19Aug2008

Brian Cox

---

---

Hi all
Sorry I haven’t writ­ten for a while…Been a bit all over the place.
Listeners to my Planet Rock show will know about the weekly sci­ence spot, well next Sunday I have a treat for you if you do..
This morn­ing I finally got to talk to Brian Cox, one of the physi­cists work­ing on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN…(He also used to play key­boards for D-​​Ream, so in his case, I guess things really did get bet­ter..)
Holy shit­ting Christ..What a DUDE!! He man­aged to talk about mind-​​melt­ingly hugely pro­found physics con­cepts with a clar­ity and sim­plicity that has to be heard to be believed.
(What’s more he does it in a seduc­tively lilt­ing Mancunian accent, more Johnny Marr than Liam Gallagher if you know what I mean, and he’s got a cooler hair­cut than either of them to boot..)
What the good folk at CERN are about to attempt is sim­ply aston­ishing. On Sept 10^th, they will have cooled down the 27km par­ticle accel­er­ator to 2 degrees above absolute zero…That’s colder than the space between galaxies..They will then start fir­ing pro­tons at each other at 99.999% of the speed of light in order to recre­ate the con­di­tions in the Universe ONE BILLIONTH OF A SECOND after the Big Bang!!!!!!
The idea is to find the so far elu­sive Higg’s Bosun, the so-​​called ‘God’ par­ticle that give things mass, and try to detect why we can’t detect dark matter…I was going into an ecsta­tic spin lis­tening to him talk about this stuff, and it was all I could do to not jump off my chair shout­ing “Yippeee!“
He also does it with a keen­ness and humour that is utterly cap­ti­vating, and makes me bit­terly regret hav­ing dropped out of Physics at school. (Although to be fair I blame my Physics teacher’s excru­ci­at­ingly long winded and tedious exper­i­ments ver­i­fying Hooke’s Law for that..)
Physics is the big daddy of all the sci­ences, and right now it’s on the verge of break­throughs that are beyond immense, like Biology in Darwin’s time I expect. In terms of mak­ing Physics sexy, appeal­ing and acces­sible some­one like Brian is worth a thou­sand Stephen Hawkings, and needs to be cel­e­brated as such.
We’ve had Comedy as the new Rock’n’Roll, well let’s make the next one par­ticle physics!
Check out

http://​public​.web​.cern​.ch

Also, some of the sci­en­tists have done a rap!! It’s actu­ally a bril­liantly sim­ple expla­na­tion of what they’re up to..

It will cer­tainly be bet­ter than last weeks show, which was plagued with mishaps, and I can only apol­o­gise to my guest Chris Spedding for the sham­bles…

xxGuy