Brian Cox quotes

Brian Cox is a renowned Scottish physicist and television presenter, known for his engaging explanations of complex scientific concepts. With a background in particle physics, Cox has made a significant impact on popularizing science through his numerous TV series, such as "Wonders of the Universe" and "The Planets". He is also a professor at the University of Manchester and a research Fellow at the Royal Society. Cox's charismatic personality and passion for science have earned him a large following worldwide. Stay updated on Brian Cox's latest projects and discoveries by following him on social media.

Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn’t exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began.

- Brian Cox

Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday’s diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery.

- Brian Cox

We shall see that if it were possible to exceed the speed of light, we could construct time machines capable of transporting us backward through history to any point in the past. We could imagine journeying back to a time before we were born and, by accident or design, preventing our parents from ever meeting. This makes for excellent science fiction, but it is no way to build a universe, and indeed Einstein found that the universe is not built like this. Space and time are delicately interwoven in a way that prevents such paradoxes from occurring.

- Brian Cox

Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect’s wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful.

- Brian Cox