Brian Cox and the Universe
Brian Cox talks about his book, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos:
“It’s a book about how to think”. OK, I’m in ... the book is on order.
The Milky Way
This is an interview in The Guardian, where Brian Cox shows how anyone can see the world like a physicist. And he explains why he loves changing his mind.
Professor Brian Cox is advanced fellow of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. He embarked on a tour to promote the ideas in his book, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos.
I was looking through your tour dates. You are playing Wembley…
“The bigger the venue the fewer people you can see is a general rule. It’s just great that cosmology can get people out. I did another event at Wembley Arena for 8,000 children, which was brilliant.”
Your new book feels like a sort of magnum opus, a statement of where you – and co-author Jeff Forshaw – think we are up to in relation to the universe…
“Yes. I’ve worked with Jeff for 20-odd years now. We’ve written loads of papers together. The book started off sort of as a manual of what it means to take a scientific approach to nature. But it did turn into a book more about cosmology.
"And that’s really because we both academically have been getting really into this theory of “inflation”, this theory of the exponential expansion of the universe before the Big Bang as we define it.
"But the overall idea of the book was to start with some things you could imagine doing yourself in your back garden or on the beach in Wales – and then by the time you get to the stuff where you need a space telescope you don’t mind because you know the process. It’s a book about how to think.”
