Review Out of this world experience with scientist Cox

You don’t have to be a particle physicist to consider time travel, the Big Bang and the end of the universe when in the presence of Professor Brian Cox for a couple of hours.

For he clearly communicates theories, science and hard-tograsp (and sometimes well over my head) facts about life, the universe and what we understand of it in a way his Aberdeen audience could all follow, if not always precisely understand.

His show at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre on Saturday was both mindblowing and mind-expanding, enlightening and entertaining, incredibly complex and – at the same time – beautifully simple.

It was an evening of avidly listening to two men passionate about science and the perspective it offers us on our place in the universe, on a planet which is physically insignificant and yet vital to those who call it home.

Brian and Robin Ince, his cohost on BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, make a perfect partnership of the intellectual professor and an irreverent, quirky nerd. And the passion is infectious, the on-screen images – many from the Hubble Telescope – breathtaking, the ideas startling and the knowledge almost overwhelming. Brian talks for the best part of two hours without a script and without hesitation.

The presenters make the point that just asking questions about small and almost trivial things can lead to grand conclusions, though not always – have you ever wondered if jelly would set if constantly stirred in sub-zero temperatures? One scientist did and almost froze trying to find out.

They talk of, and quote from, the giants of science – Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Hermann Minkowski, Ibn al-Haytham and Charles Darwin – as though in conversation with these long dead men, giving life to their words, the human touch to their lives and insights into these great thinkers.

Darwin, author of 29 books – including an apparently “unputdownable” tome on earthworms – once dismissed his genius as him simply being better than the common run of man at noticing things.

But most fascinating in a fascinating evening of cuttingedge cosmology was about where our planet started (about 9.2billion years after the Big Bang), and where we started – it took around three billion years for single cell organisms to become complex living things.

And most encouragingly, the show inspired the potential scientists among us.

In a Q&A session, the majority of questions came from youngsters in the audience: a seven-year-old who wanted to know how to get out of a black hole, a 10-year-old who wanted to know if dark matter would play a part in the end of the universe and an 11-year-old who wanted to know what made the Big Bang.

There was the dad who wanted Brian to explain Back to the Future to his nine-year-old daughter, an 11-year-old who wanted to know how bandages helped skin heal and a husband keen to have Prof Cox convince his wife that humans have, indeed, landed on the moon.

The event was an out-of-thisworld experience which brought home to the 5,000 who gave up their sofas with Dr Who and Britain’s Got Talent for an evening of cosmology, just how special our small blue planet is and outlined where we are in our quest to understand.

Professor Brian Cox considers the big questions