Brian Cox: What can we learn from the professor of wonder?

The celebrated physicist — once a rocker — talks about curiosity, galaxies, walking on the Moon and the power of saying ‘I don’t know’.

- Rohit Brijnath

Wonder is a path someone must walk you down.

My father first took me there even before I fully understood it. Get the Britannica, he'd growl, and I'd groan. Volume 13 was opened, pages flicked, the Nile found, a journey commenced. He was taking me travelling, down a great river of knowledge where we'd find maps, papyrus and mentions of Homer’s Odyssey.

Wonder is the spark that ignites curiosity. It’s akin to a window opening to a new world and it is what Brian Cox does. He lives on Earth but leads us on voyages beyond. Last week I spoke to the celebrated physicist and by chance discovered there are nymphs in the sky and princesses among the stars.

As we chatted on the In Your Opinion podcast, Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, whose lectures can be complex as he untangles knotty subjects, took me through a world of black holes, the Voyager, Carl Sagan, the composer Richard Strauss, Albert Einstein, and the Bee Gees (they signed his undergraduate physics syllabus in the days he was a musician).

At one point I asked, if I bought a telescope, what might I look for up there in the mysterious dark, and he mentioned the Galilean moons. I could hear my father saying, “look it up”, and so I did and it’s where I discovered Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the four largest moons of Jupiter, named after a priestess, a princess, a prince and a nymph from Greek mythology.

Cox talking space is akin to a songwriter discussing Bob Dylan. Animation seizes him. “So everyone,” he explained, “who's looked through the telescope that I have and seen Saturn for the first time becomes emotional about it because it looks like a child’s drawing of a planet.