After performing his smash-hit show ‘Horizons’ to nearly half a million people across the world, Professor Brian Cox is back with his new world tour Emergence.
Brian has appeared in many landmark science programmes for BBC radio and television over the last 15 years, from the Peabody Award-winning Wonders of the Solar System to the world-wide hit series The Planets.
In the winter of 1610 Johannes Kepler was crossing Prague’s Charles Bridge when he noticed a snowflake land on his arm. Why, he asked, are all snowflakes six-cornered? “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that even in a snowflake, this ordered pattern exists at random.”
400 years later, we have part of the answer. Snowflakes are made of water molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks and electrons - which might be made of superstrings - all held together by forces of nature described by quantum theory. But how does such delicate beauty emerge from such abstract simplicity?
Emergence is a celebration of the intricacy of the Universe and an exploration of the laws of nature that sculpted it. From the largest structures in the known Universe – the rivers and flows of galaxies that trace the cosmic web – to Earth’s interlinked ecosystems and the structure of the human brain – from black holes to snowflakes - we observe a world of dazzling complexity underpinned by magnificent simplicity.
How did a quarter of a million-year-old species of great apes on one small planet amongst trillions orbiting around a middle-aged star in an average galaxy figure all this out, guided by curiosity, mathematics and an aesthetic sense of symmetry and beauty? And what might we become if we can hold onto the ideas of the enlightenment so successfully developed and deployed by Kepler and his contemporaries and successors – ideas that have allowed us to begin to read the story of the Universe and carried our spacecraft to the edge of the solar system and outwards to the stars.
Professor Brian Cox said: “I’ve loved creating Emergence - it’s the most ambitious live show I’ve ever written. I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with a wonderful group of scientists, musicians, filmmakers and graphic artists to bring cosmology, biology, philosophy and history to the largest and most advanced LED screens available, with the best sound and lights I could find. I hope the show is an all-encompassing experience, and I hope it leaves everyone, whether they love science or music or history, or simply contemplating the beauty of Nature, with something new to think about.”
