IN THE BEGINNING

Brian Cox’s new show, Universe, is a scientific creation story. He tells Sara Rigby why the series doesn’t shy away from the unknown, why he sees the stars as gods, and why he wants to launch Boris Johnson into space.

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WHAT CAN VIEWERS EXPECT FROM YOUR NEW SHOW?

At one level this is a cosmology series. Cosmology forces us to approach the deepest questions because it’s ultimately about the origin of the Universe and its fate. Within it, questions are raised about the nature of life in the Universe. How common is life? How did it begin? We’re essentially talking about creation stories – so this series is the scientific creation story.

I say right at the beginning that the value of astronomy and cosmology is not so much about the things we discover. It’s the fact that it challenges us. So we are forced to accept that we’re not the centre of the Universe, that we are a tiny speck in a vast and possibly infinite Universe that may be eternal into the future, possibly even in the past. We don’t know. I think the value in such a series is really to say, “This is the arena in which we exist. This is the story of how we came to be here, as told by science,” by which I mean the best [explanation] we can do, given our available knowledge.

This series, more than any other that I’ve done, goes right to the edge of knowledge, in particular, the film about black holes. We’re talking about discoveries made in 2020, really fundamental breakthroughs about the nature of space and time and what they are and whether they emerge from a deeper theory.