Emergence: Professor Brian Cox brings his universal questions to Leeds First Direct and Utilita Arena Sheffield

Professor Brian Cox is on tour asking key questions about the universe. He tells John Blow why doubt excites him more than certainty.

Professor Brian Cox is touring like the rock star he always wanted to be. He is commanding audiences in venues which are normally lit up by stadium bands but instead of playing the keyboard, of course, he’s holding court on the great issues of quantum physics.

“Yeah, I am it,” comes the cheerfully sarcastic response, confirming his more down-to-earth Oldham lineage over video call from home.

There is something satisfying, however, about the former keys player for Dare and D:Ream finding his way to a mass audience through science rather than music. It shows a hunger for knowledge big enough to fill arenas night after night.

“When I was growing up, that's what I wanted to do, I wanted to be in a rock band, and I wanted to have all these trucks and flight cases and things like that,” says Prof Cox, who, at 58, looks easily a decade younger.

“This show now, I think it's got seven trucks and two tour buses, and 500 flight cases all with my name on. I achieved this teenage dream by talking about physics,” he laughs.

He is referring more specifically to Emergence, his latest and biggest world tour which has just been through Oceania and comes to Yorkshire in the autumn.

Prof Cox starts the show with the story of Johannes Kepler, who in the early 1600s was crossing Prague’s Charles Bridge when a snowflake landed on his arm and inspired him to write an essay. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that even in a snowflake, this ordered pattern exists at random.”

Why, he wondered, are they always six-cornered? It opens the door to greater questions.

“It is the most wonderful thing that there's an appetite (for this show),” he says. “But I know that. Particularly astronomy, the questions we're exploring are: how far do you have to go to discover life? I wouldn't say are we alone in the universe because I'm sure we're not. As I say in the show, there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, so I'm sure there's something out there. But it's a good question, how far do you have to go? Is there life on Mars, for example? Life on Jupiter's moons? So, those questions, but also questions about what are the smallest building blocks of matter. What happened at the Big Bang? Was there a before the Big Bang? What's the future of the universe? What happens inside a black hole? Those are, I think, things that people are naturally curious about, but then it's another thing entirely to give up your Friday night or Wednesday night, or whatever it is, to then come to a show about it. So that is a wonderful thing that people will do that.”

The Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester is now a household name, having fronted a number of BBC science programmes, most recently Solar System, which aired in late 2024 and became one of the broadcaster’s most watched factual series for several years.

His interest in physics was ignited as a young man, when he would go stargazing on Saddleworth Moor, and that simple wonder keeps him curious still, even if the answers to those questions he posed earlier might never come in his lifetime.

“There was a great physicist, John Wheeler, who said that we live on an island of knowledge, in an ocean of ignorance, and as the island expands, so do the shores of our ignorance,” says Cox. “So obviously the more you know, the more you understand that you don't know. The point is, it gets more interesting.”

That is a theme that runs through Emergence. There is a particular line, echoing Wheeler’s own, that has caught people’s attention: "The silence necessary for progress is drowned out by the vulgar noise of certainty."

Clearly, he is referring to more than science.

“You have to admit you don't know in order to make progress, obviously, and that's it – this vulgar noise of certainty, it seems to me to be increasingly vulgar and loud in our societies, of course. There's a political, not a party political, but a political element to that statement.”

Even so, does it not frustrate him, to not get the answers?

No, he says. “Imagine that you did know everything. Raise the counter-proposal, right? How boring would life be? I mean, it'd be pointless, actually, if you knew everything. I think it's the mysteries that are where the wonder lies.”

Besides, what we do know has come on so fast and the show is informed by the most up to date scientific data.

Meanwhile, Prof Cox got to be a rock star in the studio, too, working with PJ Harvey to create music for the show.

“She'd sent me a load of demos that she had and one of them, I thought, sounded like a message, almost like Morse code. So I said to her, what if it's Voyager talking to us after half a century in space, giving us its reflections on what it's learned since it's been away from earth?”

Prof Cox plays keyboard on the track, which has been released a single, recorded at Miraval Studio in France.

Oscar-winning film composer Dario Marianelli worked with them and also wrote an orchestral piece for the end of the show. Graphics and visual effects have been created in collaboration with director Nic Stacey and digital artist Erik Wernquist, while is by Peter Saville, known for his original work with Factory Records.

Prof Cox says: “There's something about the ability to create that spectacle. You've got to just enjoy it, You see these images from the James Webb Space Telescope, for example, or the Mars rovers, on a screen of that size. You don't ever get to do that.

“I've spoken to colleagues of mine, who worked on these instruments and these observatories. They only see these things on a computer screen and then you stick them 30 metres wide, and it's just a privilege to be able to do that. So I love it, actually.

“I like this silliness of it. Standing on this little stage in front of a wall of LED with massive speakers and loads of lights, and all that sort of stuff, and we have bits of surround sound there as well, all that stuff going on, a 35 (person) road crew, whatever we've got, and just talk about physics. It's kind of Python-esque.”

And there it is - the Life of Brian.

Emergence comes to Leeds First Direct Arena on Saturday, October 10 and Utilita Arena Sheffield Arena Sheffield on Thursday, October 15.