Professor Brian Cox Audiobooks

Professor Brian Cox, born in 1968, is an English physicist and – in an earlier life – a working musician, who played keyboards for the rock band Dare and later for the pop group D:Ream. The day job is serious science: he is professor of particle physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester and holds the Royal Society Professorship for Public Engagement in Science.

To the public he is the face and voice of British science broadcasting, best known for BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage and the Wonders television series, along with popular science books including Why Does E=mc2? (2009) and The Quantum Universe (2011). No less a judge than David Attenborough has described him as the natural successor for the BBC’s scientific programming.

Cox’s gift is scale without condescension: the very large and the very small made graspable, with the enthusiasm of someone who still cannot quite believe his luck. The Planets is the natural way in – a tour of our own neighbourhood – while Human Universe asks the bigger questions about our place in the whole arrangement, and Forces of Nature finds the physics hiding inside everyday sights. In audio the effect is rather like the best kind of lecture: you come away feeling cleverer than you arrived, without once being made to feel stupid on the way.