Quantum Physics to the Masses.

Such a charmer 

Meet Doctor Brian Cox. I'm pretty sure that you must at least be partially acquainted with him via your silver screens? If not, then I'll sum him up in brief for you. He's the Physics teacher you never had. Instead of going grey at the age of 27 and developing a bad temperament by the age of 30, he was in a rock band. True, he may be grey, but not in the grey, balding and thinning look associated with most physicists his age. True, he may be as old as my mum, but he's preserved himself better than most other teachers/lecturers of science. He's the science teacher that's down with the kids but doesn't look sad and old doing so.

Fission? Fusion? Gah.

It's really brave, this thing that he's doing. He is actually trying to teach us something through our television sets, and trying to teach something that not quite everybody grasped when they were at school. Mainly because physics involves maths. But look here now! Here's the man giving us a second chance at education and is going to blow our little minds through our tv sets! Won't everyone look smart when they chat about it in the staffroom over coffee?

However, you can tell that Brian Cox actually wants to teach you something. The only thing is that the poor bloke doesn't have a clue what's going on with trying to engage the right kind of audience. Of course everyone will switch it on because it's interesting, but some of the things that he tries to explain on there are so oversimplified that they're wrong. For example, in his first three or four-part series about the universe, I swear that he said that fusion in the Sun wouldn't go past Helium. I mean, you know, squeezing two particles together under immense heat and pressure to form a larger particle and releasing heat as a result of this is quite a difficult concept past two. However, he is forgiven, because in the last thing I saw with him on, he got fusion right.

These are all the different types of P orbital

He was actually on some show the other night about the Universe (he was giving an oversimplified talk again... but I guess I have to give the man a break. He is a professor after all and it's been a while since he's been at general-numpty level). I only caught the second half of it, where he explained to the audience generally how electrons were arranged in orbitals inside their little shells. I would've been surprised if my sister hadn't given me the heads up that electrons are crazy. Well, more crazy than I was originally led to believe, but I've accepted that now. However, he explained it very well for a physicist and then went on to wow the audience with Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty.

 I'd never quite understood it before, because I think that the book that I read it in dressed it up in flimsy analogies, when all I really needed was someone to draw the equation on a black board and watch Johnathan Ross suffer miserably at mental arithmetic. Of course, I think that was the only equation that I saw (probably too much maths might scare the public), but I was impressed by the fact that he'd actually used maths on prime time tv and people were still interested!

After the show it had a couple of close-ups of some of the celebrities in the audience stating that it was "eye-opening" and "mind-blowing" and they struggled to grasp some of the concepts. Hold on. He's defining quantum physics in baby terms and making a hash of it for you. Why doesn't he do a fast-track calculus show in order to get the nation up to the level of maths required to actually understand quantum physics thoroughly? I'd be up for it. But I don't know. That might just be me and everyone else who has a slight grasp on the science world. Of course I know many people who just refuse to watch him outright, oversimplifying and selling out the particle physics community.

When I watch his shows it always turns out that I know/at least grasp the concept of the concept that he's trying to put across. However, it's something in his delivery that makes him easy to watch and understand. Just one day, could you put something slightly more challenging on TV please?

Not again.