Brian Cox's Favourite Wonder
And one of mine too! :)





前有Brian May 今有Brian Cox ♥_♥



好稀饭那段望远镜的夜景场景 <3
BBC的科普类节目比Discovery的给力多了，出发点和形式都更好，更能吸引人，尤其是影片画面质量和拍摄手法方面，那是Discovery不可比的，关键是Discovery哪里去找如此性感的Prof :D



最喜欢的片段之一





“After an unimaginable length of time even these will decay away to nothing. The story of the universe comes to and end. It will be unchanging. Nothing happens and it keeps not happening forever. There is no difference between the past and the future. The arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. The entire cosmos will die.”
Something I've never come to accept...Die! Not die to be reborn?



Prof Cox is so hot that he could fuse helium into carbon and create life



Quotes：
●"Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture."
●"Setting yourself up as anti-religion is not helpful. You can set yourself up as anti-maniac, that’s different. So it’s OK to say that if you believe the world was created 6,000 years ago, as the Creationists do, then you are an idiot. There is nothing wrong in saying that because you are an idiot. But setting yourself up as an atheist who is against all religion is not a battle that needs to be fought."
●"Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on."
●"Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a twat."
●"Look at that! If you ever needed convincing that we live in the solar system, that we are on a ball of rock, orbiting around the Sun with other balls of rock, then look at that! That’s the solar system coming down and grabbing you by the throat."
●"We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon, that identifies our planet as home to life."
●"What scientists are attached to is journeys into the unknown and discovering things that are completely unexpected and baffling and surprising."
●"As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe as measured from the beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for 1/10^30 of a percent. And that's why, for me, the most astonishing wonder of the universe isn't a star or a planet or a galaxy. It isn't a thing at all. It's an instant in time. And that time is now. Humans have walked the earth for just the shortest fraction of that briefest of moments in deep time. But in our 200,000 years on this planet we've made remarkable progress. It was only 2,500 years ago that we believed that the sun was a god and measured its orbit with stone towers built on the top of a hill. Today the language of curiosity is not sun gods, but science. And we have observatories that are almost infinitely more sophisticated than those towers, that can gaze out deep into the universe. And perhaps even more remarkably through theoretical physics and mathematics we can calculate what the universe will look like in the distant future. And we can even make concrete predictions about its end. And I believe that it's only by continuing our exploration of the cosmos and the laws of nature that govern it that we can truly understand ourselves and our place in this universe of wonders."


"I accept some criticisms of the series," says Cox, 43. "I think the days of standing alone on a mountaintop while a helicopter circles round me are over. We're not going to do that again. But it's a challenge to suggest the epic, awe-inspiring nature of the universe. When Carl Sagan, whose work I loved from when I was a boy, made Cosmos [a 1980 TV series and book], he got a lot of stick. So do I. But it's hard: how do you keep the body of the documentary and remove all the visual cliches? To be honest, I'm a little bored of the grandiose thing and I want to move on."
He balks, though, at the suggestion he's cost licence-fee payers lots of money by travelling the world. "My foreign travel was hardly as costly as the CGI or the camera crew. Anyway, it's about the value we bring in the programme. You need epic locations to give the right resonance to what you're talking about." True, but some critics have pointed out the cosmic irony that extraterrestrial wonders are illustrated by shots of Earth's natural wonders.
Cox twirls his spaghetti crossly. It's as though he's trying to reduce his pasta from supernova to ultra-dense neutron star. (This, you will be pleased to learn, will be this article's first and last cosmological simile.) As Cox twirls, his smile fades. The last time I saw that smile disappear so thoroughly was last Sunday during the episode on gravity. There he brilliantly explained the differing gravitational forces on different planets while sitting in a centrifuge, and there is nothing like a centrifugal gravitational simulator to wipe the smile off someone's face.
What's he cross about? "What annoys me is that I can't get out my intellectual cricket bat with my critics, as I can when you're doing physics. There's a brutality in science because you're measuring yourself against reality. As a presenter, I have to be circumspect, but as an academic I just want to beat them into the ground." Who? "The people who accuse me of dumbing down. I may have been standing on a mountaintop, but what I was saying was about electro-weak symmetry breaking. Some people can't see the content for the style. I just want to get the script and say, 'Here's what I said about gravitational mass and inertial mass, or about Einstein's general theory of relativity or about entropy. Now you tell me what you ****ing know about entropy.' I suspect they couldn't because they weren't paying attention. They're so bewitched by complaining that the style of Wonders isn't like the great TV documentaries from when they were young."
He's still cross that complaints about the noisiness of the musical soundtrack led producers to turn down the volume on later episodes. "That was a mistake. It was only a handful of complaints. When I worked as a science adviser with Danny Boyle on Sunshine [the 2007 sci-fi film set 50 years in the future in which a team of astronauts are sent to reignite the dying Sun] he said that music is an integral part of the emotional presentation of a film. It's the same for Wonders: this is supposed to be a documentary about the wonders of the universe and the music should be in the same emotional register. It's not a lecture."


Cox argues that the BBC could have made two different soundtracks available for the series as it was screened. One authentically loud, presumably for the kids whom Cox wants to lure into studying science and engineering; the other muted for more venerable demographics likely to send why-oh-why complaints to Points of View. "It would be similar to making subtitles available, an option you could choose with your remote. It wouldn't cost much. It would be like having wheelchair lifts to buses." After the interview, the BBC press officer chaperoning Cox tells me it would be prohibitively expensive to provide such audio options.
His insistence on his documentary having an emotional dimension underwritten by epic images and loud music highlights is what we might call Cox's Paradox. "I'm trying to get viewers to feel my first reaction to science, which was awe at the universe and astonishment at what we've learned." But at the same time, his vision of science is one devoid of emotion. "Sagan always said this – people don't need to know when the universe began; people need to know how science works, that it's not got an agenda, and that it is a process that is utterly dispassionate."
So you're trying to get younger viewers to have a passionate reaction to something that is methodologically dispassionate? "It's a paradox, but it's what I'm doing. I'm fighting for reason. With scientific education in a democracy, which is what this is about, you have to accept that reason is radical. We live in a culture where people can say 'I don't like nuclear power' or 'I don't think wind farms are pretty', whereas PhD scientists are valuable precisely because they instinctively strip away emotional responses and say, 'Here's the evidence. Here are reasons.' I want Britain to be more reason-based."
As a Royal Society University Research Fellow, Cox has a brief to educate Britons about science and to instil enthusiasm about science and engineering in young people. Why's the latter important? "Britain is squandering its lead in science and engineering. We once led the world, and we can again."
I catch a sidelong glance of Cox as he talks. High-cheekboned, plump-lipped, favoured with serene brown eyes, flecks of grey dignifying his Madchester hairdo – he is not an ugly man. Such improperly non-dispassionate assessments, though, about his looks and their corollary, his alleged egotism, drive the professor nuts. He's just concluded a Twitter war with Sarah Vine, Times columnist and wife of education secretary Michael Gove. In a hyperbolically rude outburst, Vine wrote that Cox's ego was a "giant intergalactic body of energy, an object so large and indomitable that it threatens to obscure even the light of the sun. . . Not even Narcissus himself would have had the brass neck to stipulate . . . long, lingering shots of the handsome professor silhouetted against a night sky."
Cox tweeted: "Sarah Vine should speak to her husband about the impact of science and history programming before scribbling her drivel in the Times". He added that it was Gove's job to encourage young people to into the fields. Then he tweeted Vine: "Your article offends me, and I dare say everyone who has an interest in encouraging more young people into science." Vine snapped back: "If someone can point me towards an ugly scientist who objects to my piece as much as @ProfBrianCox then I will take his objection seriously." Cox replied: "Surely age/sex/appearance has nothing to do with it. Perhaps scientific track record would be a better barometer?"


It's edifying – isn't it? – to see two footsoldiers of Rupert Murdoch's evil empire (Cox writes a column for the Sun) mash each other up as the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will do in 3bn years' time? (Another cosmological metaphor. Sorry). Don't you guys realise you love each other, I ask Cox. "Well, I'm glad she's admitted she was wrong. I know what it's like to be a journalist – you get called at 2pm and told to file something at 4 on something topical."
He tells me he did just that recently, in a column for the Sun in which he eviscerated Saint Vince of Cable because the coalition business secretary seemed poised to cut science funding by 20% in the comprehensive spending review. "The Sun illustrated my article with a Spitfire flying from a double helix, with the headline that cutting back on science now would be like cutting back on the Spitfire programme in 1938. Bang on."
Excellent. But didn't Vine have a point? Where are TV's ugly presenters? Doubtless in some BBC Television Centre holding pen, poor hideous brutes. Would Patrick Moore have been given air time in a TV culture that privileges lookers over thinkers?
"I guess my answer is what you're looking for is someone people want to watch. It's the same for actors. It's not all about looks. If you look at the BBC's science output now it's all middle-aged academics – Marcus du Sautoy, Alice Roberts, Ian Stewart, Jim Al-Khalili, me. It's not like we're Take That."
Casting Professor Cox as a boyband member, though fun, is wrong. He played keyboards for Dare in the 80s and for D:Ream in the 90s, but his rock'n'roll years are long over.
What happened? Picture the scene: it's Manchester in the early 90s, probably raining. A physics undergraduate who only got a D in A-level maths and used to enjoy bus-spotting, is presented with an unimaginably glamorous offer – to tour sunny Australia with a band with a misplaced colon in its name. "It was a really exciting prospect. But I decided I needed to concentrate on my studies."
It was a Damascene moment: down one path lay sex, drugs and rock'n'roll; down the other, gluons, muons and the quest to find the hypothesised Higgs boson particle. He chose the latter. Why? "Physics excited me more. I felt so energised by the process of learning – the intensity of learning – you don't get that very often." He looks wistful: "Actually, I'm trying to get space to get that feeling back. I like going on learning curves and doing TV has given me that but nothing's been as thrilling as the intensity of learning physics."
In 1997, one of his last performances with D:Ream was at Labour's election night party at the Royal Festival Hall. Their song Things Can Only Get Better had been co-opted as the Blairite anthem. "It became a hit again as a result, but I don't think I got any money."
Were you a New Labour supporter? "No, I wasn't politicised. I've never been party political. I only became political in 2007 when Labour was cutting science funding. I got to work in the Particle Physics Action group to fight it. I had a horror of politics then – everybody knew it was wrong to cut science funding, but nobody admitted that they had made a mistake. That's how politics differs from science. In science, you're peer-reviewed into admitting your mistakes. In politics, you don't have to, in fact you have a vested interest in not doing so."


The year after playing for dad-dancing New Labourites, Cox got his PhD in high-energy particle physics at Manchester. He became a member of the High-Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester and worked on the Atlas experiment at Cern, aimed at investigating basic forces that have shaped our universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate. Put that way, it's not hard to see why Cox chose physics over rock'n'roll.
In 2004, he married US blogger and film-maker Gia Milinovich at Cern. They have a son called George, who will be two in May. His middle name is Eagle after the first spacecraft to land on the moon. Two years ago he became professor of particle physics at Manchester, aged only 41.
Between now and September he will collaborate on a book on quantum mechanics and start filming a five-part BBC TV series called The Wonders of Life. It follows his two successful series (the first of which last week earned Cox a Royal Television Society award) and will be a physicist's take on what life is. Didn't David Attenborough's Life on Earth series cover the same ground? "His was a naturalist's perspective; mine goes back to the time when there's an argon content in water and you had living organisms in uranium in rock. It will be about how life was brought about by chemical reaction." Will it be as grandiose as the previous series? "I hope not." We'll see, when the series is screened later next year.
Just before Cox's cab drops me off and he heads to his publisher where he must sign copies of his new book, Cox tells me one of his heroes is physicist Richard Feynman. "He was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century but people always expressed frustration that he didn't concentrate on one thing more. He could have achieved more." Isn't the same true of you? After all, you're doing TV, writing for the Sun, signing books, rather than knuckling down to the hard stuff: understanding the natural laws of the cosmos. "Well, he got a Nobel prize. I won't. I'm not Feynman. I'm not a genius like him!"
The cab pulls away. Inside it, there is someone whose ego is not intergalactically proportioned but, so far as I can judge, more modest.
• This article was amended on 25 March 2011. The original referred to Brian Cox as a fellow of the Royal Society. This has been corrected.

Reviews x
He started out as the long-haired one in D:Ream, but the gravitational pull of physics was too much for Brian Cox
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The long-haired one? Mmm...why couldn't I find a photo? >_<
Loving the cosmological metaphors in this article.
The other letter is more troubling. It lists the series' visual shortcomings. Incessant slow-mo footage...Endless foreign-location sequences of questionable relevance that us increasingly impecunious dupes (licence-fee payers) are bankrolling...
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Seriously...don't they have an artistic taste? Cliche? Absolutely not!
His insistence on his documentary having an emotional dimension underwritten by epic images and loud music highlights is what we might call Cox's Paradox. "I'm trying to get viewers to feel my first reaction to science, which was awe at the universe and astonishment at what we've learned."
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Prof, I feel you <3
He's just concluded a Tωitter war with Sarah Vine, Times columnist and wife of education secretary Michael Gove. In a hyperbolically rude outburst, Vine wrote that Cox's ego was a "giant intergalactic body of energy, an object so large and indomitable that it threatens to obscure even the light of the sun. . . Not even Narcissus himself would have had the brass neck to stipulate . . . long, lingering shots of the handsome professor silhouetted against a night sky."
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She might well be too attracted to the charming Prof to pay real attention to the content of the programme XD
Cox replied: "Surely age/sex/appearance has nothing to do with it. Perhaps scientific track record would be a better barometer?"
"I guess my answer is what you're looking for is someone people want to watch. It's the same for actors. It's not all about looks. If you look at the BBC's science output now it's all middle-aged academics – Marcus du Sautoy, Alice Roberts, Ian Stewart, Jim Al-Khalili, me. It's not like we're Take That.
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agreed.
(Another cosmological metaphor. Sorry)
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Can't complain XD
"Physics excited me more. I felt so energised by the process of learning – the intensity of learning – you don't get that very often."
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Ionian Enchantment *_*
He could have achieved more." Isn't the same true of you? After all, you're doing TV, writing for the Sun, signing books, rather than knuckling down to the hard stuff: understanding the natural laws of the cosmos. "Well, he got a Nobel prize. I won't. I'm not Feynman. I'm not a genius like him!"
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agreed.