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DR. BRIAN COX
The NewScientist article
Science fiction movie review: Sunshine said
Now at this point, we'd usually sit back, forget about the "science"
and just enjoy a good space yarn. But Sunshine's producers have been
promoting the fact that the film was made with the help of physicist
Brian Cox from Manchester University in the UK, and even held a press
event at CERN in Switzerland, the site of the Large Hadron Collider and
a Mecca for physicists.
Well, it's true that the Sun is expected to die, but not for five
billion years or so. That, says Cox, is too far in the future for
audiences to be able to relate to. By setting the action just 50 years
in the future, when for example we see the roof of Australia's Sydney
Opera House poking from a huge ice sheet, it gives us something we can
worry about.
Cox and his CERN colleagues had to come up with an explanation for how
the Sun could be failing so far ahead of time. "It was like: 'the Sun
is
going to die in 50 years, think of something, will you?'" says Cox. The
"something" involves a "Q ball", the nucleus of a supersymmetric
particle, getting itself lodged in the Sun. The hypothetical Q ball
eats through normal matter, ripping apart the Sun's neutrons and
protons and converting them into supersymmetric particles.
Brian Cox, Ph.D. is a
Royal Society
University Research Fellow based in the High Energy Physics group at the
University of
Manchester.
He works on the ATLAS experiment
at CERN in Geneva. He's
also
working on the FP420 R&D
project.
Brian authored
The FP420 R and D project at the LHC and
Double proton tagging at the LHC as a means to discover new
physics,
and coauthored
Central exclusive di-jet production at the Tevatron,
Detecting the standard model Higgs boson in the WW decay channel
using
forward proton tagging at the LHC,
Observing a light CP violating Higgs boson
in diffraction,
KtJet: A C++ implementation of the K-perpendicular clustering
algorithm,
Outstanding problems in the phenomenology of hard diffractive
scattering,
and
HERA and the LHC: A Workshop on the implications of HERA
for LHC physics. Proceedings, Part B.
Read his
full list of publications!
He earned a first class honors degree in physics from the
University of Manchester and a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics at
the DESY laboratory in Hamburg in 1998.
His thesis was
Double
Diffraction Dissociation at Large Momentum Transfer.
He was elected a fellow of
The Explorers Club in 2002.
Brian was a musician for quite a while.
Watch him play at a 1989 gig! Also
watch
him at the
LIFT conference in Geneva in 2007.
Watch his TED talk
What Really Goes on at the Large Hadron Collider.
Listen to his
BBC Radio 4 interview.
Read the transcript of his
ABC Science Show interview.
Read the Wired interview
Rock Star-Turned-Physicist Trades Keyboard for Atom Smasher.
Print bio!
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