The Wonder of Brian Cox

by Ben Falk

  Cox had met his soul mate, but he had also taken on a great responsibility as stepfather to her young son. They got on well, but it was an adjustment to his life, which now included birthday parties at the ice rink, vomit on the white living-room rug and competitions to see who could do the most household chores. They maintained two houses: Cox in Manchester and Milinovich in London. It was frenetic, but exciting. Work was exciting, too. In October 2001, he won a prestigious Advanced Fellowship from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), a five-year-long award aimed at those who had done one or two post-doctoral positions and were moving into proper academia. More than 250 applications were received every year and only 12 were handed out, paying his salary, some subsistence and potentially offering funding for research.

  It was the next stage in what was to be an increasingly successful career, both on-screen and off. With a serious girlfriend, stepson and fellowship in tow, Cox was ready to take it to the next level.

  CHAPTER 6

  CERN… AND MORE

  It seems a long way from Oldham to the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, but by 2003 Brian Cox was a well-travelled man. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, was the pinnacle for any particle physicist looking to take the next step in his or her career. Established officially in 1954 and sitting astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, CERN was set up as the base of a world-class fundamental physics research institute with a goal to progressing and if possible, revolutionising their branch of science. They did that and more. In 1957, they built their first accelerator (the SC) and in 1959, the Proton Synchotron (PS) became for a short time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

  Future Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak developed the multiwire proportional chamber, which was to forever alter the way scientists were able to detect particle collisions in 1968. Then, in 1989, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider was commissioned. With a circumference of 27 kilometres, the building of the tunnel alone took three years and was Europe’s largest civil engineering project prior to the Channel Tunnel. The LEP was used for 11 years and provided crucial research into so-called Z particles, as well as proving definitively there are only three generations of matter. But perhaps the most incredible discovery at CERN prior to 2008 was the internet. The Web’s founder, English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, created the building blocks of the net in 1989/90 while at CERN before putting it into the public domain. It was a magnanimous gesture that symbolised the ethos of the organisation – changing our lives through science and discovery for the sake of bettering humanity and nothing more. Said Cox: ‘Who would have thought that a particle physics laboratory would have invented the thing that would revolutionise e-commerce and has probably generated trillions for the economy?’

  The formulation for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began back in the early 1980s. Determined to move particle physics forward, scientists at CERN met to discuss building the biggest-ever accelerator. It wasn’t until 1994 that the project was approved. ATLAS, one of the main experiments at the LHC, was approved in 1996. Established to discover the elusive Higgs boson, which would explain how particles get their mass, it was also hoped that it would explore the origins and properties of so-called dark matter. The scientific consensus is that 96 per cent of the universe is invisible in the sense that it is made up of dark matter. Initially, it was thought ALTAS might examine the existence of extra dimensions in our universe. What is a collider? In the case of the LHC (and most similar machines), it’s a combination of an accelerator and detector. Explains CERN itself: ‘Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.’

  The LHC was built in order to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang. ‘Two beams of subatomic particles called “hadrons” – either protons or lead ions – travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap,’ says CERN. ‘Only experimental data using the high energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.’ Cox himself summed it up: ‘The thing about the LHC is that it is a new energy regime, so anything that we see is interesting.’ Talking to interviewer Alan Franks, he put the new accelerator in its scientific context: ‘Particle physics is often misunderstood because it is seen as being a search for new particles, whereas what you really want to know is what these particles do when they collide – basically, how the universe was built at those energies. It’s not a matter of going up to high energy for the sake of it; what we have found over the 100 years since Ernest Rutherford (father of nuclear physics and professor at Manchester in 1907) is that the universe looks simpler as you get to higher energies so you are gradually uncovering the underlying structure. We know exactly the point at which our understanding fails and that point is at 10 times less energy than the LHC has got. We know that something interesting happens there and we know that it is related to mass.’

  For Cox, working for CERN seemed like the natural next step. Already he had visited the facility a number of times. He had worked on the HERA project in Hamburg and more recently worked at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab in Chicago. Before it shut down in September 2011, Tevatron was the second most powerful accelerator in the world, charging beams to 99.999954 per cent the speed of light in a tunnel 4 miles in circumference, buried 25 feet underground in a campus near the city of Chicago. There, he busied himself with continuing his research, writing academic papers and giving talks. In November 1999, he was one of the presenters (along with Manchester University colleague and friend Professor Jeff Forshaw) of ‘Is BFKL Ruled Out By the Tevatron Gaps Between Jets Data?’ at a meeting in Batavia, Illinois. The following April, he co-wrote ‘Hard Color Singlet Exchange at the Tevatron’ and then in the December, he contributed to ‘Diffractive Vector Boson Production at the Tevatron’.

  He was doing exactly what he wanted to do – working on nuts and bolts science in one of the most prestigious labs in the world. But Manchester and its well-regarded physics department had been one of the universities that contributed to building the ATLAS detector at CERN. Building work at the LHC had been pushing on and in November 2003, ATLAS stepped into the colossal LHC structure with the installation of 18 huge feet, each 5 metres high, which were made to support the 6,000 tonne detector itself. Despite meaning he would have to move away from Gia and Moki, the family agreed it was the best career step and so Cox was off to Geneva.

  Despite working at some of the most impressive particle accelerator labs in the world, nothing could prepare him for the LHC, even though it was still in the building stages. Comparing it to HERA, which he had worked on as a post-grad, demonstrates its magnitude. While HERA energised its particles to 300 GeV, the LHC could push them to around 14,000 GeV. Sitting in a tunnel almost 27 kilometres in circumference and between 50 and 175 metres underground, it was a spectacular piece of engineering and a mouth-watering enterprise for any physicist. ATLAS itself is the detector, half as big as Notre Dame Cathedral and weighing the same as 100 jumbo jets. Though it wasn’t this number when Cox arrived at CERN, by December 2009, there were 2,900 scientists working on the project from 37 different countries. A section of ATLAS was tested for the first time using beams from the Super Proton Synchotron (SPS), another accelerator.

  Cox ploughed straight into the work. In June 2004, he gave a talk in East Lansing, Michigan titled ‘A Review of Forward Proton Tagging at 420m at the LHC and Relevant Results From the Tevatron and HERA’. Two months later, he was in Hanoi, Vietnam to speak to the 5th Recontres du Vietnam on Particle Physics and Astrophysics. Relishing the new challenge, he presented the paper ‘Double Proton Tagging at the LHC as a Means to Discover New Physics’. ‘I think CERN is, in my opinion, the first Apollo program of the 21st century in a way,’ he told Orei
lly.com. ‘I mean, it’s certainly the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted and it’s journeying into the unknown in a way we haven’t done for many decades in fundamental physics, in particle physics. There are some very big questions about our model of the way the universe began and how it evolved. We really are wonderfully baffled at the moment, I think it would be fair to say about the building blocks of the universe and the way the universe began and how it evolved, and the LHC is the frontier at the moment in that research.’

  He loved working there. ‘It’s an odd job – a fantastic job, actually,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘Your job description is to, “find out how the universe works – and here’s this six billion Euro machine that you can use to do it.”’ For several years, he ran an upgrade project there called FP420, which was designed to result in additional particle detectors being installed close to the LHC beams. He used some of the most advanced computer programs in the world, writing simulation programs in FORTRAN, a computer language described as ‘procedural, imperative, that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing’. In addition, he utilised C++, a computer code that is ‘statically typed, freeform and multi-paradigm’. It’s safe to say he was dealing with complex levels of computer science. ‘My program is a program called POMWIG, which is a derivative of HERWIG, which is one of the big Monte Carlo physics simulation programs,’ he told interviewer Timothy O’Brien. He might find that harder to explain clearly to people on television.

  Having worked in labs before as well as foreign countries, he soon got into the swing of things. Staying at a Holiday Inn at the foot of the Jura Mountains in France, he had to walk 20 minutes to work through the small French village of Saint-Genis. Every day, after waking up to an international newspaper and a continental breakfast of coffee, bacon baguette and pain au chocolat, he crossed the border into Switzerland with the looming peak of Mont Blanc as his backdrop. Going through the security gates, he made his way up the aptly named driveway, Route de Albert Einstein. Cox has described CERN as being an ‘almost utopian village’, where the higher-ups are given diplomatic licence plates for their cars. It’s a busy complex – every time there’s a new project (and CERN has been in existence for more than half a century so there have been plenty), a new office springs up, connected to the rest of the lab via wood-panelled corridors. It probably reminded him of school.

  The sheer size and labyrinthine nature of CERN meant he still occasionally became lost on his way to the place he was working. Arriving at a white warehouse, he would descend into the LHC tunnel. As ATLAS began to take shape, it looked more and more like a spacecraft to the excited scientist, who said: ‘The gleaming gold wheels at each end look like the solar panels from a giant Mars rover.’ Being partly housed in France, it’s unsurprising a lot of the work done at CERN is carried out in the canteen. ‘Lunch is at 12,’ said Cox. ‘It’s a bit of a race. If you go at 12.10, the canteen is packed with thousands of physicists. There’s a lot of mingling – it’s legendary for that. It’s full of people talking about physics. They have brilliant cakes, really great elaborate things with cream and chocolate.’

  And after lunch, it wasn’t long before the booze came out. ‘They start serving alcohol around 3 in the canteen, so people start drinking a little bit of red wine, getting more energetic and chatty,’ he revealed to writer Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe. ‘The trick with this kind of project is to think out of the box.’ Just as in Hamburg, where his evenings were spent shooting the breeze with Jeff Forshaw or out and about with other young members of the team, evenings often involved more animated banter over a few beers and possible a nice bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Stopping work briefly at 7pm, some alcohol would be consumed before a bit more work and then it was off to dinner. One of Cox’s favourite places was the Coq Rouge, a small place in Saint-Genis. The camaraderie demonstrated just how everyone shared a common purpose. As Professor John Dainton, his supervisor at HERA explained, scientists at a lab are all seeking the same truths, trying to achieve the same goals.

  It might not be nine to five, but it was hard work. Back in his hotel room, Cox would avoid reading about science or physics or his brain would begin whirring again. Rather, he would read books such as God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Others were beginning to recognise his academic talents, too. In October 2005, he became a Royal Society University Research Fellow. The oldest scientific academy in continuous existence and charged with championing and developing the pursuit of science in the UK and around the world, the University Research Fellow scheme is one of their flagship early career awards, given to elite scientists in their year group. Each year, there are 600 applicants and around 12 fellows are made, following close scrutiny of a five-year research proposal by a panel of experts. They also examine publication records and collect some background material on the candidate.

  The award can be extended for three more years (as Cox did) and is considered an investment in the fellow himself rather than funding for a specific piece of research. Matching his university salary, with some subsistence costs on top, it is aimed at giving him the freedom to pursue different avenues during the fellowship. ‘The idea is to bring the best scientists from our universities,’ explains the Royal Society. ‘We’re down to the real cream of the crop.’ Indeed, it was a prestigious pat on the back.

  CERN was enthralling, but there was no doubt he was missing Gia and Moki. Though Cox tended to iChat with them on the computer before heading out for his evening meal, being away was difficult. It seemed as if it was time to take the next step in their relationship, though it appears that neither Brian nor Gia particularly cared for a big wedding. In fact, it was one of the smallest weddings ever. In 2004, they travelled to visit Milinovich’s family in Duluth, Minnesota and while there were married in her mother’s front room with a family friend who happened to be a judge officiating. ‘It was kind of an afterthought, really,’ he told the Guardian. ‘We didn’t make a big thing of it at all – we just wandered off and decided to get married. Because we didn’t really want anyone there, to be honest.’

  Cox’s own parents were not very happy, having only been informed on the couple’s return to the UK. ‘I don’t think they were entirely pleased,’ he admitted, while attributing the decision as being partly down to his roots – ‘I’m a northern man, I don’t like any fuss.’ He later joked that neither he nor his wife could remember exactly when it took place and that he needed to check at some point whether the ceremony had been legal. ‘We felt quite strongly that it was about us and not anybody else,’ he explained. ‘It does seem quite eccentric in hindsight.’ Since being awarded an OBE, people have suggested that he should exercise his right to marry in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. ‘I don’t know whether that’s apocryphal,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard it so many times that it might be true. Maybe I should do it, just because I can. I won’t, but it’s an amusing thought, isn’t it?’

  While they didn’t invite any guests, friends did get to see some pictorial evidence of the big day. ‘I remember getting an email from Brian and Gia with photos of the wedding,’ says the couple’s former Network of the World colleague, Chiara Bellati. ‘They had this very private, secret wedding and then they emailed a whole load of people announcing the happy news.’

  The newly married couple began work on some science-based TV programme ideas and then Cox got a break: the BBC’s Horizon was looking for contributors to a show they were doing called Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, a docudrama-style programme about the famous physicist’s last project, which he hoped would unlock the mind of God. Narrated by actor Bernard Hill, the show mixes fictional scenes from Einstein’s deathbed with commentary and talking heads. Cox was chosen to be the main interviewee. Not only did he explain the main scientific concepts throughout the programme, he was also asked to do some of the silent walking bits he would later emulate in his own series. At one point, he is filmed tossing a dice into the air in slow motion; elsewhere, he walks out of focu
s through an orchard. Interjected in these segments are abruptly angled interview shots as he lays out Einstein’s ideas.

  The show is a bit too tricksy in its attempts to sex up what is in essence a very straightforward documentary. Cox isn’t as fluent as he would later become but he does a solid job and Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony received a 8.2 out of 10 user review rating on the Internet Movie Database. Though he had strived to break into the media properly for some time – and the BBC interest was a validation of that – Cox wasn’t convinced about his on-screen ability. ‘I never thought I could do it,’ he told me in early 2010. ‘When I first tried to do anything on TV, it was shit. I don’t think many people are natural in front of cameras – I think in general you need practice. What the BBC have been brilliant at with me is thinking, he can probably do it eventually, let him have some practice. They’ve been very good and supportive.’

  Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony was broadcast in January 2005 and he quickly followed it up by participating in another BBC documentary called Stardate: Comet Impact, which was shown in the July. Suddenly, the Cox household had two television personalities. Milinovich had also been presenting for the BBC, on their World channel, with a show called Click Online. She had also teamed up in 2004 with co-presenter Ed Sanders for Channel 4’s Demolition Day, an engineering reality show charging two teams with building indestructible edifices, which were then put at the mercy of their opponents, who attempted to smash them. Writing together seemed like a natural thing to do and they had done so before in their early television days at Network of the World. Now, they began to hatch up some interesting ideas with a view to talking to production companies.