Professor Brian Cox brings some excitement to finance conference
TV presenter dazzles audience with tales of the universe
Masters of the Universe – meet Wonders of the Universe.
Hard-nosed bankers sat in respectful silence as Brian Cox, scientist, television presenter and former pop star, explained the Big Bang, the importance of research and why it’s not a bad thing for scientists to play around.
In a wide-ranging talk to the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference on Friday, Cox, a particle physicist, launched his lecture with a picture from the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory. The image showed the oldest light – dating back to a mere 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.
“What you’re looking at here is a snapshot of, essentially, fluctuations in the density of the early universe. These are the seeds of the galaxy,” Cox told an audience of financiers, who, for once, looked more excited by life, the universe and everything than by mergers and acquisitions.
Cox, who has presented a series of BBC flagship science programmes, including Wonders of the Universe, Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of Life, is a professor at Manchester University. In Britain he has become a household name and, due to his legion of adoring female fans, is the man credited with making science sexy.
He also works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, which was useful when he explained how the Big Bang had helped shape life.
