Conversing with Brian Cox can, in all truth, make you immediately regret the moment you eschewed science when selecting your A-levels. The measured rate in which he speaks provides consideration and care to myriad complex topics – black holes, principles of physics, the deep mystery of time – in an engaging manner that your year eight teacher could never quite master, elegantly layering every explanation with wonkish terminology the way in which a synth-pop band coats its arrangements with different stylings.
Best known as a presenter of science programmes, Cox, for many of a certain generation, is straight from the Attenborough school of good-guy geeks, a person beloved for explaining difficult topics – the solar system and Mars among them – for a wide audience to digest easily on their Saturday evenings and then ruminate over with a flat white and the papers on Sunday mornings.
Below, we speak to the physicist about his musical collaboration with IWC Schaffhausen and Hans Zimmer (which was unveiled in summer 2024), what would happen if one were to throw a watch into a black hole, and if the idea of eternity scares him.
Brian Cox on humanity’s attempt to colonise Mars
The progress we’ve made in space exploration is remarkable. If you go back 10 or 15 years and asked, ‘Will we have rockets that fly to space and then come back again and land on Earth?’, I would have probably said, ‘No, that’s a long way away.’ [But they do exist now] so, you can never discount the ingenuity of engineers.
Images courtesy of IWC Schaffhausen
But I think that human exploration of Mars is quite a way in the future. My guess is that the timescales that some people will talk about – you know, 10 years or something – is probably too hard. The furthest we’ve been is the moon, and it only takes a few days to go to the moon. We have astronauts on the Space Station for long periods, but they’re very close to Earth. So, if something goes wrong, they can come back in a matter of minutes, hours at most. Whereas, if you’re on your way to Mars, you’re gone for years. For the human body, I think it’s hard.
Brian Cox on what would happen if you were to throw a watch into a black hole
It’s a very, very, very deep question. When viewed from the outside, if I throw it in – if I observe it going towards the event horizon – then I will see it ticking more slowly. So, from my perspective, time will be going slower and slower and slower, and time will stop on the horizon. If I jumped in with it into a big black hole, like the one at the centre of the Milky Way, I would not notice. I’d fall through the horizon.
Then the question is, what happens? I would go towards this singularity thing, which is the end of time in Einstein’s theory. But, actually, in nature, we think something more complicated happens, and we’re not sure what it is. Essentially, you get scrambled up and ‘spaghettified’. And then, ultimately, it seems you emerge out of the black hole, again, imprinted in what’s called Hawking radiation in the far future. So, your pattern, your information is, in some sense, encoded in the ashes of the black hole.
Brian Cox on humanity
I’m still of the opinion that we could well be the only civilisation in the galaxy – and I’m still of the opinion that we’re idiots.
Brian Cox on whether the thought of infinity scares him
What does it mean to live a finite life in an eternal universe? I think everybody thinks about this. We have finite lives – I think that’s the way things are. And so, the challenge, really, is to understand how to not only deal with the fact that you live a finite life, but to revel in the fact that you exist at all.
You’ve got to switch from saying, ‘I want more of this’ to thinking, ‘It’s astonishing that we actually have this.’ Bertrand Russell was once asked, ‘How can you deal with that finite life… you’ll die one day?’ And he said, ‘Well, it was a long, long time before I was born, and it hasn’t bothered me in the slightest.’ So it is symmetric. No one worries about the fact that they didn’t exist once.
Brian Cox on explaining time
We don’t know what time is, and that’s a very deep statement, because you would think that, at this point in the 21st century, we know about time.
Brian Cox on his musical collaboration with Hans Zimmer and IWC Schaffhausen [which took place in summer, 2024]
I became aware of Hans Zimmer’s music through science-fiction films. I think the reason he’s so good at it – beyond his musical talent – is that he knows a lot, an immense amount, and he cares very much about things such as the future of the human race, and how we make sure that we have a future. You sit and talk with him for hours about anything – you’ll get into deep philosophical discussions, scientific discussions. In the case of the collaboration with IWC, we were talking about the nature of time, the nature of eternity, our emotional reaction to it – and what he’s almost uniquely good at is taking all those ideas and translating it into music.
This feature was taken from our Autumn 2024 issue. Read more about it here.
Want more interviews? We pay a visit to Javier Bardem…
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