Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Yeah.
And what's interesting to me is I've got interested in Oppenheimer's writing post-war. And I've been interested in it. The BBC asked me to look at... There's a thing called the BBC Reith Lectures that are very famous in the UK. And every year someone gives these lectures after Lord Reith, who founded the BBC. And Oppenheimer did them in 1953, I think it is, 53 or 54.
And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about. But in there, he was concerned with the fact, of course, that he felt he delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves. And he felt our technology, our scientific know-how, exceeded our wisdom and our political skill, which is arguably true.
So he thought in the 50s, he couldn't see how we'd avoid destroying ourselves. But he thought about it a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for it. And he describes this, how if there's any lessons that science teaches us, the exploration of nature teaches us, that we could move into other fields, that we could transfer into politics, for example.
And one of them is this picture that complex systems are complicated. So he's talking about looking at quantum mechanics, for example, and it gets complicated. And you say, what is an electron? It's this thing. It's a particle-like, point-like thing or a big extended wavy thing. What is it? It behaves in all these strange ways.
We don't really have the language or the mental capacity to picture it. And so he said any attempt to say this thing is this or it is that, it is like this thing, it is doomed. What you have to understand is that you have to develop this rather complex and nuanced picture of the way that nature works. And quantum mechanics is a good example. But he said so it is with human societies.
So in a society... And what is it? It is at one level a load of individuals, like little particles. And they have their own needs and desires and they have their views and strongly held views. And so should they, by the way. There's a great quote from, I think, early 60s from Oppenheimer, where he says that to be a person of substance, you need an anchor.
So you need to believe things and you need to argue for things. You need to take positions. You have to have a morality. You have to have a politics, right, basically. Otherwise, you're not a person of substance. But he says at the same time, of course, you have to recognize there's a society. So there are lots of people with anchors.
And you might strongly disagree with that anchor and they might be wrong. Their anchor might be nonsense. But the challenge of politics is to avoid war. I read somewhere recently, someone said, I can't remember if it was, but said that democracy is a technology challenge. to avoid civil war. That's what it is.
So somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your, and should have, your firmly held position, you have to find a way, and it feels almost contradictory, you have to find a way of understanding that the society as a whole is a complex mixture of all these different little particles with their own anchors and their own positions. And what is the goal? So it is the goal.
It often feels to me that politics at the moment, the goal is to win an argument. It often feels like to convince enough people that your view is the right view. And that obviously is part of democracy. It's the way it works. You argue for your position and then you get four or five years to do your thing and then someone else can take over.
But also, I think the thing we're missing at the moment is that perhaps more fundamental function of democracy, which is to avoid war. Because if you can avoid war, especially with the power that we have now, you have the time to sort the rest out. But if we can't avoid war, we don't. And I think that – and Oppenheimer wrote – he knew that in the 50s.
And it feels to me more that we're back full circle now. It feels to me we've almost forgotten. We seem to have forgotten that the primary – The primary function of democracy is not to ensure that your side wins. The primary function of democracy is to ensure there's a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future.
And yeah, that's it really. That's what I would like to say.
This just makes sense. What does seem to be generally true is that we haven't, as a society... It says it was just on Facebook.
I mean, what I think is generally true is that we haven't yet adapted to the Internet. Yes. Just the Internet. Yes. Because it's only, as you said, in the great sweep of human history. Right. And it's only been used by people for 30 years.
Yeah. And it's a couple of decades. It's been influential. Yeah. So I think it feeds. It's another of those problems we face now. This what we talked about, this this bridge to this tremendously bright future that we have. One of the pillars of that bridge that we need to strengthen is how to deal with this thing that we've only had for a couple of decades. Right. It's clear.
I think we would – you know, people, again, will be listening to this and they'll have different views on the way that things happen on the Internet and regulation and so on. But I think what everyone would agree on is we haven't got it right yet.
So we don't know how – the way that it's influencing our –
And I don't know what the answer is. I mean, one answer, I mean, the way I do it, because obviously I'm on Twitter X. And so the way that I do it is you can tell, I think, by someone's timeline usually. Because my basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone's timeline and it's all political. Right. I just ignore them.
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