BRIAN COX: Astrophysics

[ronprice]

Brian Cox was on SBSONE TV again in Australia this week.1  This Part 4 of 5 programs was broadcast in the UK in March 2010 and, as is often the case, programs made and produced in the UK—and the USA--get Downunder about a year later, sometimes more and sometimes less.  As I pointed out the last time I wrote about this Brian Cox,  he is not the Brian Cox has drunk cheap wine, methylated spirits and aftershave.  He's not been in some of what the sociologist Irving Goffman called total institutions: jails, lockups, and padded cells.   He’s not the Brian Cox who until the age of 49 was a self-confessed and hopeless alcoholic, who turned his life around and is now a man with a mission.

He is not the Emmy Award Scottish actor, the independent film director or the English goalkeeper.  I want to talk about here in this short prose-poem the delightful astro-physicist. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 SBS1 TV, “Wonders of the Solar System,” 22 March 2011, 8:30-9:30 p.m.

As I said the last time I wrote
about you, Brian, I had trouble
with physics in high school and
only got as far as matriculation.
You have helped me make up for
my ignorance of physics, & astro-
physics, astronomy and the study
of our universe. As I said 4 months
ago: I dropped physics in ’62 for history
so that I could go to university and I’ve
been into history ever since, Brian. History
has as many wonders as astro-physics, Brian.

Without physics I could not do medicine,
law, engineering, or any of the maths and
sciences. So it was into the arts for me and
there I have stayed for the last 50 years!

Now, in my retirement, I have begun to play
at the edges of astrophysics thanks to, by
sensible and insensible degrees, a series of
media-events, like this Cox chap who could
make you feel the wonder and awe of it all:
3 cheers again for Brian Cox!...Hip-hip-hurray!

Ron Price
30 December 2010 updated to
24 March 2011