Brian Cox was once the keyboard player for pop band D:Ream, whose 1993 No1 hit "Things Can Only Get Better" was used by the Labour Party during their 1997 General Election campaign.
After attending Hulme Grammar School in Oldham, his home town, he studied physics at the University of Manchester where in 1993, while still studying, he joined the band. He would "finish my physics lecture... then do a gig supporting Take That."
A year after D:Ream disbanded in 1997, Cox was awarded his PhD degree in high energy particle physics at the University of Manchester.
Now he is probably Britain's best-known, and best-loved, physicist since presenting the BBC's brilliant five-part documentary series Wonders of the Solar System earlier this year. The series attracted millions of viewers, thanks to Cox explaining the science in an easy-to-understand way in his friendly northern accent. His good looks also attracted women to the show.
He now wants to help Britain reclaim its place as the world's leading science nation.
Now, writing exclusively in The Sun, Professor Cox writes about Europe's Large Hadron Collider and the historic moment when two particles smashed into each other in the highest-energy collision ever seen.
The biggest bang
Having a blast ... computer image of the biggest 'bang' to date inside the Large Hadron Collider
Wednesday 21st July 2010
The Sun
By Professor Brian Cox
Meet Professor Brian Cox, writing exclusively for The Sun: I’d finish my physics lecture... then do a gig supporting Take That: Man who makes science cool signs as Sun science professor | The Sun |Features
AT first glance this picture looks like the most basic display from the earliest home computers.
But what it actually shows is the historic moment two particles smash into each other in the highest-energy collision ever seen.
The resulting mini-explosion inside the Large Hadron Collider is at least a MILLION times hotter than the centre of the sun.
Expert ... Brian Cox
And the multi-coloured lines are newly created sub-atomic particles spraying out from the collision between two protons.
It is one of the most interesting of the billions of collisions which the LHC has been photographing this year on a giant 4,000-tonne camera called ATLAS built and operated in part by UK scientists.
But the collider's job is not just to make lots of new particles.
What scientists are really interested in is the behaviour of our universe in the first instants after it was born, 13.7 billion years ago.
These are the conditions in the centre of the explosion in the picture below.
This is interesting because we have found that our complex and baffling world today is made up of just a few simple building blocks.
In fact you only need three things to make up you, me, the earth and every star in the sky.
These building blocks are hidden from view today, locked up inside matter, but in the very early universe they roamed free.
Two of these little building blocks are called quarks, and the other is the electron.
What you are seeing in the picture is actually two quarks, one from each of the colliding protons, smashing together and flying outwards, creating a shower of new particles as they go.
Understanding exactly how these tiny things behave is crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of our world.
A million times hotter than the sun ... explosion in Hadron Collider
In the 19th Century, understanding the atom gave us chemistry.
In the 20th Century, understanding the nucleus at the heart of the atom gave us nuclear power and also modern medical technology including MRI and PET scanners.
Who knows what wonderful benefits the 21st Century understanding of the tiniest building blocks will deliver?
The collider is the giant 27km circular machine buried in a tunnel under the Swiss city of Geneva and has been out of the headlines recently.
That's because it is quietly working away recreating the conditions that were present in our universe less than a billionth of a second after it began.
Tomorrow, at an enormous international conference in Paris, the first results from the LHC will be presented to the scientific community.
For myself and the thousands of other physicists and engineers who have worked on the project over the past 20 years it has taken to get these first results, this is the start of a golden age in the exploration of the universe.
I remember working on my PhD in the late 1990s in Hamburg on the experimental data coming out of an earlier particle collider.
Seeing nature in a completely new way for the first time is the most exciting thing that can happen to a scientist - it is genuine exploration.
'This is a new golden age in the exploration of the universe' ... Hadron Collider will help us understand the bing bang better
For many younger physicists at CERN - the European Organization For Nuclear Research, which runs the collider project - they will be experiencing that thrill for the first time.
Nobody knows what we will discover now the LHC is running beautifully, but we all expect a profound leap in our understanding of the basic workings of the universe.
I worked for many years on a project to install new particle detectors very close to the LHC proton beams themselves.
These will hopefully be installed when the LHC shuts down for its scheduled maintenance in a couple of years' time, and should help in the search for new particles such as the famous Higgs Boson.
If the Higgs does exist, it will be seen at the LHC during this coming decade, and may show itself within the next few years.
And even as the LHC starts delivering its first fascinating results, this week scientists have been discussing the giant machine that may succeed it.
The International Linear Collider is an ambitious project to build a 31km-long atom smasher in a straight line.This kind of machine is very different from the LHC, which is a giant circle.
Circular machines have a huge advantage because they can keep speeding up the particles as they whizz round and round until they have enough energy to be smashed together to reveal the secrets of the universe.
The problem is that when particles go around in a circle, they lose lots of energy as X-rays. This is, in fact, how X-ray machines work in hospitals.
The way around this in circular machines like the LHC is to use particles called protons. They don't produce as many X-rays as other particles because they are heavier.
But there is one big downside - protons are really complicated things, full of thousands of other sub-atomic particles.
It's a bit like smashing two buses together at a thousand miles an hour - something interesting might happen but there will be a hell of a mess as well!
A linear collider gets around this by being straight, which means you can use much simpler particles called electrons in the collisions.
Particles travelling in straight lines don't produce X-rays, and this is better for high-precision measurements because there isn't any debris at all.
But because you can't keep whizzing them around in a circle to speed them up, it is not possible to get to the ultra-high energies that the LHC can manage.
The strategy for scientists over the next 50 years is therefore to search for new particles and science with the LHC, and then be ready to build a high-precision linear collider with just the right energy to explore these new phenomena in beautiful detail.
In hard economic times like these, it is easy to frown upon ambitious international projects like the LHC and the International Linear Collider.
But it would be very short-sighted and extremely silly not to continue to investigate our universe in this way.
All the particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy we do in the UK - including all the physicists, all our students, the cost of CERN, the European Space Agency, all our domestic facilities and all our telescopes - cost less than 50 pence per week per taxpayer.
The LHC itself costs us less than five pence per week.
For that, we get to do science, to understand our universe better, and to uncover who-knows-what wonderfully useful discoveries for tomorrow.
Not to mention the generations of new scientists that these wonderful projects inspire.
Brian Cox's fave facts
-270. The temperature (in degrees Celsius) of the universe today. It's just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature.
Since its incredibly hot beginning 13.7billion years ago at the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding and cooling down.
3 Types of subatomic particles: the up quark, the down quark and the electron.You, me, the earth, the sun and every star in the sky are made of them.
200billion. Number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun is one of them. We are orbiting around the centre of the Milky Way - but it is so vast that it takes us 250million years to complete a single orbit.
186,000 miles per second. The speed of light. If you could travel that fast, time would stand still.
33,000 feet. Height of peak of Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Mount Everest is highest mountain above sea level, at 29,000ft.
thesun.co.uk
After attending Hulme Grammar School in Oldham, his home town, he studied physics at the University of Manchester where in 1993, while still studying, he joined the band. He would "finish my physics lecture... then do a gig supporting Take That."
A year after D:Ream disbanded in 1997, Cox was awarded his PhD degree in high energy particle physics at the University of Manchester.
Now he is probably Britain's best-known, and best-loved, physicist since presenting the BBC's brilliant five-part documentary series Wonders of the Solar System earlier this year. The series attracted millions of viewers, thanks to Cox explaining the science in an easy-to-understand way in his friendly northern accent. His good looks also attracted women to the show.
He now wants to help Britain reclaim its place as the world's leading science nation.
Now, writing exclusively in The Sun, Professor Cox writes about Europe's Large Hadron Collider and the historic moment when two particles smashed into each other in the highest-energy collision ever seen.
The biggest bang
Having a blast ... computer image of the biggest 'bang' to date inside the Large Hadron Collider
Wednesday 21st July 2010
The Sun
By Professor Brian Cox
Meet Professor Brian Cox, writing exclusively for The Sun: I’d finish my physics lecture... then do a gig supporting Take That: Man who makes science cool signs as Sun science professor | The Sun |Features
AT first glance this picture looks like the most basic display from the earliest home computers.
But what it actually shows is the historic moment two particles smash into each other in the highest-energy collision ever seen.
The resulting mini-explosion inside the Large Hadron Collider is at least a MILLION times hotter than the centre of the sun.
Expert ... Brian Cox
And the multi-coloured lines are newly created sub-atomic particles spraying out from the collision between two protons.
It is one of the most interesting of the billions of collisions which the LHC has been photographing this year on a giant 4,000-tonne camera called ATLAS built and operated in part by UK scientists.
But the collider's job is not just to make lots of new particles.
What scientists are really interested in is the behaviour of our universe in the first instants after it was born, 13.7 billion years ago.
These are the conditions in the centre of the explosion in the picture below.
This is interesting because we have found that our complex and baffling world today is made up of just a few simple building blocks.
In fact you only need three things to make up you, me, the earth and every star in the sky.
These building blocks are hidden from view today, locked up inside matter, but in the very early universe they roamed free.
Two of these little building blocks are called quarks, and the other is the electron.
What you are seeing in the picture is actually two quarks, one from each of the colliding protons, smashing together and flying outwards, creating a shower of new particles as they go.
Understanding exactly how these tiny things behave is crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of our world.
A million times hotter than the sun ... explosion in Hadron Collider
In the 19th Century, understanding the atom gave us chemistry.
In the 20th Century, understanding the nucleus at the heart of the atom gave us nuclear power and also modern medical technology including MRI and PET scanners.
Who knows what wonderful benefits the 21st Century understanding of the tiniest building blocks will deliver?
The collider is the giant 27km circular machine buried in a tunnel under the Swiss city of Geneva and has been out of the headlines recently.
That's because it is quietly working away recreating the conditions that were present in our universe less than a billionth of a second after it began.
Tomorrow, at an enormous international conference in Paris, the first results from the LHC will be presented to the scientific community.
For myself and the thousands of other physicists and engineers who have worked on the project over the past 20 years it has taken to get these first results, this is the start of a golden age in the exploration of the universe.
I remember working on my PhD in the late 1990s in Hamburg on the experimental data coming out of an earlier particle collider.
Seeing nature in a completely new way for the first time is the most exciting thing that can happen to a scientist - it is genuine exploration.
'This is a new golden age in the exploration of the universe' ... Hadron Collider will help us understand the bing bang better
For many younger physicists at CERN - the European Organization For Nuclear Research, which runs the collider project - they will be experiencing that thrill for the first time.
Nobody knows what we will discover now the LHC is running beautifully, but we all expect a profound leap in our understanding of the basic workings of the universe.
I worked for many years on a project to install new particle detectors very close to the LHC proton beams themselves.
These will hopefully be installed when the LHC shuts down for its scheduled maintenance in a couple of years' time, and should help in the search for new particles such as the famous Higgs Boson.
If the Higgs does exist, it will be seen at the LHC during this coming decade, and may show itself within the next few years.
And even as the LHC starts delivering its first fascinating results, this week scientists have been discussing the giant machine that may succeed it.
The International Linear Collider is an ambitious project to build a 31km-long atom smasher in a straight line.This kind of machine is very different from the LHC, which is a giant circle.
Circular machines have a huge advantage because they can keep speeding up the particles as they whizz round and round until they have enough energy to be smashed together to reveal the secrets of the universe.
The problem is that when particles go around in a circle, they lose lots of energy as X-rays. This is, in fact, how X-ray machines work in hospitals.
The way around this in circular machines like the LHC is to use particles called protons. They don't produce as many X-rays as other particles because they are heavier.
But there is one big downside - protons are really complicated things, full of thousands of other sub-atomic particles.
It's a bit like smashing two buses together at a thousand miles an hour - something interesting might happen but there will be a hell of a mess as well!
A linear collider gets around this by being straight, which means you can use much simpler particles called electrons in the collisions.
Particles travelling in straight lines don't produce X-rays, and this is better for high-precision measurements because there isn't any debris at all.
But because you can't keep whizzing them around in a circle to speed them up, it is not possible to get to the ultra-high energies that the LHC can manage.
The strategy for scientists over the next 50 years is therefore to search for new particles and science with the LHC, and then be ready to build a high-precision linear collider with just the right energy to explore these new phenomena in beautiful detail.
In hard economic times like these, it is easy to frown upon ambitious international projects like the LHC and the International Linear Collider.
But it would be very short-sighted and extremely silly not to continue to investigate our universe in this way.
All the particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy we do in the UK - including all the physicists, all our students, the cost of CERN, the European Space Agency, all our domestic facilities and all our telescopes - cost less than 50 pence per week per taxpayer.
The LHC itself costs us less than five pence per week.
For that, we get to do science, to understand our universe better, and to uncover who-knows-what wonderfully useful discoveries for tomorrow.
Not to mention the generations of new scientists that these wonderful projects inspire.
Brian Cox's fave facts
-270. The temperature (in degrees Celsius) of the universe today. It's just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature.
Since its incredibly hot beginning 13.7billion years ago at the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding and cooling down.
3 Types of subatomic particles: the up quark, the down quark and the electron.You, me, the earth, the sun and every star in the sky are made of them.
200billion. Number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun is one of them. We are orbiting around the centre of the Milky Way - but it is so vast that it takes us 250million years to complete a single orbit.
186,000 miles per second. The speed of light. If you could travel that fast, time would stand still.
33,000 feet. Height of peak of Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Mount Everest is highest mountain above sea level, at 29,000ft.
thesun.co.uk