From snowflakes to black holes, Professor Brian Cox examines intricacies of the universe in new show

Four hundred years ago, German astronomer Johannes Kepler pondered the perfect structure of the snowflake.

He asked a simple question – why do snowflakes have six corners?

That is the starting point of Professor Brian Cox’s latest show Emergence, which he brings to New Zealand next month.

Professor Brian Cox

2017 Getty Images

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“He didn’t know what it was, but it’s that insight that, when you see patterns in nature, then there’s a reason,” Cox says. “It’s not just the gods have made it that way, there’s some underlying reason and that really is the beginning of modern science.”

Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, is known for making hard science easy to understand.

In Emergence, he examines the intricacy of the universe and the exploration of the laws of nature that sculpted it – from snowflakes to black holes.

Kepler saying at the end of his book, where he ponders the reason for the snowflake’s perfect symmetry, that he doesn’t know the answer is “radical”, Cox says.

“‘I don’t know’ is one of the wisest things you can say and it’s the foundation of science.”

The show is a “journey inwards to the smallest building blocks of the universe and then a journey outwards to the largest structures in the universe”, Cox says.

It took until the 20th century to understand that everything is made of atoms and the structure of the snowflake comes from the shape of water molecules, Cox says.

“That process has led us to understand that the universe was once very hot and dense.

“We’ve measured the time back to that and it’s 13.8 billion years ago, and whether that hot dense phase is the beginning of time is unknown. We don’t actually know what time is at a fundamental level.”

The key idea is we make progress by asking “well posed questions”, Cox says.

“About things that we can observe. The goal is not to be somehow profound and grand.”

As the show moves from the tiny snowflake to the cosmos, Cox ponders the possibility of other civilizations.

“The Milky Way galaxy has been around for the age of the universe, 10 billion years plus, and yet it seems that not one civilization has become a truly interstellar, space-faring civilization and written the evidence of its existence across the sky. That’s referred to as the Fermi Paradox and it is a paradox.

“It could be that it is actually, in an engineering sense, pretty much impossible to travel between stars or it could be that there aren’t any civilizations out there, which is a different question. It’s maybe a biological question.”

American astrophysicist Frank Drake theorises that civilizations may never get beyond the point that humanity currently has, Cox says.

“Maybe, when you acquire the power to destroy yourselves, which is after all a prerequisite for building a space-faring civilization, you will discover nuclear physics before you get to the stars. It may be that it’s just not possible to contain those urges.”

There may have been hundreds or thousands of civilizations in the history of the Milky Way, Cox says.

“They’ve all discovered nuclear physics and all blown themselves up. It could be, it’s almost a law of nature that we… I sometimes put it in these terms that maybe our knowledge exceeds our wisdom and maybe that’s just the way that it is.”

Humanity is the “outcome of 13.8 billion years of universal evolution”, Cox says.

“As [Carl] Sagan famously said, we’re made of star stuff, the carbon and oxygen in our bodies were cooked in generations of long dead stars and so on.

“The history that’s built into each one of us is remarkable. I mean, it is remarkable.”

Despite his years pondering the universe, he remains full of wonder, Cox says.

“The beautiful thing about astronomy is that the more you know, the more mysterious and wonderful it becomes.”

Brian Cox brings Emergence to Christchurch’s Wolfbrook Arena on 2 June 2026, Auckland’s Spark Arena on 4 June and Wellington’s TSB Arena on 6 June.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand