particle physics, again at Manchester. His thesis was titled Double Diffraction Dissociation at Large Momentum Transfer, and Robin Marshall supervised it. The research came from the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator, which sits at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany.

  Cox later worked on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. He held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, and earlier an advanced research fellowship from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.

  His physics also reached print. With Jeff Forshaw he co-wrote Why Does E=mc2? in 2009 and The Quantum Universe in 2011. He has supervised or co-supervised several PhD students to completion, including Tamsin Edwards.

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• 5. Wonders on Screen

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  David Attenborough once described Cox as the natural successor for the BBC's scientific programming. The broadcaster's schedule gave him plenty of room to prove it.

  In early 2010, BBC Two aired the five-part Wonders of the Solar System, with Cox presenting. A four-part follow-up, Wonders of the Universe, began on the 6th of March 2011. In 2013 came Wonders of Life, which Cox describes as a physicist's take on life and natural history. He also presented Science Britannica, a three-part series on British scientists over the last 350 years and on how the public views British science.

  Before those series, Cox appeared in the BBC Horizon strand. His episodes included "The Six Billion Dollar Experiment", "What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity?", "Do You Know What Time It Is?" and "Can we Make a Star on Earth?"

  In January 2011, BBC Two commissioned the three-day live series Stargazing Live. Cox co-presented it with the comedian Dara Ó Briain, and Jonathan Ross featured as a guest. Further series followed in January 2012 and January 2013.

  On the 14th of November 2013, BBC Two broadcast The Science of Doctor Who for the show's 50th anniversary. Cox tackled the mysteries of time travel, in a lecture recorded at the Royal Institution Faraday Lecture Theatre. Human Universe and Forces of Nature followed, and in 2022 BBC Two broadcast Brian Cox: Seven Days on Mars.

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• 6. Radio and Comedy

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  Since November 2009, Cox has co-presented The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4 with the comedian Robin Ince. The programme is billed as a comedy science magazine show. Its guests have included the comedians Tim Minchin, Alexei Sayle and Dara Ó Briain, along with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  Scientists from other fields have joined too. Alice Roberts, of the BBC show The Incredible Human Journey, has appeared. So has Callum Roberts, a chief scientific advisor for Blue Planet II. Cox also took part in Ince's stage show Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People.

  On the 24th of July 2009, Cox appeared in an episode of Robert Llewellyn's CarPool podcast series. He was a regular on the BBC 6 Music Breakfast Show with Shaun Keaveny, with a weekly feature there, and he later joined the Afternoon Show from 2019. Each year he and Keaveny recorded a Christmas special with the musician Brian Eno.

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• 7. Lectures, Cameos and Python

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  In 2010, Cox delivered the Royal Television Society's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, titled "Science, a Challenge to TV Orthodoxy". He used it to examine problems in how the media cover science, and BBC Two later broadcast it. He has also given talks on the Large Hadron Collider and particle physics at TED on numerous occasions.

  On the 4th of March, the National Theatre hosted "Frankenstein's Science", with Cox in conversation with the biographer Richard Holmes. They discussed Mary Shelley's exploration of the human wish to bring life to an inanimate object. In March 2011 the calendar filled again. On the 6th of March he was a guest at Patrick Moore's 700th episode of The Sky at Night, a programme he credits as an inspiration. Four days later he gave the Ninth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture.

  His reach extends to fiction. Cox was the science advisor on the film Sunshine, and on the DVD he recorded a commentary on which scenes were scientifically accurate and which were not. He made a cameo in the Doctor Who episode "The Power of Three" in 2012.

  A longtime Monty Python fan, he joined the troupe on stage in July 2014 on the final night of their 10-date show, Monty Python Live (Mostly). In 2017, he voiced the space expert Professor Ryan Farrow in an episode of the children's programme Postman Pat, titled "Postman Pat and the Space Suit".

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