Quotes from Brian Cox

In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility. In

Some don't like their history presented in this way, but science is richer when its stories include people as well as ideas; curiosity is, after all, a human virtue.

dwarf galaxies, have as few as ten million stars. The biggest, the giants, have been estimated to contain in the region of 100 trillion.

about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe. We have no right to expect answers; we have no right to even ask. But ask and wonder we do. Human Universe is first and foremost a love letter to humanity; a celebration of our outrageous fortune

THE FIRST DAY OR SO WE ALL POINTED TO OUR COUNTRIES. THE THIRD OR FOURTH DAY WE WERE POINTING TO OUR CONTINENTS. BY THE FIFTH DAY WE WERE AWARE OF ONLY ONE EARTH.' — SULTAN BIN SALMAN BIN ABDULAZIZ AL-SAUD, SPACE SHUTTLE STS-51-G

I have found it impossible to get a chest of drawers in the back of a Ford Fiesta and a tent back in its bag, so fitting a universe into a melon boggles me and my mind.

There are too many people in this world who want to be right, and too few who just want to know.

First we guess it. Then we – now don't laugh, that's really true – then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

This is the current state of our Sun, happily converting 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second into helium to counteract the inward pull of gravity.

Bruno believed that the universe is infinite and filled with an infinite number of habitable worlds. He also believed that although each world exists for a brief moment when compared to the life of the universe, space itself is neither created nor destroyed; the universe is eternal.

But as the seventeenth century wore on, precision observations greatly improved due to the invention of the telescope and an increasingly mature application of mathematics to describe the data, and led a host of astronomers and mathematicians – including Johannes Kepler, Galileo and ultimately Isaac Newton – towards an understanding of the workings of the solar system. This theory is good enough even today to send space probes to the outer planets with absolute precision.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Lucy was little more than an upright chimpanzee; an animal, a genetic survival machine. We bring art, science, literature and meaning to the Earth; we are a world away, and yet separated by the blink of an eye.

Take note, politicians, economists and science policy advisors of the twenty-first century; a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth's place amongst the stars.

There is a button on most calculators that computes the square root for you. It is usually denoted by the symbol "?" and one would normally write things like 3 = ?9. As you can see, the square root is the opposite of squaring, 42 = 16 and ?16 = 4.

Occam's razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn't be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.

The Universe is always expanding.

we now suspect that Mercury, the innermost planet, began life much further out and was deflected inwards to its present-day seared orbit.

Russell's point is not to assert his right to be left alone to his personal delusions, but that devising a theory that cannot be proved or disproved by observation is pointless in the sense that it teaches you nothing, irrespective of how passionately you may believe in it. You can invent any object or idea you like, but if there is no way of observing it or its consequences, you haven't made a contribution to the scientific understanding of the universe.

I don't need answers to everything. I want to have answers to find.

Science is the enemy of the certain

There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night. Astronomers are goths.

I enjoy acting now more than I ever have. I've had lots of difficult times when I was younger, but that was all tied up with thwarted ambition. It's hard being a young actor, because you don't realise until later that it's only ever about doing the work.

Unlike New Zealand, which has nothing especially predatory, Australia is full of spiders and crocodiles and all kinds of animals that will eat you and sting you.