Brian Cox. Smashing Research at CERN.

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Brian Cox works at the coolest place on earth. In fact, at -271 degrees Celsius, it happens to be the coolest place in the universe. “Other than in man-made places, the coldest the universe gets is -270.45 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees above absolute zero], which is the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation,” says Cox. “That’s the heat left over from the Big Bang.”

Cox is a particle physicist and professor at the University of Manchester, England, and his supercooled workplace is the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the enormous particle accelerator miles below ground in France and Switzerland. Two decades and nearly ten billion dollars in the making, the LHC is the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted.

The Big Bang in Miniature

In early 2009, physicists at CERN will smash together the first opposing beams of protons in an attempt to reproduce conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began—in other words, they will try to recreate the ‘Big Bang’ in miniature, under laboratory conditions. The objective, says Cox, is to observe and verify undiscovered or hypothetical physical phenomena—things like the Higgs boson, first theorized in 1964, and the only elementary particle of the Standard Model of particle physics yet to be proven or seen. Simply stated, says Cox, “the aim is to understand what everything is made of and how it sticks together.”

Cox is one of about 10,000 physicists working at the LHC. In addition to his laboratory work at CERN and in Manchester, Cox is fast becoming a media celebrity. With an extraordinary talent for explaining complex scientific subjects in understandable and entertaining terms, he lectures around the world to both scientists and general audiences. He also produces television and radio shows for the BBC, and acts as a science advisor to Hollywood filmmakers.

Physicists Prefer Mac OS X

Since 2003, Cox has chosen the Mac as his computing platform, whether he’s in the research lab, on the presentation stage, or working on a TV show. “When you look around a physics conference now, you see more Macs than anything else,” says Cox. “I think that's because they're essentially UNIX, and that makes it very easy for everybody who's used UNIX in particle physics for the past 20 or 30 years. There's a huge code base. We're still using programs written in Fortran quite a lot—programs that were written in the '70s and '80s—and they compile directly on the Mac. It's very easy to do, as opposed to Windows, where it's just a pain to compile all the old legacy programs.”

Part of the appeal is the level of control available through Mac OS X, he explains. “When you grow up as a physicist, certainly a particle physicist, you’ve grown up with terminals. And on a Mac, you can go in and type UNIX commands in a terminal window. It sounds really geeky, but physicists like that power. So I can't overestimate or overemphasize the usefulness of the Mac being a UNIX-based system.”