Science

It’s a mid-February Tuesday evening in Glasgow. The doors open at the city’s premier concert venue, The Hydro. The audience wait patiently as the necessary searches of handbags are made and their tickets are scanned before entering the foyer. There, the food and drink concessions appear to be doing a decent trade. Programme sellers wave the tour brochure aloft whilst tour merchandise can be obtained from one of the retail units. It’s going to be a busy night with 9,000 seats sold but the crowd is ordered and well mannered. Armed with their tee shirts, programmes, hot dogs and beer, those folk who have shelled out forty quid each for a ticket make their way to their seats. Some find themselves on the floor of the auditorium looking up at the stage. Most will be situated on the huge crescent shaped banking that surrounds three quarters of the main floorspace. The clock strikes 20:00 and the lights are dimmed…

This situation will be familiar to millions of people around the country. Venues like the Hydro are made for events like big rock concerts and other popular forms of entertainment such as the Strictly Come Dancing tour or Disney on Ice. Tonight is different though. Tonight, 9,000 people have come to see a talk by the Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University. This may seem like a highly unlikely scenario until you realise that that man is Professor Brian Cox. Cox is one of the very few scientists who have made it into the conscious of the general public. He has achieved that through his work presenting many BBC science programmes, particularly the three ‘Wonders’ series. The popularity of science seems to go through peaks and troughs; Cox’s programmes have seemingly helped propel it to a peak the likes of which we have not seen for some time. It helps he’s a good looking guy but his enthusiasm for the subject is something I, and it would appear many other people, find entertaining. As a bit of a science geek I am naturally delighted by all this and I was one of those 9,000 folk who took their seat in The Hydro that evening. I really didn’t know what to expect but I was willing to, for one evening only, be blinded by science.

As it turned out I wasn’t. Science is such a huge subject it couldn’t possibly be crammed into a couple of hours. Even Cox’s branch of science, physics, would not have had its surface scratched by an evening’s chat. Instead, Cox talked about cosmology. Very broadly speaking, physics can be split into the very small – fundamental particles such as quarks and leptons (having been born in a village called Lepton, I approve of this name) – and the very large, cosmology. To keep a large crowd entertained by talking about quantum mechanics, the theory of fundamental particles and the forces that affect them, would be a very big ask, even though this is Cox’s area of research. The science of the very big relies on the theory of relativity, itself something that is very difficult to get your head around, but it is much easier to relate to the general public, especially if you have access to some beautiful imagery that can be projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. Cosmology it was then and it was a perfect choice. I’m not a scientist but I’ve read numerous popular science books including a couple co-authored by Cox himself. What was covered in the show wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before and not overly taxing but that was not a problem. I, along with everyone else was there to be entertained. For me the imagery and Cox’s enthusiastic explanations were enough to keep me agog throughout the evening. Cox had a helping hand from Robin Ince, his sidekick on the science based radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage. Ince was the more natural stage performer having a pedigree in stand up and the two played off each other well. Whilst there was no dancing in the aisles, no demands for an encore and nothing to singalong to, the crowd seemed to be happy as they were filing out of the building.

As mentioned, I’m a bit of a fan of science, especially physics. That’s not to say I’m any good at it. I did get an A Level in the subject but there was no way I could have taken it any further than that. What is the universe made of and where did it come from? It’s fascinating to me. The concepts are mind blowing. 13.8 billion years ago the immensity that is the universe today, trillions of galaxies each consisting of trillions of stars, was all crammed into an infinitesimally small space when the Big Bang happened. How are we supposed to get our heads round that? Cox and his fellow physicists will describe it with a fair degree of precision through mathematics but to we mere mortals it is something we have to visualise and can’t. Similarly, relativity which describes the effects of gravity on spacetime is something which is definitely there but has such weird effects it does not sit easily in our brains. Black holes with their event horizons and singularities make a great plot for sci-fi movies but if we were ever to visit one the effects would defy our misplaced logic. We are trapped in our own tiny localised area of the universe and have evolved to survive in it. Relativistic effects are so tiny we have no need to deal with them. Whatever happens at the atomic level is of no real concern as long as those atoms behave in the way they have done since the beginning of time. We have, however, evolved to be curious and science is the process we use to attempt to answer the questions of how and why. It’s not easy and the more we find out, the harder it gets to understand. Professor Brian Cox and others are attempting to make it more accessible to the general population and for that I’m rather glad.