Brian Cox, physicist and broadcaster

Engineering is in need of a new poster boy. With Vince Cable hinting at plans to cut blue skies research and Lord Browne waging war on physicists at the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK’s science and technology community seems more divided than ever. But now Prof Brian Cox, former rock star, working physicist and the BBC’s latest sensation, is planning to help unite the warring factions and bring engineering to the forefront of scientific research.

’I’d love to be seen as just as much a communicator for engineering as for science,’ said Cox, ’My dad says that I watched the Moon landings when I was one. I don’t remember that, but one of my earliest memories is seeing pictures of Apollo around the house. I’m sure it was those things that caught my eye because the early 1970s was a time of astonishing science and this inspiring engineering. Anything was possible and it was absolutely fascinating.’

With his soft Oldham accent, boyish good looks and genuine enthusiasm, it’s easy to see how Cox attracted more than five million viewers to his five-part BBC2 series, Wonders of the Solar System. The programme saw Cox calculate the energy of the sun using an umbrella in Death Valley, reach the outer edges of the Earth’s atmosphere in a jet fighter and sculpt Saturn in the sand of an African desert. When he’s not seeking out extreme environments, he’s working as a professor of physics at Manchester University and is a senior scientist on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.

For Cox, science and engineering have always been intimately linked. ’There is virtually no difference in my mind. If you look at CERN, for example, it’s number one - an astonishing engineering achievement. To make that thing - 27km of it - with superconducting magnets all over the place - to industrialise that to the level that was necessary was a tremendous achievement. To find out what the Universe was like a billionth of a second after it began you need an engineer, a scientist and a mathematician.’

But Cox has been much more than that. His early career put him on an altogether different path when, at 18, he joined rock band Dare as a keyboard player and went on to record two moderately successful albums. Aged 23, he returned home and applied to study physics at Manchester University. But music once again intervened and, in 1990, Cox joined D:Ream, the band responsible for Labour’s 1997 winning anthem Things can only get better. According to Cox, however, things have got worse.

“In terms of ambition for manned space flight, we have gone backwards – there’s no doubt about it”

’The story of space engineering in my life has gone from massive optimism to complete disaster,’ he said. ’You know, we’ve gone nowhere, we’re retiring the Shuttle this year, just like we retired the Concorde. I almost feel like we’ve gone backwards. It’s not true of course - aeronautical engineering hasn’t gone backwards. But in terms of ambition for manned space flight, we have gone backwards, there’s no doubt about that. And it’s actually the desire to want to do it.’

The lack of desire, stressed Cox, is not down to engineers, but politicians. Vince Cable’s announcement last month that research funding will be rationed by ’excellence’ is, according to Cox, a classic example of poor policy. ’You don’t have to be a scientist or an engineer to look at that and say “that’s just idiocy”. It’s so obvious that the research budget is too small in the UK. It’s below the EU average, yet we’re second only to the US in our success in [publishing research in] science and engineering. Every other country that matters is increasing its science and engineering research budget. I wish I could say that all politicians are idiots, because that’s how they appear, but I know they’re not. So I’m genuinely baffled.’

“Engineering is the basis of everyone’s life, without a doubt. It’s so obvious you almost feel it’s a cliché, but maybe it’s not that obvious”

Another senior figure that Cox is displeased with is Lord Browne, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Browne recently broke with convention by criticising maths and physics as having too much government funding compared with engineering. ’It’s an unfortunate opinion to want to cut this bit instead of that,’ said Cox. ’I think it’s a political division. On a non-grandee level, we certainly don’t think that. As a science and engineering community we have to stand up with a unified voice and make a big noise together.’

And this is what Cox is hoping to do. In between flying to Nepal to film a new series, Wonders of the Universe, for the BBC, he is campaigning hard to voice his concerns over budget cuts, which this week are expected to hit the UK’s research base hard. ’Engineers need to stand up for themselves,’ said Cox. ’Engineering is the basis of everyone’s life, without a doubt. It’s so obvious that you almost feel it’s a cliché, but maybe it’s not that obvious. When people say we’re going to cut the research and development budget, we don’t make a big noise about it. But it should be on the front page of every newspaper. What a stupid thing to do.’

Brian Cox will be delivering a lesson on the solar system on November 16th as part of The Big Bang: UK Young Scientist and Engineers Fair.