From the Big Bang to life on Mars, Professor Brian Cox takes us on a 13.8 billion year journey in his new show

Currently traversing the globe with his biggest ever tour, lighting up stages and arenas from the UK and Ireland to the US, Australia and Asia-Pacific, he’s heading back to a stage near you with Emergence, his biggest and best show to date.

With his award-winning BBC science programmes, podcasts and books, the Oldham-born Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester, Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science and Fellow of the Royal Society attracts audiences of mind-boggling billions, yet even he is subject to gravity and possessed of a down to earth quality that makes him able to explain the universe and everything to mere earthlings with non planet-sized brains.

So it is with Emergence, his most ambitious live show to date, for which he’s worked with ‘scientists, musicians, filmmakers and graphic artists to bring cosmology, biology, philosophy and history to the largest and most advanced LED screens available, with the best sound and lights’ he could find. All told it adds up to seven trucks, two buses and 35 people.

“It's like a big rock tour,” says Cox.

Excited to be appearing in Scotland, especially at Edinburgh Playhouse where he will feel closer to the action and the audience, after multiple arena tours, 58 year-old Cox gives me a ‘potted history’ of the show.

“It began with an idea. There's a beautiful book I've loved for many years, written by Johannes Kepler around 1610, called The Six Cornered Snowflake, with this wonderful idea about why does a snowflake have six corners?

“Many historians describe that time and people like Galileo and Kepler in that part of Europe as being the beginning of modern science because it's when we start to ask questions about the patterns in nature, like the motion of planets or pattern in snowflakes. We start to ask why. It's not just random or God did it, but what is the reason? Is this telling us something about the underlying laws of nature as we would now call them?

“I start with that insight of Kepler’s and how within just four centuries we've measured the age of the universe, understand its observable size and have theories about what happened before the Big Bang. We have spacecraft - the Voyager spacecraft are in interstellar space - and we're on the verge of becoming a space varying civilisation. We know the galaxies are moving, how far away they are and understand how the universe evolved. So how do we acquire reliable knowledge about nature?

“Also there are questions we're exploring now: are we alone in the solar system or is there life on Mars? Is there life on the moons of Jupiter? How many civilisations might we estimate there are in the Milky Way Galaxy? I explore the importance and rarity or otherwise of life in the universe. Because life is one of those patterns that's emerged from 13.8 billion years and these simple laws of nature and building blocks. Why? How did that happen? It's a remarkable thing.

“Then I bring these ideas together and talk about what it might mean for us now, because I’m often asked ‘what does all this mean? Two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, what does that mean?’”

He pauses and laughs. “That's a pretty long potted history.”

On the contrary, Cox is brilliant at putting mind-boggling ideas into succinct, digestible form for the non physicist/cosmologists among us whose minds have a tendency to wander into ‘his hair’s nice’ and ‘quarks are what I put on my oatcakes’ territory through a combination of talking directly to the audience coupled with spectacular big screen visuals of galaxies and this time round, music courtesy of himself, PJ Harvey and Oscar-winning film composer (Atonement, Sense and Sensibility) Dario Marianelli, specially written for the show.

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So why is the show called Emergence?

“In the context of us, we're asking what is intelligence? It's a classic emergent property. As far as we can tell, the human brain is a collection of atoms in a pattern, we know that three particles - up quarks, down quarks and electrons - are held together by four forces of nature and that makes a human brain and out of that emerges consciousness. It's a classic example of emergence, a very complicated property of the universe which emerges from something very simple. And the whole universe is like that.

“In the show we talk about how did the universe go from the Big Bang, where it's really simple and there’s just hydrogen and helium and not much else, to 13.8 billion years later there are galaxies and solar systems, planets and stars, and the galaxies are in a pattern.”

To illustrate, Cox takes his audience on a big screen fly through of images from new data collected by DESI [the dark energy spectroscopic instrument at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona which captures light from distant galaxies].

“It’s a 3D map of the galaxies, and there are patterns in the galaxies just like there are patterns in snowflakes. It's an emergent pattern. We understand what it came from. That's another example of emergence. You could say all structures in the universe, planets, stars, galaxies, humans, are emergent structures. And there are properties that emerge on a different level again, like intelligence and consciousness.”

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Going back to Kepler, Galileo and the new thinkers of the 1600s, if time travel were possible would Cox go back to their time or is there another era he’d visit?

“I would have loved to meet Kepler and Galileo. Six Cornered Snowflake is full of jokes so Kepler, as well as laying the foundations of modern science, seems like a fun person to hang around with.

“But there are so many things I want to know, so I'd like to go into the future. I want to know how far you have to go beyond Earth to find life. I'd like to go to the point where we have just discovered life beyond Earth. It might be Mars. It might be in the next 10 years we discover that.”

And will we know, given the multitude of conspiracy theories that think alien life would be kept a secret?

“Yeah!” laughs Cox in response. “It's so amusing to me, and any scientist, when a conspiracy theory says you lot know stuff and you're not telling us. It's just unbelievable. The moment we have evidence for life beyond earth astronomers will be shouting about it! That’s what they’re like. They'll be on telly, radio, everywhere! It's laughable people wouldn’t know.”

Does he think there’s life on other planets?

“I don't know. One of the reasons we're exploring Mars and have a lot of spacecraft there now on the surface and in orbit is we're interested in the question, was there life on Mars, or is there still life on Mars?

“We think there's a strong possibility there may have been, and see more evidence that says the carbon chemistry is complicated.
We've seen patterns on the surface that look like evidence of microbial life in the past. We don't know whether that's correct, but it's interesting. If all we'd seen was something like the surface of the Moon we wouldn't be spending money, time and effort looking for life. So we think it's possible.

“And we have two spacecraft on the way to Jupiter which are really bioscience spacecraft, which will get there in about five years. We're interested in the moons of Jupiter because we think some are maybe habitats.

“But ultimately the key to science is you don't guess, you go and look. We don't know whether we will find answers, or are capable of understanding. All we know is that we've made progress and the questions we've asked about the structure of atoms and size of the universe, we've been able to answer and understand more.

“But it could be it's just too hard and we're not able to understand. We haven't got to that point. We just assume the more we look, the more we understand, which is probably true - but it's not a law.”

Does this mean Cox is a nightmare for his family - TV presenter and writer Gia Milinovich and two sons - to watch sci-fi films at home in London with because he points out the plots are risible or the science is wrong?

“No, I love science fiction because I treat it for what it is. There are some shortcuts and liberties that you take when you're making a film, It’s not a documentary.

“Project Hail Mary's a good example because the book is wonderful. Andy Weir is a great writer and I've met him a few times and he thinks about everything. And then it's turned into this wonderful film, which is entertaining, made a big impact on people and was very beautiful.”


Where does Cox stand on tech billionaires funding space exploration?

“Well, really it’s private companies building rockets let say, because there's a commercial reason to do so. There was a House of Lords inquiry a few months ago on the space economy and it found 18% of UK GDP relies on space-based infrastructure and it's one of the fastest growing areas of the global economy.

“So there are commercial companies moving into space in the same way commercial companies provide services here on Earth. The way to view the space economy is not as the space economy, it’s just the global economy, and it is one of the fastest growing and most productive areas and there are private companies operating in it.

“The change is that it wasn't economically viable to do that 30 years ago so taxpayers were paying and governments were paving the way with things like the Apollo programme, but now what's happening more and more is that part of the world - the bit a bit above our heads - is commercialised, and we all use it all the time and benefit from it.”

What about things we can’t always explain with science, such as those people who say they have seen a ghost or had a premonition. Does he believe in those things and ever experienced either?

“No I haven’t. But I have a good answer for that, which is I think those two things would contravene the laws of nature as we understand them. So I'm not surprised I haven't seen a ghost, because as far as I understand the laws of nature, they don't exist.

“And seeing into the future? Everything we understand about nature, including the frameworks that we use to understand, not only why our stars shine, but how a nuclear reactor works, are based, ultimately in large part on Einstein's theory of relativity, and that model tells us you can't see into the future. So the consequences of being able to see in the future are that our best models of nature are wrong, and then you have to explain why the technology that we have that rests on those models, works.”

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Ok back with things that don’t contravene the laws of nature, the data being collected that is increasing our knowledge of cosmology exponentially.

“One of the things I want to do is show everyone the latest data,” says Cox, “because we have so much now, precision measurements of the universe, and on the larger scale, the distribution of galaxies, the oldest light in the universe; we have images. We're going through a renaissance in cosmology because we have made so many measurements.

“People say how do you know there was a Big Bang? It’s because over the last century we've made increasingly detailed measurements. The only way ultimately you can understand nature and how something works is to look at it. And we're getting better and better at looking at the universe.”

Cox’s method of showing us the data is to go big on the visuals and team it with music.

“It's a big spectacular show,” he says. “It's definitely the one that I’ve spent most time on developing beautiful graphics. There's a lot of graphic artist’s work in it. There are a lot of images from space telescopes and the surface of Mars and so on but there's a lot of people's work in it, musically and artistically, which I like.”

Music is always integral to Cox’s shows - he played the keyboard with the band Dare in 90s before joining D:Ream with whom he played Glastonbury in 2024 - and Emergence is no exception.

Included in the show is a song entitled Voyager, inspired by NASA’s space probes, that was written by PJ Harvey, from the perspective of what message Voyager 2 might send back to Earth after nearly 50 years traveling through space. On the single, released in June, Cox plays synthesizer and his son George percussive bass along with an orchestral arrangement by Marianelli.

“PJ Harvey came to one of my previous shows and we talked about collaborating, and I said ‘Voyager’ so she came up with a song. We recorded it together in a studio in France,” he says, “and Dario orchestrated it, and also wrote the music for the end of the show, which we recorded with an orchestra. So there's loads of new music in the show. And I actually do use a little keyboard as well, for a laugh, which is like a surprise for the audience, to explain some quantum mechanics and I do actually play something.

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Musicians and artists have long been inspired by space? How does it feel for Cox when the two worlds come together?

“Well, it helps. I always think the intellectual challenges of cosmology, it's just frightening. It's terrifying, really. And then you have to ask what it all means. Well, scientists are not good at answering that question, but musicians and artists, that's what they do.”

When people see the show, what's the main thing he wants them to take away?

“There's an overarching message. As Kepler says in his book ‘I don't know enough and there's new knowledge to be gained’. So this remarkable progress was based on the radical idea that there are things we do not know. And there are so many people, we can all point to them in the world today, who think they know everything.

“The message is there's no progress if you think you're right and you know everything, because progress requires new knowledge to be generated and for you to accept there are things you don't know.

“So we dig down into the structure of matter and the smallest building blocks.
What is space and time? What happened at The Big Bang? What happened before that? Is there life in the universe beyond us? And ultimately, we get to the point where our knowledge stops. We don't know.

“The most important idea of all is that there's a lot we don't know. And will never know. The key to science is to be delighted about that.

“And the strong implication is that that's the way we should live our lives, that's the way we should conduct our politics, that's the way we should behave. We should understand that there's so much that we don't know.”

Brian Cox Emergence World Tour, 7 and 8 October, Edinburgh Playhouse; 18 October, Glasgow OVO Hydro, www.Briancoxlive.co.uk