103 Quotes by Brian Cox

Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society.

No one gets teased for being a geek anymore- science is the new rock n roll.

It would be wonderful if ideas could be the new rock ’n roll.

For me, Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!

The current worldview is never claimed to be correct, in the very important sense that there are no absolute truths in science. The body of scientific knowledge at any point in history, including now, is simply the collection of theories and views of the world that have not yet been shown to be wrong.

The practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.

So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?

They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.

Thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn’t changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa.