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Sue Bennett HON 1010A-01 23 January 2014 Funding Exploration Professor Brian Cox is a world-renowned scientist in the fields of astronomy, physics, and astrophysics. He is popularly known as the host of the popular television series Wonders of the Universe, Wonders of the Solar System, and Wonders of Life, and for his work on the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Brian Cox is from England and also has a background in music, as he garnered some fame as the keyboardist for the band D:Ream. During this TED talk, one of several TED talks presented by Brian Cox, titled Why We Need the Explorers, Professor Cox aims to share with his listeners an admirable argument for continued government funding of scientific exploration and curiosity. Cox begins his oration by highlighting and vocalizing a current affair: the status of the worlds economy. The economys health inevitably affects most, if not all, of the civilized population of the world. Refuting the argument that a large budget for scientific pursuits and curiosities is illogical, he launches an inspiring case for the continued subsidization and growth of funding for fields of scientific study. Beginning by using a complicated, illustrated graph to show the worlds spending on scientific researcha visual aid he jokes may be the worst in TEDs historyCox points out specific regions of scientific investment and subsidies. Overall, there are over $600 billion spent to fund curiosity research, including medical and the arts and humanities, in the world per year. In the United Kingdom, this number is around $3 billion totalequivalent to the U.S. To add perspective, he underlines that this number is six tenths of a percent of the gross domestic product of the UK.

Anderson 2 Pulling on concepts and thematic material from his background in Wonders of the Solar System, Cox moves in sequence to underpin the need for human exploration and growth in knowledge. Showing photographs taken by the Voyager spacecraft, he hints at capturing his audiences sense of wonderment and desire to satisfy curiosity; even teasing at the idea of extra-terrestrial life in our own solar system on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Through this, he continues to fortify examples and highlight his overlying message that science is not useless; it is a crucial aspect of life and innovation. Stifling scientific advancement and achievement is innately wrong, in his view. By example, in 1928, Alexander Fleming stated that he did not anticipate discovering the first antibiotic, but that continual curiosity, research, and involvement birthed this innovation. Without government funding and investment, this seemingly invaluable achievement in medicinal practice would simply fail to exist in todays life. Furthermore, from an economic standpoint, Cox identifies that the Apollo space missions undertaken by the U.S. returned $14 into the United States economy for every one dollar spent on its completion. It paid for itself fourteen times over. As he states, there is potential for maximizing economic revenue from scientific ventures through investment in research and other curiosity-based endeavors. To conclude his talk, Professor Brian Cox states, Surely we know enough; we dont need to discover anything else about our universe (Cox). He emphasizes his view on the fatality of presuming our knowledge is ultimate. He again illustrates through words that science is not complete in understandingthat there are still mysteries in nature to be solved and discoveries waiting to be made in our universe.

Anderson 3 Work Cited Cox, Brian. Why We Need the Explorers. Lecture. TED. Apr. 2010. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.