Brian Cox

If you wanted to come to the O2 tonight to see Emergence but couldn’t get tickets, we just released a couple of rows we don’t need in front of the mixing desks briancoxlive.co.uk/emergence…

Thank you to everyone who has come to Emergence in this first week of the UK Tour. I’m really enjoying messing around in front of the big tele :-) Next show is Sheffield on Thursday ….

Production rehearsals today in Sheffield - the first time we’d built the screen. It’s quite big. Tour starts in Edinburgh on Wednesday, then on to Manchester and Leeds at the weekend.

Me explaining local gauge invariance, which is probably one of the more ambitious bits of the Arena shows to be honest :-)

In February I spent an unforgettable week at Miraval Studios in France with @PJHarveyUK and Dario Marianelli recording music for my Emergence live shows. We made a little film youtu.be/lI7a4j-Uf3I?is=90n9…

Here is my view on what’s wrong with funding of scientific research in the UK, and how I would change the focus if it was up to me! There is a long list of things that UKRI needs to weigh when making decisions about funding for research and facilities, and driving growth is not one of them. The reason is that the whole of UKRI’s portfolio is essential for driving growth - indeed the research ecosystem is one of the necessary foundations of growth. The point I made at the Labour Conference is quite simple. UKRI’s budget is 0.65% of government expenditure, at a little under £10 Bn per year. That is a very tiny leaver when seen through the prism of attempting to use it to make a step change in economic growth - especially when the leaders of UKRI and the Research Councils are not economists and should not be economists! Their expertise lies in research. BUT, and this is the key point - if by fiddling around trying to use this tiny budget (in relative terms) to make a noticeable change in growth you damage the fundamentals, then you run the real risk of damaging the growth potential of the rest of the economy. Universities, research labs, education and inspiration are all essential for growth. This is what UKRI should be focused on because they are the custodians of this VERY valuable but fragile world-leading ecosystem. So, I would say to UKRI, do the thing you are supposed to do, do it well on behalf of the rest of the economy, and do nothing else.

I start the UK and Ireland leg of my Emergence tour next week - here’s a clip of a film we made about the music, recorded at Miraval Studios earlier this year. The full film is on YouTube somewhere or other .. :-)

This is an accurate summary of my position :-)

Looking forward to Bucharest this evening - this is what our show looks like at 10am …. They do build things fast :-)

If you were at my show this evening in Ljubljana when we looked live at the Deep Space Network and saw it communicating with @NASARoman - this is what was going on :-)

This is good news, and as the article points out, signals a welcome change from the previous administration. There is a sense of optimism for the first time in a while - UKRI should read the room and reverse the damaging (and I have to say not well documented) decision to de-prioritise huge swathes of basic research.

Walking home a few minutes ago across the Charles Bridge in Prague ahead of the live show here tomorrow - it will be a special night for me because the entire Emergence show is inspired by the story of Johannes Kepler walking across this bridge in a New Year’s snow storm in 1609 and wondering about the origin of the six fold symmetry of a snowflake - the beginnings of modern science.

That was wonderful wasn’t it !

We need a major structural review of UK science. A series of government decisions over the last decade (including but not limited to the Brexit referendum and the subsequent fall out) have undermined this vital foundation of our economy - that is unarguable. The problems have been exacerbated by the recent hasty and opaque decision making in UKRI. What links these things together for me is the lack of a coherent analysis of the impact of each small decision on the whole ecosystem, from Universities to industry. Example: It may look reasonable on paper to move money from astrophysics to AI. But is it sensible if that precipitates the closure of a number of physics departments? Do those closures damage our AI industry more than the redirection of funds enhances it? I have seen no evidence of a careful analysis of this and many other questions.

On the physics funding crisis in the UK - there are some issues of nuance, shall we say, in the attached article below. The reason STFC had 'no choice' but to cut so many projects (Jodrell and many more) was NOT the government's spending review settlement. It was a deliberate choice by UKRI (as confirmed by a UKRI board member on X, you'll find it in my replies) to refocus spend away from STFC science and labs and towards other areas which, it asserts, will lead to more ‘impact’. UKRI have the power to do this. However, as the HoC Select committee pointed out, we have not been able to see a detailed record of the process, impact assessment or consultation that led to such a seismic shift in UK science policy. Who made the decision? As @ChiOnwurah wrote in an open letter to UKRI / STFC in March: ‘What is clear is that, despite your assertions to the contrary in evidence to my committee and our counterparts in the House of Lords, widespread cuts have been proposed before adequate consultation with those affected was undertaken. This is wholly unacceptable and represents a failure for which DSIT, UKRI and STFC leadership must bear responsibility, and act urgently to address.’

Jodrell Bank is the most visible causality of UKRI’s short sighted ‘vision’ for science, but as you’ll see below, there are many other valuable UK facilities and collaborations at risk. We became aware of the problem in the autumn of last year. It is not a result of the overall funding settlement for science after the spending review, which was quite generous I would say in the circumstances. Neither as far as we can tell is it a direct decision by ministers (all of whom have now gone in any case). Rather the problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science. What must happen now is that the new ministerial team make the time (and space ;-)) to review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future.

This is the result of many bad legacy decisions taken by UKRI hastily and without proper consultation, overseen by a government department that no longer exists. Surely the new @andyburnham government will want to take time to review this.

If you’re in Canada or the USA, I’ve added some extra dates to my tour at the end of this year / into 2027.

If you couldn’t get tickets for my live show in Denver in January, we’ve added another date : briancoxlive.co.uk