It breaks my heart to have to write something of a mixed review for An Evening with Professor Brian Cox.
Indeed, it’s take me almost a month to finishing writing this post, because I
wasn’t sure I wanted to be so negative, but I hope the following criticism will
be seen as constructive rather than vindictive.
Once of the first things Brian said when he came on stage was how
comforting it was to see a couple of thousand people make the effort to come
out on a “night like this” (i.e. cold and wet) for what was “essentially a
lecture”. He was right – it is comforting, and it was a lecture. Now, I’m fine
with lectures – in fact I’d love to go to more of them – but something that’s
billed as “An Evening With…” and
takes place at a gig venue like the O2 Apollo should surely have been more, for
want of a better word, entertaining?
Yes, there were a couple of videos, lots of amazing photographs and some nice
graphs, plus some interludes involving Cox’s regular work partners Robin Ince
and Jeff Forshaw, but in the main this was a two-hour lecture about cosmology
that was actually not very accessible. If you consider Cox’s TV series (which I
love) as introductions to science, then An
Evening with Professor Brian Cox was more like an intermediate course. No,
it wasn’t at the level of a university lecture, but there was a lot of technical information and graphs.
This isn’t necessarily problematic, and after all you can’t have science
without maths and graphs, but I think there needed to more focus and a slightly
softer approach, because it was all rather bewildering. My wife and our friend
felt the same.
It’s obvious from watching Cox’s TV shows or by listening to him on
podcasts that he’s a very good public speaker: he’s knowledgeable and engaging,
plus he’s in the enviable position of being able to throw in jokes about not
having been on that same stage for a while (nice reference to his pop-star days
there). But I think there was simply too much being thrown at the audience for
the show to fulfil its purpose (at least this is my view, which is, after all,
only one opinion and others are available). I enjoy reading popular science
books on physics, but much of the content went over my head, and even when I
did follow what was being said it was quickly replaced by another graph. As one
person behind me remarked, “He kept going off on tangents.” There needed to be
more structure, and I felt the same way after hearing Cox’s 2012
Cockroft-Rutherford lecture. I’m not saying that the science should be dumbed
down or that there needed to be more puppet videos, just that there is a way of
effectively communicating complex ideas and information, and I’m not convinced
that this show gets it right. It does in part, but not wholly. Perhaps others
had a different experience, but I’m sure that the scientists in the audience –
of which there were many – got more out of it than the people like me who love
popular science and The Infinite Monkey Cage podcasts but simply aren’t
sufficiently scientifically-minded to be actual scientists. And if the evening
wasn’t for people like me, who was it for?
Then there is the choice of venue itself. Most people would have been
attending after a full day of work and the 02 Manchester Apollo was, like any
gig hall, unbearably hot; I can’t have been the only one who was actually
falling asleep by the end. Well, I know I
wasn’t – the guy next to me jumped twice as he finally dropped off. Then you
have the usual gig venue problems: cramped seating, people arriving late and
disrupting the beginning of the performance, boozers who can’t last an hour
without needing to stand up and disrupt a whole row of seated attendees so that
they can go to the toilet. For this, we had to pay over £30 (plus booking fee).
I can’t help thinking that the evening would have been far better suited to
somewhere like the Bridgewater Hall, or even a university lecture theatre,
where at least the seating would have been roomier and there would have been
less drinking. I suspect the choice of venue was an attempt to draw in a
different type of crowd, which is to be applauded, but if that’s the case then
I would question the content of the evening even more…
So that’s the moaning out of the way. Please don’t think that I had an
awful time, because I didn’t. There were
many positives to highlight. Firstly, science is AWESOME, and this was
definitely conveyed by Cox, Ince and Forshaw, all of whom have a clear passion
for physics and cosmology. The excitement regarding science was obvious as Cox
talked, as it was Ince’s interludes (he likes to play up the “idiot” role but
anyone who has listened to any of the podcasts in which he’s involved will know
that he’s absolutely not an idiot). And
there is a definite geeky excitement to seeing such a large venue occupied by PEOPLE
WHO JUST LOVE SCIENCE. What the show did do very well was convey the incredible
complexity of the universe and its incomprehensible vastness. Even if you’re
bamboozled by the equations, it’s still easy to get an overall sense of just
how amazing the universe is.
If you love science, you will enjoy this lecture, however I suspect
that the level of enjoyment will probably fluctuate quite a bit depending on
your grasp of the concepts. I may have some gripes about the evening, but I’m
very glad that I went. I just hope that the next Cox event lives up to my
expectations.
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