Brian Cox
Brian Cox
Brian Denis Cox, CBEis a Scottish actor who works with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he gained recognition for his portrayal of King Lear. He is also best known for appearing in The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, X2, Braveheart, Rushmore, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Troy and Doctor Who. He was the first actor to portray Hannibal Lecter on film in the 1986 feature film Manhunter...
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth1 June 1946
CityDundee, Scotland
space our-world saws
For the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space.
eye practice darkness
One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.
dream past journey
Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.
journey unexpected scientist
What scientists are attached to is journeys into the unknown and discovering things that are completely unexpected and baffling and surprising.
views world universal-truth
In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.
moving hands theory
Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on.
law arrows forever
The story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, forever. It's what's known as the heat-death of the universe. An era when the cosmos will remain vast and cold and desolate for the rest of time the arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It's an inescapable fact of the universe written into the fundamental laws of physics, the entire cosmos will die.
musician explorers universe
An explorer of the universe is sexier than a musician.
important culture popular-culture
Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture.
new-york bridges white
For me, Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!
mean together earth
The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.
thinking people understanding
If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.
knowing understanding benefits
At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.
home surface beacons
We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon, that identifies our planet as home to life.