Brain Cox got a D in A-level Maths

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:12

Tunney said:
Read much of his research, have you?

Indeed. His research at CERN wasn't because of his 'celebrity status'.

TFleming · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:12

kgi said:
Well, celebrities are not famous for their academic results are they?

His work is mostly on communicating science to the public. Highly commendable but it's not the same as coming up with a new theory or a theory of everything is it?

As for the correlation between academic/intelligence prowess and getting to become a professor, let's just say it's tenuous.

Do you not need to discover something previously unknown in a field to gain a PHD?

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:13

James24 said:
What... He is a proper physicist in every right. Not just someone with a physics degree who now presents tv programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu...wcmd=FIND+AUTHOR+COX, Brian+AND+EPRINT+hep-ph

http://www.apolloschildren.com/brian/

Abraham said:
Eh? it's only recently that he's become a "celebrity", apart from D:Ream. He's gone through the ranks of Academia at UoM and is a renowned Physicist.

Is he? really? He has only had 4 publications of research papers (here: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/brian.cox/publications). Yes, four, one of which is a C++ coding of an algorithm. The rest in the list at stanford are 'talks', 'conferences' & 'workshops'. Sounds to me like his celebrity status with the fact that he was qualified on paper propelled him to the tenurship an UoM rather than his actual research work. I've seen lecturers with many-many more publications than he has.

As I said, his work to communicate science to the layman and get kids/peeps interested is highly commendable, but he has not discovered anything or added any significant amount of research into the body of knowledge we have today. He is a highly educated celebrity, nothing wrong with that.

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:15

TFleming said:
Do you not need to discover something previously unknown in a field to gain a PHD?

Regardless of this, he's not just a Dr, He's a Prof. You need to be good at what you do to get a departmental chair.

Sp00n · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:16

Pffttt... he's only a Prof?

Pathetic.

KNiVES · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:17

A Levels mean nothing, universities will accept grades as low as straight Ds. Plenty of hugely successful people have poor A levels, or even none at all, because they went on to do NVQs or trades and such.

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:17

TFleming said:
Do you not need to discover something previously unknown in a field to gain a PHD?

Not discover, just do research in something that no one else has done before. Many PHDs are piles of steaming, well you know what. As long as it's "new" it's ok.

In Cox's case his Phd was "based on his thesis drawn from work he did for the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg". So he was working there and used his work to write his Phd thesis.

Biohazard · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:18

kgi said:
In Cox's case his Phd was "based on his thesis drawn from work he did for the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg". So he was working there and used his work to write his Phd thesis.

and?

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:20

Burnsy2023 said:
Regardless of this, he's not just a Dr, He's a Prof. You need to be good at what you do to get a departmental chair.

Or famous.

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:21

In Cox's case his Phd was "based on his thesis drawn from work he did for the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg". So he was working there and used his work to write his Phd thesis.

Biohazard said:
and?

kgi said:
Not discover, just do research in something that no one else has done before. Many PHDs are piles of steaming, well you know what. As long as it's "new" it's ok.

Parsifal · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:22

Brian Edward Cox, OBE (born 3 March 1968) is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is also working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres (1,380 ft) from the interaction points of the main experiments.[1]

He is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC. He also had some fame in the 1980s as the keyboard player in the rock band Dare and in the early 1990s with the pop band D:Ream.

I'm sure the people in this thread have done way more than that.

kgi: List your greatest achievments before you criticise.

daver · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:22

Had a lecture from this guy in about 1999 when I was at sixth form. Had a day of physics lectures at Salford uni and remember one of them was by 'the guy out of d:ream'

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:23

btw, does anyone have the timeline when he became a lecturer and then progressed to become a professor? or was he appointed as a professor straight from having a phd?

Biohazard · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:23

and?

Do you have critique on his work or is it just sour dummy time?

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:27

Parsifal said:
I'm sure the people in this thread have done way more than that.

kgi: List your greatest achievments before you criticise.

Read my original post again please, I never criticised him for his achievements :rolleyes:

. All I said was -in reference of his D grade in Maths- that not all professors are highly accredited intellectually or even academically. Case in point, B.Cox who seems to not have had a particularly interesting research career, yet he is a professor. I was reinforcing the point that you don't need straight AAAAAAs to achieve tenurship or become a professor and that people sometimes look at professors as geniuses/wizards when they are not.

And btw, since when someone can't criticise unless they are 'better'? I'm free to criticise anyone and anything in anyway I like. As long as I have an argument for it then all is fine. You are better off arguing my points rather than calling up to me to list my achievements as a measure of comparison.

Mr Jack · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:29

Al Vallario said:
Daily Mail: Two-fifths of university students have worse than two Es at A-level

What an utterly shoddy article - no surprise from the Daily Fail - you'll note that the vast majority of those getting less than 80 tariff points are those on 0. What's 0, do you suppose? Is it people who failed all their A-levels, do you think? Or might it be all those people, who have non-standard backgrounds? Such as, I dunno, foreign students?

Even by Dail Mail standards, that's pushing the envelope of drivel.

Mr Jack · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:29

sihart25 said:
Hey it just goes to show that even if you don't get the results you can still persevere. this should be a message to all students must have taken hard work to become a prof after this but he managed it.

Mind you, grade inflation would have got him an A or a B these days.

ntg · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:30

Biohazard said:
and?

Do you have critique on his work or is it just sour dummy time?

Do you have trouble reading or are you trolling?

I responded to your 'and' post. I'll say it again:

His Phd was based on his work at Hamburg, describing the results of experiments that he was following.

So, in response to Tflemings post:

Do you not need to discover something previously unknown in a field to gain a PHD?

I said that NO, you don't need to discover something new, just produce work on something that someone hasn't worked on before. Does it make sense to you now?

AGD · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:33

Why the hate? :confused:

He's popularising science and seems to be a likeable guy.

Biohazard · 3 Feb 2011 at 12:34

kgi said:
Read my original post again please, I never criticised him for his achievements . All I said was -in reference of his D grade in Maths- that not all professors are highly accredited intellectually or even academically. Case in point, B.Cox who seems to not have had a particularly interesting research career, yet he is a professor. I was reinforcing the point that you don't need straight AAAAAAs to achieve tenurship or become a professor and that people sometimes look at professors as geniuses/wizards when they are not.

"He is a highly educated celebrity, nothing wrong with that."

It seems like you are attempting to deride the guy to me.

Do you expect every scientist involved in theoretical physics to be all producing the same volumes of work by means of papers?

We know you don't need straight A's, this is after all the topic of the thread is it not?

kgi said:
And btw, since when someone can't criticise unless they are 'better'? I'm free to criticise anyone and anything in anyway I like. As long as I have an argument for it then all is fine. You are better off arguing my points rather than calling up to me to list my achievements as a measure of comparison.

I never said you couldn't, and I didn't call you up on anything personally.

Stop acting defensively, and so snooty. It don't work wee man.