Tonight, British Physicist Brian Cox Premieres Discovery's Series "Wonder of the Universe"

Tonight, Professor Brian Cox, boyish, charming, and accessible, is hosting a new four-part show called Wonders of the Universe on The Discovery Science Channel (see a short segment from show two in the right-hand window). What makes Cox so special? He's what you get when you cross a former British rock star--who's aged as slowly as Dick Clark in his cryogenic prime--to a globe-trotting physics professor. Brian Cox is a man the Los Angeles Times calls, "the nerd who is cooler than you." Although The LA Times' batting average on cool-nerd-tagging is pretty dismal, as they say, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

A brief Brian Cox psycho-DNA-discography

His coolness bonafides: Cox got his start as a professional keyboard player when his band signed a record deal in the late 80s. Later, he joined another group called D:Ream, whose hit "Things Can Only Get Better" became Tony Blair's election theme song in 1997. While the group's songs were being "rebranded" by the British Labor Party, Cox cruised through a PhD in high-energy particle physics and performed regularly with the band, throwing off several more classic UK music videos. Professor Cox now holds a chair in particle physics at the University of Manchester and works with the Large Hadron Collider, happily smashing protons together (instead of hotel room furniture) at unbelievably high speeds, while balancing a successful second career as a BBC Television host. His embedded domain: deep science coupled with cosmology and wonderment. If you haven't seen his earlier series, like a winsome Carl Sagan, Cox is a great explainer, combining strong visual and poetic metaphors with science. Global locations vividly color a shambling, picaresque quest, fused with scientific rigor.

The new show: Wonders of the Universe

For the four-part series WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE, expanding on the promise of 2010's Peabody Award-winning WONDERS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, Cox takes viewers even farther to explore how deep space can be explained--and even experienced--by re-examining the familiar here on Earth. Episode 1: Children of the Stars Series Premiere: Wednesday, July 27, at 9 PM (ET/PT) In the premiere episode, using physics and cosmology, Cox explores life's beginnings by looking deep into space at the process of stellar evolution. He explains how the 92 elements that make up all life on Earth were created by the lives and eventual deaths of distant stars. Forged deep in the hearts of stars, the untold trillions of atoms that make up each of us link together to tell the story of the universe's origin. (Clip-Sun energy)

Episode 2: The Cosmos Made Conscious Episode Premiere: Wednesday, August 3, at 9 PM (ET/PT) In this episode, Cox seeks to understand the nature of time and its role in creating both the universe and ourselves. One destination: from an extraordinary calendar built into the landscape of Peru to the beaches of Costa Rica, he explores the cycles of time which define our experiences. A journey to see glaciers shows how time must inevitably lead to the destruction not just of our planet, but of the entire universe. (Clip: Glaciers.)

Episode 3: The Known and the Unknown Episode Premiere: Wednesday, August 10, at 9 PM (ET/PT) In this episode, Cox explains how gravity is responsible for the Earth's relationship with the moon, and why we see only one side of our closest neighbor. At Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cox talks about how the Chacoan people saw and recorded one of the most spectacular events in the cosmos--the violent death of a massive star. Today, we can still see the remains of that explosion: a vast, cloud of stellar debris we call the Crab Nebula. And ironically, it is the very incompleteness of Einstein's theory of gravity that inspires Cox's own sense of wonder, underscoring the continuing challenges of unraveling the universe's mysteries. (Clip: Super nova)

Episode 4: On Beams of Light Series Finale: Wednesday, August 17, at 9 PM (ET/PT) In the last episode of his journey, Cox travels from the Burgess Shale to the sands of the oldest desert in the world to show how light holds the key to our understanding of the universe. At one of the most magnificent archaeological sites in the world, Cox watches the sun rise during the winter solstice and demonstrates how the same properties of light that color desert sands and the hues of a rainbow also provide unique insights into the history and evolution of the universe. (Clip: Rainbows)

Do you like the sound of Cox's practice of mixing science and art to describe the universe?

Images: Earth, Brian Cox various-- Discovery