My guest today, Brian Cox has had a very unconventional career trajectory.

He started his adult life as a pop star, part of a band that had a number one hit on the British charts and did arena tours.

Then he shifted gears and became a particle physicist, part of the team that discovered

the Higgs boson.

And for a third act in his career, he's back on tour, and he is again selling out arenas.

But this time, he's not playing music.

Instead, he's giving science lectures.

What is this thing we call science, this way of thinking and interrogating nature

that's taken us from the end of the medieval period and onwards to the Enlightenment and then

to the stars basically in 400 years?

Welcome to people I mostlyire with Steve Levitt.

We will certainly talk about Brian's multiple careers on stage, but I want to start with some particle physics.

There was a media frenzy around the Higgs boson after the announcement of its discovery back in 2012.

Honestly, though, I've never had any idea why the Higgs boson after the announcement of its discovery back in 2012. Honestly, though, I've never had any idea why the Higgs boson matters to anyone, but I know it must be important because

they call it the god particle. So I asked Brian to explain why it matters so much to physics to find the Higgs boson.

The story goes back to the 1960s and the construction of our theory of subatomic particles

and the way that they interact with each other, which is called the standard model of particle

physics. So I can give you the 30-second overview of that thing if you want.

Please do, yeah.

There are 12 fundamental matter particles.

I use the word fundamental because as far as we can see, they don't have any structure.

They're point-like objects.

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