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There is nothing that is more guaranteed to make a normal rational person feel stupid than hearing someone talk knowledgably about particle physics.

Since many physicists are actually very kind people, they often try really hard to find ways to communicate tricky science to the rest of us. Some of them are creative and artistic too, which is a real bonus, and so we get valuable avenues of understanding like Tom Stoppard’s plays and Douglas Adams’s novels. These have the useful function of making us laugh and feel thoroughly entertained while terribly difficult ideas about things like the space-time continuum creep into our consciousness via the back door.

Professor Brian Cox is a new and highly valuable asset in the ‘Oh, now I see!’ industry of explaining complicated things to ordinary people.

You may have come across him as the presenter on the BBC2 documentary series, The Wonders of the Solar System. He is a youthful looking physicist with floppy hair and a Mancunian accent who works on the Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland and lectures on particle physics at Manchester University. He also has the interesting history of being the keyboard player for the 90s band D:Ream, whose song ‘Things can only get better’ was used as the soundtrack for New Labour in 1997.

Same starting point

Cox is interesting from a Christian point of view because he is a scientist who is engulfed in wonder by the universe. He talks in rapturous amazement about its beauty and is overcome by the incredible way in which it works. On Radio 4’s Great Lives in May, he said that he considered the starting point of science and religion to be the same in many ways. He recognised, quite rightly, that both scientists and believers are transfixed by what they see and they want to know more about what is behind them. This is a very useful observation for Christians as they talk to those who feel that science and faith are incompatible. It makes it clear that there is no problem for a Christian in finding out more about how the physical universe works. What gets more problematical is the interpretations that are then put on these facts. Science does not tell us what the meaning of it all is.

Threat or friend?

Cox’s particular area of interest, and the reason for his involvement on the Hadron Collider, is the question of what happened at the beginning of time: to be specific, to discover what happened in the billionth of a second after the beginning of time. He says that his aim as a particle physicist is ‘to explain what everything is made of and how everything sticks together’. For those who believe and trust in a creator God, this is a very interesting area to engage with. Is the work that Cox and the Hadron Collider are engaging in a threat to Christians, or is it doing valuable work to help us understand how God has put the universe together?

Many would consider Cox to be a threat to religion. As such, he has been welcomed with open arms by the Humanist Society, which has given him its accolade of ‘Distinguished Supporter’. At the ‘Nine Lessons and Carols for godless people’ performed last Christmas, he gave an attractive description of the wonders of the universe and a description of ‘creation’ that does not need to include a God. He claims that modern science with its discoveries of the last 50 years has presented us with a creation story of its own. He tracks the development of the universe from the Big Bang to the place where we find ourselves today. ‘It is a wonderful and significant story’, he says, charting the move from simplicity to complexity. He sees all of the detail and intricacy of our world as a brilliant consequence of the gradual expansion from the initially simple universe into the vast array of life that we know today. Carl Sagan, his hero, once looked at all that we see around us and the advanced nature of our brains and our human achievements and said: ‘These are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years’. This, says Cox, ‘makes me feel incredibly valuable’, presumably because of the time that it has taken for him to arrive on the scene — despite the fact that he doesn’t really believe in time (but that is a concept for us to tackle somewhere else).

I’m here on purpose

As someone who believes that God made me, I feel very valuable too. I share the same sense of wonder and awe as Cox about the fact that I’m here, but it’s an awe stemming from the fact that I’m here on purpose. I’m here because a God arranged my being, using those very same bits of hydrogen, to have a relationship with him.

As a Christian, hearing physicists explain things is fascinating. But, in addition, I know that I’m not just here because I’m matter. I’m here because I matter to God.

The rockstar physicist

Same starting point

Threat or friend?

I’m here on purpose

Eleanor Margesson

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