D:Ream man Brian Cox’s Big Bang

A decade ago Brian Cox (pictured) achieved a measure of fame playing keyboards with the British pop band D:Ream – their number one hit Things Can Only Get Better was (New) Labour's campaign song in 1997 and they topped that moment of glory when they performed at the party's victory bash at the Royal Festival Hall as news of Tony Blair's landslide came through.

However, those days are over. He is now Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University and, according to the Independent, "the photogenic face of particle physics". He is back in the news because he is one of one of more than 6,500 scientists from 500 research institutes in 80 countries who are attempted to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe began some 13.7 billion years ago.

The project Cox is involved in, which involves spinning beams of sub-atomic particles in opposite directions before deliberately colliding them together in an underground tunnel 16 miles in circumference (called the Large Hadron Collider), is being carried out in Geneva. It seeks to resolve one of the biggest questions in physics: how are matter and the forces of nature linked together.

Says Professor Cox, 40: "Particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. They aim to understand what everything is made of and how everything is stuck together – from atoms to galaxies. I'm quite a believer that science should be part of culture as well as being useful in its own right."