Brian Cox: What can we learn from the professor of wonder?

Wonder is a path someone must walk you down. My father first took me there even before I fully understood it. Get the Britannica, he’d growl, and I’d groan. Volume 13 was opened, pages flicked, the Nile found, a journey commenced. He was taking me travelling, down a great river of knowledge where we’d find maps, papyrus and mentions of Homer’s Odyssey.

Wonder is the spark that ignites curiosity. It’s akin to a window opening to a new world and it is what Brian Cox does. He lives on Earth but leads us on voyages beyond. Last week I spoke to the celebrated physicist and by chance discovered there are nymphs in the sky and princesses among the stars.

As we chatted on the In Your Opinion podcast, Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, whose lectures can be complex as he untangles knotty subjects, took me through a world of black holes, the Voyager, Carl Sagan, the composer Richard Strauss, Albert Einstein, and the Bee Gees (they signed his undergraduate physics syllabus in the days he was a musician).

At one point I asked, if I bought a telescope, what might I look for up there in the mysterious dark, and he mentioned the Galilean moons. I could hear my father saying, “look it up”, and so I did and it’s where I discovered Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the four largest moons of Jupiter, named after a priestess, a princess, a prince and a nymph from Greek mythology.

Cox talking space is akin to a songwriter discussing Bob Dylan. Animation seizes him. “So everyone,” he explained, “who’s looked through the telescope that I have and seen Saturn for the first time becomes emotional about it because it looks like a child’s drawing of a planet.

“So you go from the telescope, you look through the eyepiece, and then you look at this... little yellowy point in the sky with your eyes. And then you go back to the eyepiece and you go, ‘It can’t be this. I can’t be looking at that.’ It’s these huge rings, this beautiful planet.”

I am swiftly swayed by this UN Champion For Space – who brings his new show, Emergence, to Singapore on June 10 – and it is not only because I am intimidated by physics and thus ignorant and impressionable. Truth is, on a planet of terse and trivial Instagram reels, he is the sort of influencer we need, whose only provocation is to think, to find, to marvel.

Cox’s answers took off joyously, without an established destination (one answer may lead anywhere) or a set flight time. But then wandering is his business. When I asked about the three humans across time he’d like to have a round-table discussion with, he might easily have replied with four words: Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Einstein. Instead his answer generously roamed over a thousand words. To interject was akin to interrupting a singer in full flow.

‘Send leaders into space’

He talked complex life forms and microbes, and also sending particular beings up in rockets. “All leaders of countries should actually be required in the future to go up into space and then come back again. It should be a requirement when you take office, just so you can see the thing that you’re responsible for. I said it as a joke once, but the more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense.”

He evangelised about stars and scale and refers to a photograph from the Vera Rubin Observatory in his show which holds 10 million galaxies in a single image. Even he sounded awed. “A galaxy is hundreds of billions of stars. It takes light maybe 100,000 years to cross a large galaxy... and there are 10 million of them in the photograph and two trillion, by some estimates, in the observable universe.

“It’s impossible to imagine.”

He is 58 yet has not lost that boy he once was, who gazed at the night sky and was drawn to it as you might be to a Shakespearean text. His interest became his fascination, following a path once described by the novelist Henry Miller: “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

Now he, who like David Attenborough and Neil deGrasse Tyson is our necessary guide through unfamiliar terrain, transmits that wonder, rekindling it, asking us to pause and see the universe anew. We, often jaded by a bickering world, could do with more of this. Amazement – a childlike thing we abandon as adults – might be the antidote to cynicism. I can never forget my granddaughter meeting her puppy for the first time and squeaking with the awe of a six-year-old: “This is a great day.”

Forever a student

As we discussed learning, in schools and university, he mentioned a light-hearted thought which became a belief: He’d like to abolish examinations in the first year at university. “I understand that that sounds naive and there’ll be people watching who say, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I would like the students to ask a literally existential question – which is, why am I here?” Not to pass exams, of course, but to learn.

But then curiosity is his anthem and it is a humbling one because it begins with the refreshing truth that we don’t know. It’s what I feel when walking into a bookshop, all that vast, neatly stacked chaos of ideas and facts which I will never fully discover.

But often it feels as if curiosity across the planet has dimmed a little, like a flickering light in a storm of certainty. We are mostly creatures of swollen conviction now, dangerously armed with apparently irrefutable arguments. Cox has a gentler phrasing for this, saying, “If you are sure you know everything, if you are certain, you have closed off the possibility of progress.”

We shrink from saying “I don’t know”, as if ignorance diminishes us, but Cox is unafraid of that phrase. Even on stage sometimes, if he stumbles over an explanation, he realises in that instant that it is “because there’s something there that I don’t understand”. Professor is only his title, student is his enduring status.

I asked Cox, who studies space from Earth, if he’d like to travel up there and look back at us. In reply he talked about the famous Earthset photograph taken on April 6 by the Artemis II crew as they flew around the Moon. “You look at those photographs (and) I think I would love to see that.” Later, he added, “I’d quite like to land on the Moon”, and yet has no desire to travel farther. Two weeks is his voyaging limit and so Mars is not on his itinerary.

In Singapore, Cox’s lecture might wander through cosmology, physics and philosophy, and hopefully even those who don’t grasp everything will, like me, find something to hold on to. My fascination is always the stars and it doesn’t matter who we are, and where we live, when we walk out into the night it feels so wonderfully human to instinctively look up.

Is it a glittering map of distant worlds we see or merely an ancient navigational tool? Is it an ever-changing transcript of history or the home of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley? None of us sees the night-time sky quite the same but it hardly matters. What does is that we keep voyaging, riding the spaceships of our imagination towards some distant wonder.