Famous scientists: Brian Cox

Brian Cox seems to be Britain's favourite professor. Is it the youthful looks, the Oldham accent - or have we just fallen for physics?

Cox has made his name spreading the word about science in ambitious documentaries like Wonders of the Solar System.

But Cox doesn’t spend his life in front of the cameras – and his day job is even more exciting. He currently works with CERN at the Large Hadron Collider, investigating the fundamentals of mass – as he puts it, “why is this table solid?”

At the LHC, Cox works on the ATLAS project – the general-purpose detector tasked with the search for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle thought to be the source of mass in the universe.

Even here, he remains a passionate communicator. When the media filled with scare stories suggesting the LHC could destroy the world, he was a prominent voice of reason. But his passion for science extends to frustration at media misinformation – he famously once said that “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a ----”.

Life before physics

Cox was no stranger to the spotlight even before he’d earned his PhD. Before Horizon and Wonders of the Solar System you were more likely to see him on Top of the Pops.

After seeing Duran Duran play in Leeds when he was fifteen, he was lured away from science by music – and ended up with a D in his maths A-level.

He learned to play keyboards, and began a brief career with the rock band Dare. He left the band after a fight in a Berlin bar, and decided the time was right to return to physics. At 23, he went to the University of Manchester to start his degree.

But Cox wasn’t finished with music. While at university, he joined D:Ream and reached number one with the single Things Can Only Get Better. Success made for a strange student lifestyle which sometimes involved working in the lab all day before walking to the Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre to support Take That.

Cox played with D:Ream for the last time in May 1997, when the group played their No. 1 hit, chosen as the anthem for New Labour’s election campaign, at the party’s election night event. He left the band to focus on physics full time.

He doesn’t miss music, because “after about five years’ touring, it’s not glamorous anymore, it’s just knackering.” The wonders of the universe don’t seem to be getting boring as quickly…

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