In the stars

To spend time with stadium cosmologist Brian Cox is to make human beings reconsider their status - although tiny and fragile and finite in this infinite universe - as ecstatic and random rock stars of the galaxy

There was a remarkable moment when physics professor and TV personality Brian Cox was visiting the British Consulate in Hong Kong to deliver a promotional speech to journalists there. Ten minutes ahead of his talk, the cosmologist who had spent half his life looking for evidence of the origins of creation as far back as four billion years ago, looks up at the projection screen and says there was too much light shining on him that he couldn't see.

Is there a blind that can be lowered, he asks? No. "Okay, I'll do my best, but you'll just have to come to the show to see these images," he jokes, with his mix of wild-eyed, disciplined-mind, boy wonder-esque persona. Cox is referring to his "stadium cosmology" performance, the Professor Brian Cox Universal World Tour, which landed in Hong Kong on June 5, and also visited Singapore, New Zealand and Australia.