Enchanting fact of the week: Brian Cox, who used to be in the pop band D-Ream (they of “Things Can Only Get Better”, Labour’s 1997 election anthem) is now an experimental physicist at the University of Manchester and one of the key designers of the Large Hadron Collider.
Glorious interview moment:
INTERVIEWER: Is this stuff more or less difficult than being in a rock-band?
BC: [Laughs] It’s technically more difficult but it’s less difficult in the sense that it’s a much more interesting thing to do for a 40 year-old. I will admit that when you’re 18 being a rock star is an interesting thing to do but it gets a bit wearing after a while.
INTERVIEWER: Would you say this is the equivalent of being in a rock band for a physicist?
BC: I think it is; yeah I think CERN is the–it’s the–in my opinion the first Apollo program of the 21st century in a way. I mean it’s certainly the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted and it’s journeying into the unknown in a way that we haven’t done for many decades in fundamental physics–in particle physics. You know there are some very big questions about our model of the way the universe began and how it evolved; there are issues like you know the stuff–the dark matter in the universe and dark energy which is forcing the universe to expand quickly and that kind of interface between particle physics and cosmology has going through a renaissance at the moment and there are many–the observations that the precision observations of the microwave background for example–all those things are feeding in these new measurements that suggest that the universe is accelerating its expansion.
But the really priceless quote is in this week’s Popbitch:
At the age of 14 I built a circuit board to make a synthesiser like in Duran Duran’s Planet Earth. It all started there really.
