About the Book
Human Universe is first and foremost a love letter to humanity; a celebration of our outrageous fortune in existing at all. I have chosen to write my letter in the language of science, because there is no better demonstration of our magnificent ascent from dust to paragon of animals than the exponentiation of knowledge generated by science. Two million years ago we were ape-men. Now we are spacemen. That has happened, as far as we know, nowhere else. That is worth celebrating. This book asks questions about our origins, our destiny, and our place in the universe. We have no right to expect answers; we have no right to even ask. But ask and wonder we do. “I am astonished by the existence of a single atom, and find my civilisation to be an outrageous imprint on reality. I don’t understand it. Nobody does, but it makes me smile.”
About the Author
Professor Brian Cox, OBE is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester as well as researcher on one of the most ambitious experiments on Earth, the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is best known to the public as a science broadcaster and presenter of the popular BBC
Wonders trilogy.
Andrew Cohen is Head of the BBC Science Unit and the Executive Producer of the BBC series Human Universe. He has been responsible for a wide range of science documentaries including Horizon, the Wonders trilogy and Stargazing Live. He is an honorary lecturer in Life Sciences at the University of Manchester and lives in London with his wife and three children.