LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Science is completely central to everything we do in life, including the fact that I'm sitting here in a room in Sydney and you're watching me in your lounge room wherever you are. It's fascinating and exciting stuff, yet scientists are dismayed at falling government funding for research and the struggle to persuade young people that science is a great career choice.

Somebody who's trying to change that is Professor Brian Cox, a British television superstar whose series on the universe try to make science accessible. He's in Australia shooting a series at the moment and he has a new book, Wonders of Life, due out next year. He joined me in the Sydney studio earlier.

Brian Cox, lovely to meet you.

BRIAN COX, PARTICLE PHYSICIST: It's good to be here.

LEIGH SALES: You had a career as a pop star and now you're a professor in particle physics. How did this happen? Keeping bad company obviously.

BRIAN COX: Yeah, actually, I mean, I'd always wanted to be a scientist, particularly an astronomer actually as far back as I can remember. So all the way through school I just knew I was gonna be a physicist. Then about at the age of 15 or 16 I decided I wanted to be a pop star. It wasn't as if I was a musician who'd - so I taught myself to play really in order to be a pop star. It was this dream that you have when you're 16, and accidentally, it happened for a while. So I had a brief break and I went back to university at the age of 23.

LEIGH SALES: When we report a story here, say on the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle or on a space shuttle launch, there's always so much interest. People love watching those sorts of stories. Why does that not translate into science being one of the most sought-after, glamorous careers?

BRIAN COX: Well I think that that's beginning to change, certainly in the UK actually. And there's a serious point here, which one of my heroes Carl Sagan always used to make, which is that we live in a society that's based on science. Everything we do as a civilisation has grown out of science. And yet, as you say, there's a history of it being seen as a niche subject and particularly not as many children would like to go into science. I've always thought that science is too important not to be part of popular culture for this reason.

LEIGH SALES: So what do you think is the most important scientific discovery of your lifetime?

BRIAN COX: I actually think it's the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Boson seems esoteric sometimes when you talk about it, but this is a theory that's been around since the '60s and the proposal is almost bizarre - is that less than a billionth of a second after the universe began something condensed out into empty space and it's the Higgs field. It's almost as if you could say this space now (holding hands in front of himself) is full of Higgs particles, really full of them. There's actually more energy in one cubic metre of space due to the Higgs field than the Sun outputs in 1,000 years. Bizarre theory. But the theory is that things get mass by bumping into those Higgs particles, by interacting with them, so rattling around, if you like, in this empty space.

LEIGH SALES: And why is that such an important discovery?

BRIAN COX: It's very important because our theory of three of the four forces of nature that we know about involve this mechanism. So it was introduced actually, interestingly, for aesthetic reasons almost. And as I say, it sounds totally bizarre, but we've proved experimentally that that is a correct description of nature. So at the most fundamental level, why is this table solid? Why has it got mass? It's got mass because the particles that make it up are rattling around off Higgs particles that are all sat there in this condensate in the vacuum.

LEIGH SALES: What's the scientific discovery you'd most love to see in your lifetime?

BRIAN COX: I think we may be on the verge of discovering life on a planet other than Earth, I would say. That's a sort of unscientific thing to say; we don't know, but the Curiosity rover that's on Mars at the moment, NASA's rover, is there as a path-finder for a mission to discover life. So over the last decade or so the probability I think that we'll find life on Mars now has changed 'cause we've found there's almost certainly liquid water there. Now on Earth if you find liquid water, you find life. There are also moons of Jupiter with oceans of water beneath the surface. So, I think if you'd asked 20, 30 years ago people would have thought the solar system beyond Earth was probably dead. Now there's a chance at least that we'll find life on another world. That means we're not alone in the universe. I mean, that would be an enormous discovery.

LEIGH SALES: What about something that's caught the imaginations of filmmakers and writers for many years: time travel? Is that something that we will ever be able to discover?

BRIAN COX: Well, we travel into the future of course and that sounds like a silly answer, but actually we can travel into the future at any rate that we want. Einstein told us - and this turns out to be correct - that time is relative. So if someone moves past us now at high speed, their clock runs slower than our clocks. That's an effect that has to be accounted for in the satellite navigation system actually, so it's in engineering now. But into the past, as far as we can tell, time travel is forbidden and it's forbidden actually by the speed of light. It's forbidden by the structure of space and time itself. So as far as we know, if Einstein's picture is correct - and this has been shown to be correct over a century or more - then you can't travel into the past. But you can travel indefinitely far into the future by moving relative to other people. So you could get in a rocket, fly at high speed out to a distant galaxy, come back and you'd appear 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 years into the future, ...

LEIGH SALES: Wow.

BRIAN COX: ... but only 10 years had passed for you.

LEIGH SALES: Do you think that there's a risk that we'll reach a stage in the future where governments will say, "Well, we don't really need to know that much more about space. We've got pressing problems here on Earth so let's fully close down NASA and forget about that sort of stuff"?

BRIAN COX: Yeah, and it's happened throughout history actually. You look back and you see these arguments stretching back hundreds of years. And the response of the scientists has always been the same, which is that you genuinely cannot tell what a piece of research is going to lead to and a very good example was the discovery of the nucleus by Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander working in the Manchester at the turn of the 20th Century. Discovered the atomic nucleus because he wanted to know about the structure of atoms - esoteric. And even in the '30s Rutherford was saying, "Anyone who thinks these nuclei can be used as a power source is talking moonshine," were his words. 10 years later you had the Manhattan Project building bombs and you have the technology being developed to build nuclear power stations. So for good or ill, what you see is that the research into the structure of atoms gave us a power source. So that the point is that it's impossible to understand or to predict which bit of research is gonna lead to which benefit that may change the course of society as transistors did. Civilisation would not be the same without those, but it relied on someone being curious about something that was esoteric.

LEIGH SALES: Professor Cox, any one of these topics we could have spent half an hour each on, but we're out of time. Thank you so much for coming in.

BRIAN COX: Thank you.