Physicist, BBC presenter and author Brian Cox has traced the inspiration for his latest live show, Emergence, to an unusual source: a short book by Johannes Kepler about snowflakes.
Cox said the show grew out of The Six-Cornered Snowflake, a work Kepler wrote after a New Year’s Eve walk in 1609 across the Charles Bridge in Prague. Kepler was on his way to his benefactor’s house and had not bought a present, so he turned to what he was seeing around him in the snowstorm. Watching snowflakes land on his arm, he began to think about their symmetry and to ask why they are six-sided.
That idea, Cox suggests, has lasting appeal because it links careful observation with big scientific questions. Kepler is best known for his laws of planetary motion, written in and around 1610, but Cox pointed to this smaller, more reflective text as the spark behind his new live project.
The physicist also touched on broader themes that run through his work, including the relationship between art and science. The interest in snowflakes, symmetry and emergence fits into a long tradition of asking how order appears in nature and what it tells us about the universe.
In the wider interview, Cox also addressed artificial intelligence and its future impact. He said that “we don’t know how powerful AI is going to become,” describing that uncertainty as both exciting and potentially a problem. The remark reflects a familiar tension in debates about the technology: the possibility of major advances alongside the risk of unintended consequences.
Cox’s comments place AI in the context of other profound shifts in science and understanding. As with Kepler’s close attention to something as ordinary as a snowflake, the point is not simply what is visible at first glance, but what can be discovered by looking more deeply.
He also recalled a lighter and more unexpected moment from his public life: the time Paul McCartney quizzed him about one of Saturn’s moons. The anecdote underlines the unusual range of Cox’s role as a science communicator, moving between cosmology, popular culture and public conversation.
As a presenter and writer, Cox has long been known for translating complex scientific ideas for broad audiences. His latest remarks suggest that the same curiosity that drives his televised work and live shows also shapes the way he thinks about current questions, from the beauty of a snowflake to the future of machine intelligence.
Emergence, then, appears to be more than a stage show title. It is also a way of thinking: about patterns, about the natural world, and about the gradual appearance of ideas that can change how people understand the universe.
