Chatting with Brian was out of this world

HAVING spent an evening with Professor Brian Cox - okay there were 188 other people in the room, but let’s not split particles - I am... absolutely no wiser about the laws of physics.

That said, I am a little happier about the state of the universe and planets - despite an impending collision between the Milky way - our galaxy - and neighbour Andromeda.

I can reveal, in Chronicle Business, that in what passes for measurable time (for physics profssors) the two galaxies will bash into each other and zillions and squillions of stars and planets will emerge from the cataclysmic collision long before the sun burns out in about 5,000 million years. So don’t worry about booking your summer hols for a while.

I know this because I was listening to Professor Cox intently, like everyone else at the White Hart in Lydgate.

The local TV hero was fulfilling a longstanding promise to appear at a ‘Love Lydgate’ lunch to raise funds for the hilltop hamlet.

Apparently this astronomical stuff is important - as is the humungously large and expensive whirligig thing at Cern in Switzerland, where a group of scientists such as Professor Cox are recreating the Big Bang.

The Large Hadron Collider, which sends particles around the 29 kilometre tube so quickly they almost overtake themselves, is something about we have all heard but few of us fully understand.

Yet at its heart is a bloke from Chadderton, standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s foremost and respected scientists. How he knows all this stuff, goodness knows.

I went to school in Oldham too, but I must have been in a different stream...

This one-time Hulme Grammar pupil still lives in Oldham — well to be more specific, he has a home here; people this clever don’t really live anywhere, since they are in demand all over the planet.

But rest assured, he is most certainly one of us.