‘The more you know, the more wonderful it becomes’: Brian Cox on science and awe

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
This is a podcast by The Straits Times.

**Rohit Brijnath** (0:16)
Think of space, and many of us instinctively feel small. Not just when faced with the science, but also the sheer scale of the cosmos. Two trillion galaxies, 400 billion stars. Numbers so vast, they stop being numbers, and they turn into something closer to poetry.
Gently guiding us through all this is a scientist who believes in bringing a keen sense of childlike wonder to all that vastness. Because wonder, as it turns out, might be the most important quality we have. It is the engine behind curiosity, behind discovery, behind our very human need to ask, what is out there and whether anything out there is asking the same question back.
To explore that idea and much else besides, I'm speaking to Professor Brian Cox, particle physicist, broadcaster, musician, and most recently, a UN Champion of Space.
A professor at the University of Manchester, he has worked on some of the largest particle physics experiments ever conducted. He has also in a previous life played keyboards in a rock band. For years, he's come to us via a variety of screens, asking audiences to look up, take in the wonder of it all while contemplating questions that may never be fully answered. Now, as part of the Emergence Tour, he comes to us live from arenas across the universe. I'm Rohit Brijnath, Senior Columnist. Welcome to In Your Opinion, a podcast by The Straits Times. Joining me today is Professor Brian Cox. Brian, welcome to the show.

**Brian Cox** (1:53)
It's a pleasure.

**Rohit Brijnath** (1:54)
So, Brian, if I can call you that, you have such a powerful sense of wonder, and I think you always manage to infect people with it, and I think you definitely infected me with it. So, I want to know where this sense of wonder comes from.

**Brian Cox** (2:10)
I, you know, as far back as I can remember, I was interested in astronomy, and I don't know where that interest came from. But I loved looking at the night sky.
So, I was fortunate that for some reason, I connected that with physics as a discipline, which meant that when I went to school, when in the UK, when you're 11, you go to school and you can do physics as a subject for the first time.
And I knew that by, I suppose, learning more about that science, I could make, I could understand better what I was seeing in the night sky. I think Carl Sagan actually is one of my heroes who I also grew up watching in the late 70s and early 80s in the UK. He once said that the more you learn about those things, when you know that those points of light in the sky are other stars. And then in the 1990s and onwards, we've learned that all of them pretty much to a good approximation, have planets around them. So at every point of light you're looking at in the sky is host to a solar system. And then you start wondering about the worlds orbiting around there. One of the things I say in the live show is that we estimate maybe one in 20 stars, roughly, may have a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone around the star, which makes it a potential home for life, I suppose, optimistically speaking. So then you start to say, well, those stars you're seeing in the night sky are the worlds with, so it's something about knowing more about nature. And the more you learn, the more fascinating it becomes. And so that's, I think, where my sense of wonder comes from. It's that one idea really, that the more you know about something, and it could be the evolutionary history of a blade of grass, or it could be the details of the points of light in the sky, the more you know, the more wonderful it becomes.

**Rohit Brijnath** (4:17)
So one of the things is that, you know, I think, especially when I look at social media, which I shouldn't, is that, you know, there's this great certainty in this world. Everybody's so certain about everything.
But you know, wonder involves curiosity, right? Do you wish sometimes that people were more curious than they are?

**Brian Cox** (4:39)
It's a very good question, and it goes to the heart of one of the threads through the live show is exactly what you said.
So I phrased it slightly differently, which is if you are sure you know everything, if you are certain, you have closed off the possibility of progress. The progress, if you think about it, by definition requires you to notice that there's new knowledge to be gained. Otherwise, there's no progress.