Brian Cox has no documented IQ score, and no reliable figure circulates. His career is a standing rebuttal to the idea that one early grade sets your ceiling.
Astronomy books, then a keyboard
Born 3 March 1968 to parents who worked at a local bank. He has said he became obsessed with space after watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos and reading about the Apollo missions, and then, as a teenager, with synthesisers.
Grew up in Chadderton and went to Hulme Grammar School in Oldham.
Keyboard player in the rock band formed by Darren Wharton, formerly of Thin Lizzy; released two albums and toured.
Keyboards for the dance-pop group whose “Things Can Only Get Better” hit No. 1 in 1994 and became Labour's 1997 election anthem.
Left music as the band split to focus on his PhD.
From a D to a doctorate
He has said he got the D because he was more interested in the band than in revising.
Hulme Grammar School. The grade he still jokes about.
Physics, first-class honours, begun in his twenties, after years in bands.
Postgraduate research in particle physics.
High-energy particle physics, using data from the H1 experiment at DESY's HERA collider in Hamburg.
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; also its Professor for Public Engagement in Science.
Blow away the sandcastle
In Wonders of the Universe he explained entropy with a sandcastle in the Namib Desert: there are vastly more ways to arrange sand as a heap than as a castle, so wind only ever goes one way. Blow some wind and watch the order drain away. A simplified model, not a physics simulation.
Ordered: one of very few arrangements that look like a castle.
Research, broadcasts and books
Doctoral research on diffraction in electron–proton collisions at DESY.
Worked on the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment as a Royal Society University Research Fellow.
Co-led a proposal for forward proton detectors 420 m from the LHC collision points.
Professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester.
BBC Radio 4 science-comedy panel show with Robin Ince.
The BBC series that made him a household name.
Including the sandcastle entropy scene above.
Live astronomy with Dara Ó Briain.
BBC series on the solar system's history.
Galaxies, stars and black holes.
With Jeff Forshaw, explaining special relativity.
With Forshaw, on quantum mechanics.
With Andrew Cohen, from the TV series.
With Forshaw, on what black holes reveal about space and time.
Sources
- University of Manchester, School of Physics staff records
- Royal Society Fellows directory (2016)
- BBC programme records: Wonders of the Universe (2011), The Infinite Monkey Cage
- Cox, B. & Forshaw, J. (2009). Why Does E=mc²? Da Capo
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures