Brian Cox - consciousness and meaning in universe

Brian Cox is a well known English physicist. He is a professor in particle physics and best known as the presenter for science programmes in BBC. Among many things he has stated:

Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn’t make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe.

Whatever you think meaning is, it self-evidently exists, because the universe means something to each of us. But I would argue that whatever it is, it’s an emergent property. … Without those complex biological systems, there is no meaning. … We bring meaning to it.

 

So, let me try to summarise and collect some more sources to digest his work. Firstly, you can start by enjoying his Ted Talk from 2008 explaining his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN: 

In this talk, Brian talked about "twelve particles of matter, four forces of nature", that ended up in a wonderful music video created by Symphony of Science, that you can see here. Brian talked again in Ted in 2010, this year focusing on "why we need the explorers".

Brian has been part of the Joe Rogan experience three times - episode #610, episode #1233 and episode #2217. In the first episode, he reflects about "where does God fit in an infinite universe". A small part of the second episode you can see here, where Brian reflect upon "are we the only intelligent life in universe?":

I especially like when Brian talks about "scales that rule the universe" - from a Big Think lecture we can learn this:

Speed of light

Everything that is massless
travels at the speed of light

Strength of gravity

Newton´s gravitational constant

Planck´s constant

Relates the energy of a photon to its frequency

You can fit 1 million Earths inside the Sun.

An Astronomical unit =
the distance between the Earth and the Sun

Voyager 1 (1977)

Today about 150 astronomical units from Earth, i.e
it takes light over 22 hours to reach it

Proxima centauri

Nearest star,
4 light years from Earth

Milky Way Galaxy

200 - 400 billion (miljarder) Suns

100 000 light years across

Andromeda galaxy

Nearest galaxy,
2,5 million light years from Earth

The universe might be infinite in extent...

You could continue, looking into Brian Cox explaining "The quantum roots of reality" via Big Think. Or you decide "enough is enough" for now...

Lastly, I was glad to see that Brian Cox used to play keyboard in a band called D:Ream. He took part in a performance in the 2024 Glastonbury festival playing "Things can only get better":