Brian Cox explains what he thinks really happens after you die
Kiesha Dosanjh
Featured Image Credit: (Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images)
Scientist Brian Cox has shared his beliefs on what happens after you die - and many may disagree with his thoughts.
The famous physicist has had his say on a number of ‘deep conversations’ when sitting down with LADbible last year - and one topic that came up was the ‘flat Earth theory’ which he said ‘riles him up’.
"I think the flat Earth [theory] is just bizarre," he said. "The moon landing stuff is bizarre enough but the flat Earth thing requires almost everybody who's sensible in the world to be part of a conspiracy [and] just a small number of people, who in my view appear to be a bit odd, to be the only people who know the truth,” he said.
Last year, Cox also sat down with Fearne Cotton on her Happy Place podcast, where he was asked what he thinks really happens after death. There’s a wide range of beliefs out there. Some believe in heaven and hell, whereas others believe there’s an afterlife. Cox however, believes in, well, nothing.
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He started by asking the unanswerable question: “What is life?” He says although we don’t know the answer - we can pin some things down, such as energy.
“We burn food in oxygen and if we stop burning food in oxygen, then we die. So there's energy in the way a steam engine does things. Then there’s information that it processes as well. So there’s an information component and an energy component,” he added.
"There's got to be a source of energy, you've got to be able to do things and your structure remains and things like that, which implies that it's the same as your iPhone, which stops processing information when you take the battery out,” Cox continued.
“There's no conceivable way that your conscious experience can persist when the machine stops working.”
Although Cox admitted what he said ‘did sound harsh,’ he also said it was ‘pretty remarkable’.
“It’s pretty remarkable that there’s this kind of thing that’s just obeying the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are pretty simple."
The physicist admits he doesn’t have all the answers, though. In a recent interview with the Guardian, he revealed what scientific question he would love to have the answer to.
“I’d love to know if there’s life beyond Earth, in the solar system or elsewhere,” he said, before stating that there may be a chance of having the answers amid the two space crafts on the way to Jupiter.
“There’s a slim chance that we might detect a signature of life,” he told the publication. “I’d like to know how far you have to go to see something else alive.”