Bravo! Fantastic summary of what brian cox stands for. In my eyes, he lost all credibility when he criticized Avi Loeb for his ideas about 3I/ATLAS. Avi Loeb is an enthusiastic, open minded, and humble REAL scientist, while people like cox may know enough about astronomy to confuse a layman. However, as you said, cox has contributed nothing to physics or science, apart from his arrogance—which, unfortunately, is already far too prevalent.
Yeah, Avi Loeb is a great example of what I wish people thought of when they heard “scientist” — curious, willing to be wrong in public, actually pushing the frontier instead of defending a brand. Brian Cox represents the opposite archetype to me: a media-trained explainer whose job is to keep the current cosmology looking inevitable and unquestionable.
My issue isn’t that he’s on TV, it’s that the combination of soft lighting + certainty + hand-wavey math gets treated as “final truth” while people like Loeb get dismissed for asking real questions. That inversion is exactly what’s been holding physics back.
Bravo! Fantastic summary of what brian cox stands for. In my eyes, he lost all credibility when he criticized Avi Loeb for his ideas about 3I/ATLAS. Avi Loeb is an enthusiastic, open minded, and humble REAL scientist, while people like cox may know enough about astronomy to confuse a layman. However, as you said, cox has contributed nothing to physics or science, apart from his arrogance—which, unfortunately, is already far too prevalent.
Love this, thank you. 🙏🏽
Yeah, Avi Loeb is a great example of what I wish people thought of when they heard “scientist” — curious, willing to be wrong in public, actually pushing the frontier instead of defending a brand. Brian Cox represents the opposite archetype to me: a media-trained explainer whose job is to keep the current cosmology looking inevitable and unquestionable.
My issue isn’t that he’s on TV, it’s that the combination of soft lighting + certainty + hand-wavey math gets treated as “final truth” while people like Loeb get dismissed for asking real questions. That inversion is exactly what’s been holding physics back.