Brian Cox on What Earthly Phenomena Reveal about the Wonders of the Solar System

“Curiosity is the rocket fuel that powers our civilization.”

“I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral,” ur-astronomer Ptolemy contemplated nearly two millennia ago, “but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.” But while the cosmos has fascinated humanity since the dawn of time, its mesmerism isn’t that of an abstract other but, rather, the very self-reflexive awareness that Ptolemy attested to, that intimate and inextricable link between the wonders of life here on Earth and the magic we’ve always found in our closest cosmic neighbors.

That’s precisely what modern-day science-enchanter Brian Cox explores in Wonders of the Solar System (public library) — the fantastic and illuminating book based on his BBC series of the same title celebrating the spirit of exploration, and a follow-up to his Wonders of Life and every bit as brimming with his signature blend of enthralling storytelling, scientific brilliance, and contagious conviction.

Cox begins by reminding us that preserving the spirit of exploration is both a joy and a moral obligation — especially at a time when it faces tragic threats of indifference and neglect from the very authorities whose job it is to fuel it, despite a citizenry profoundly in love with the ethos of exploration:

[The spirit of exploration] is desperately relevant, an idea so important that celebration is perhaps too weak a word. It is a plea for the spirit of the navigators of the seas and the pioneers of aviation and spaceflight to be restored and cherished; a case made to the viewer and reader that reaching for worlds beyond our grasp is an essential driver of progress and necessary sustenance for the human spirit. Curiosity is the rocket fuel that powers our civilization. If we deny this innate and powerful urge, perhaps because earthly concerns seem more worthy or pressing, then the borders of our intellectual and physical domain will shrink with our ambitions. We are part of a much wider ecosystem, and our prosperity and even long-term survival are contingent on our understanding of it.

But most revelational of all is Cox’s gift from illustrating what our Earthly phenomena, right here on our seemingly ordinary planet, reveal about the wonders and workings of the Solar System.

Tornadoes, for instance, tell us how our star system was born — the processes that drive these giant rotating storms obey the same physics forces that caused clumps to form at the center of nebulae five billion years ago, around which the gas cloud collapsed and began spinning ever-faster, ordering the chaos, until the early Solar System was churned into existence. This universal principle, known as the conservation of angular momentum, is also what drives a tornado’s destructive spiral.

Cox synthesizes:

This is how our Solar System was born: rather than the whole system collapsing into the Sun, a disc of dust and gas extending billions of kilometers into space formed around the new shining star. In just a few hundred million years, pieces of the cloud collapsed to form planets and moons, and so a star system, our Solar System, was formed. The journey from chaos into order had begun.

Then we have Iceland’s icebergs and glacial lagoons, which offer remarkable insight into the nature of Saturn’s rings. Both shine with puzzling brightness — the lagoons, here on Earth, by bringing pure water that is thousands of years old and free of pollutants from the bottom of the seabed to the surface as they rise, forming ice crystals of exceptional vibrance; Saturn’s rings, young and ever-changing, by circling icy ring particles around the planet, constantly crashing them together and breaking them apart, thus exposing bright new facets of ice that catch the sunlight and dazzle amidst a Solar System that is otherwise “a very dirty place.”

Cox explains:

It’s difficult to imagine the scale, beauty and intricacy of Saturn’s rings here on Earth, but the glacial lagoons of Iceland can transport our minds across millions of kilometers of space and help us understand the true nature of the rings. … At first sight, the lagoon appears to be a solid sheet of pristine ice,but this is an illusion. The surface is constantly shifting, an almost organic, every-changing raft of thousands of individual icebergs floating on the water. The structure of Saturn’s rings is similar, because despite appearances the rings aren’t solid. Each ring is made up of hundreds of ringlets and each ringlet is made up of billions of separate pieces. Captured by Saturn’s gravity, the ring particles independently orbit the panel in an impossibly thin layer.

Chinese lanterns, it turns out, explain how Saturn’s moon Titan, Cox’s favorite wonder of the Solar System yet the one he first thought would be least interesting, keeps its atmosphere — an atmosphere more similar to Earth’s than any other solar bodies have, rendering the moon a sort of deep-frozen primordial Earth. Since the temperature of gas is just a measure of how fast the molecules are bouncing around, and since an ideal gas contestant exists, if a container has a fixed volume and rising temperature, you have to raise the pressure or lower the number of molecules in order to keep everything in balance. That’s what makes a Chinese lantern levitate, and also what allows Titan, which sits a chilling half billion kilometers away from the Sun, keep its atmosphere in place — due to the low temperature, its molecules are moving very slowly, but the distance also means its gravitational pull, and thus pressure, is very low; thus, the two forces offset each other and the atmosphere remains perfectly afloat:

If you light the fuel beneath the lantern, the air inside the lantern heats up. This means that the molecules inside start whizzing around faster and the pressure inside the lantern begins to increase. But the lantern is open at the bottom, and therefore the pressure inside the lantern must remain the same as the pressure outside. The pressures equalize by molecules of air rushing out of the bottom of the lantern and disappearing off into the atmosphere. … Because molecules are constantly rushing out of the lantern, it weighs less and less as time goes by and eventually it is light enough to float gently off into the sky.

Cox goes on to explore other such illuminating parallels, from how Alaska’s Lake Eyak illustrate the methane cycles of the universe to what Hawaii’s Big Island tells us about the forces that keep any planet alive to how the volcanic features of India’s Deccan Traps explain why Venus choked to death. He ends with T. S. Eliot’s timeless verses on the spirit of exploration and echoes Neil deGrasse Tyson’s wisdom on your ego and the cosmic perspective, concluding:

You could take the view that our exploration of the Universe has made us somehow insignificant; one tiny planet around one star amongst hundreds of billions. But I don’t take that view, because we’ve discovered that it takes the rarest combination of chance and the laws of Nature to produce a planet that can support a civilization, that most magnificent structure that allows us to explore and understand the Universe. That’s why, for me, our civilization is the wonder of the Solar System, and if you were to be looking at the Earth from outside the Solar System that much would be obvious. We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilization has become a beacon that identifies our planet as a home to life.

Wonders of the Solar System is absolutely fascinating it its entirety. Pair it with this mind-bending read on why the world exists.

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Brian Cox on Why Science Is Essential to Modern Democracy

“For a democracy to function correctly, we need as many citizens as possible to at least have an understanding of the scientific method.”

In the fall of 2012, Brian Cox — quantum physics wunderkind, whimsical explainer of science, champion of the wonders of life — was awarded the prestigious President’s Medal in London. His acceptance speech addressed the epidemic of promoting bad science in popular culture and the desperate importance of continuing to fund science education, echoing Richard Feynman’s timeless words on the role of scientific culture in modern society and scientists’ universal responsibility to remain open to the unknown. This magnificent short film by Brandon Fibbs remixes the most poetic portion of Cox’s speech — an eloquent case for science as a prerequisite for democracy, one that Ray Bradbury made for reading some years ago — with awe-inducing footage that captures the glory of science, technology, and space exploration.

We live in a society — as the great physicist and communicator Carl Sagan always emphasized — a society that is entirely based on science, it is based on technology and engineering. All the great, important decisions that our democracy will be forced to take in the next decades, and all the way into the 21st century, are based on science — they’re based on scientific method, they’re based on an understanding what reason and reaching conclusions based on evidence is. And if the presentation of science is a Frankenstein presentation of science — a misrepresentation of what we do, a complete misselling of the wonder of exploration — then we have a problem in our democracies. And it’s the same problem that we have if we don’t have an educated population.

For a democracy — a modern scientific democracy — to function correctly, then we need as many citizens as possible to at least have an understanding of the scientific method, if not the fact. When asked, “Why do you want to continue to explore?” Humphry Davy said, “Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature and there are no new worlds to conquer.”

Watch Cox’s full speech below:

Pair with this fantastic read on how ignorance drives science, one of the best science books of 2012, and this wonderful mashup celebrating NASA by way of Walt Whitman.

↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart

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Your Cousin, the Blade of Grass: Brian Cox on the Wonders of Life

“Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing — wonder.”

With his penchant for exposing the intrinsic mesmerism of everyday life through the prism of science, the charismatic particle physicist Brian Cox is as close to a Richard Feynman of our time as we can hope to get. In fact, it is Feynman he cites in the introduction to his magnificent new book, Wonders of Life: Exploring the Most Extraordinary Phenomenon in the Universe (public library), based on his BBC television series of the same title. Riffing off Feynman’s famous ode to a flower, in which the legendary physicist marvels at how some people can believe that science can detract from wonder of life and insists, instead, that “the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower,” Cox recasts the same lens on another seemingly simple but utterly miraculous wonder of life, the humble blade of grass, and uses it to illustrate Darwin’s legacy:

On its own, it is a wonder, but viewed in isolation its complexity and very existence is inexplicable. Darwin’s genius was to see that the existence of something as magnificent as a blade of grass can be understood, but only in the context of its interaction with other living things and, crucially, its evolutionary history. A physicist might say it is a four-dimensional structure, with both spatial and temporal extent, and it is simply impossible to comprehend the existence of such a structure in a universe governed by the simple laws of physics if its history is ignored.

And whilst you are contemplating the humble majesty of a blade of grass, with a spatial extent of a few centimeters but stretching back in the temporal direction for almost a third of the age of the Universe, pause for a moment to consider the viewer, because what is true of the blade of grass is also true for you. You share the same basic biochemistry, all the way down to the detail of proton waterfalls, and ATP, and much of the same genetic history, carefully documented in your DNA. This is because you share the same common ancestor. You are all related. You were once the same.

Indeed, once both you and the blade of grass were stardust. But Cox goes on to consider the disconcerting implications of this, which challenge the heart of what it means to be human, what we consider our singular and special-case humanity:

I suppose this is a most difficult thing to accept. The human condition seems special; our conscious experience feels totally divorced from the mechanistic world of atoms and forces, and perhaps even from the ‘lower forms’ of life. … [T]his feeling is an emergent illusion created by the sheer complexity of our arrangement of atoms. It must be, because the fundamental similarities between all living things outweigh the differences. If an alien biochemist had only two cells from Earth, one from a blade of grass and one from a human being, it would be immediately obvious that the cells come from the same planet, and are intimately related.

Cox explores the age-old friction between science and scripture, echoing Neil deGrasse Tyson’s depiction of creationism as a philosophy of ignorance and Richard Dawkins’s fascination with the magic of reality. Cox bemoans the “so-called controversy surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution”:

My original aim was to avoid the matter entirely, because I think there are no intellectually interesting issues raised in such a ‘debate.’ But during the filming of this series I developed a deep irritation with the intellectual vacuity of those who actively seek to deny the reality of evolution and the science of biology in general. So empty is such a position, in the face of evidence collected over centuries, that it can only be politically motivated; there is not a hint of reason in it. And more than that, taking such a position closes the mind to the most wonderful story, and this is the tragedy for those who choose it, or worse, are forced into it through deficient teaching.

But Cox safeguards against secular fanaticism and goes on to consider the possible co-existence of science and spirituality, with a wonderful aside on labels and a gentle reminder that we simply don’t know, that scientific reductionism is as intellectually lazy as religious dogmatism, that science and philosophy need each other:

As someone who thinks about religion very little — I reject the label atheist because defining me in terms of the things I don’t believe would require an infinite list of nouns — I see no necessary contradiction between religion and science. By which I mean that if I were a deist, I would claim no better example of the skill and ingenuity of The Creator than in the laws of nature that allowed for the magnificent story of the origin and evolution of life on Earth, and their overwhelmingly beautiful expression in our tree of life. I am not a deist, philosopher or theologian, so I will make no further comment on the origin of the laws of nature that permitted life to evolve. I simply don’t know; perhaps someday we will find out. But be in no doubt that laws they are, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is as precise and well tested as Einstein’s theories of relativity.

Ultimately, in reflecting on the necessarily speculative nature of some of the films in the series, he reminds us that ignorance is what drives science forward and, as Feynman himself memorably put it, it is the scientist’s responsibility to remain unsure. Cox writes:

Some parts are speculative, but that is nothing to be ashamed of in science. Indeed, all science is provisional. When observations of nature contradict a theory, no matter how revered, ancient or popular, the theory will be unceremoniously and joyously ditched, and the search for a more accurate theory will be redoubled. The magnificent thing about Darwin’s explanation of the origin of species is that it has survived over a hundred and fifty years of precision observations, and in that it has outlasted Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

He echoes Robert Sapolsky’s timeless words on science and wonder, returning to the heart of Feynman’s ode to the flower and concluding:

Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing — wonder.

Wonders of Life goes on to explore such fascinating macro-mysteries and micro-miracles as why the world exists, how our senses work, and what the trees of life tell us about evolution. In the concluding chapter, Cox returns once again to our distant cousin, the blade of grass:

Go outside, now, and look at any randomly selected piece of your world. It could be a scruffy corner of your garden, or even a clump of grass forcing its way through a concrete pavement. It is unique. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect’s wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, color, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for a future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful. And the reason that thought occurred to me is not because some guru told me that the world is wonderful. It is because Darwin, and generations of scientists before and after, have shown it to be.

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Brian Cox on the Heart of Science

“We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.”

The precise purpose of and drive for science has been debated by some of history’s greatest minds. In The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, physicist Brian Cox offers this beautiful window into the heart of science:

Science, of course, has no brief to be useful, but many of the technological and social changes that have revolutionized our lives have arisen out of fundamental research carried out by modern-day explorers whose only motivation is to better understand the world around them. These curiosity-led voyages of discovery across all scientific disciplines have delivered increased life expectancy, intercontinental air travels, modern telecommunications, freedom from the drudgery of subsistence farming and a sweeping, inspiring and humbling vision of our place within an infinite sea of stars. But these are all in a sense spinoffs. We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.

Of course, Richard Feynman knew this. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson knows it. And every successful creator, whether in science or in art, knows that curiosity is the habit of mind most essential to producing ideas. Because science, after all, is fueled by ignorance, by defetishizing the right answers and instead turning a curious eye to the right questions.

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