Live webcast of Brian Cox lecture
15 Apr 2010
Watch online on 22 April if you missed out on a ticket
A live webcast of the public lecture by Professor Brian Cox is to be broadcast following the snapping up of all the tickets, 12 hours after their being made available. The link to the webcast will be published in next week's eUpdate.
The University of Manchester’s rock star scientist is following up to the success of his smash hit TV series on the origins of the universe on Thursday 22 April.
Professor Brian Cox visited locations across the globe to explain how the laws of nature carved spectacular landscapes throughout the Solar System for his acclaimed BBC TV series "Wonders of the Solar System".
The Oldham-born scientist, based at the School of Physics and Astronomy, will tell the audience of the strange and fascinating worlds that inhabit our Solar System.
For the five-part series described as ‘utterly contagious’ by the Guardian, he told how Earth, of all the planets in the Solar System, is the only one to have a moon that completely obscures the face of the Sun.
Prof Cox described how every molecule of every drop of water is moved around our planet by the Sun’s energy for the series praised by BBC Radio Two DJ Chris Evans as one of the best he has ever seen.
In Norway he witnessed the battle between the Sun’s wind and our planet, as the night sky displayed the beautiful Northern Lights.
And in California he made contact with Voyager, a space probe that has been travelling since its launch 30 years ago. Now, 14 billion kilometres on, Voyager has just detected the solar wind is beginning to run out of puff.
Prof Cox – along with thousands of other scientists – works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the famous scientific research centre in Geneva.
The team hope to recreate conditions in the Universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang and uncover some of its unsolved mysteries.
Prof Cox was a member of nineties pop act D:REAM while studying for his PhD at The University of Manchester.
With the band, he played "Things can only get better" at the famous Labour Party victory celebration at the Royal Albert Hall after the 1997 General Election.
Prof Cox is also a regular presenter on the BBC flagship science programme Horizon and acted as scientific advisor on the 2007 film Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland.
He has received many awards for his efforts to publicise science. In 2002 he was elected an International Fellow of The Explorers Club and in 2006 he received the British Association Lord Kelvin Award for this work.
He said: “The success of the series has been fantastic and I’d like to thank everyone for their support - it means a lot to me.
"But more importantly - the series and events such as this lecture get people talking about science.
"It’s a privilege as a University academic to be able to draw the nation’s attention to physics - the subject I love and love to teach."