Professor Brian Cox

Professor Brian Cox is coming to the M&S Bank Arena on Friday 16 October, with the show starting at 7:30 PM. He'll be joined by Robin Ince, his The Infinite Monkey Cage co-host, who'll be hosting the interview part of the evening.

The show is called Emergence, and it follows Horizons, which he took to nearly half a million people around the world. He describes Emergence as the most ambitious live show he's ever written, and he didn't do it alone: he worked with scientists, musicians, filmmakers and graphic artists to pull it together. The whole thing is built around some of the largest and most advanced LED screens available, so the visuals will be a big part of the experience. It's not just astronomy, either — it brings together cosmology, biology, philosophy and history, and Cox says he's increasingly interested in what it all means.

If you're not familiar with the man behind the podium, Brian Cox OBE is a British particle physicist and a Royal Society University Research fellow working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, as well as a Professor at the University of Manchester. Most of us know him as the face of science on the BBC, from the Peabody Award-winning Wonders of the Solar System to the worldwide hit The Planets, and he's spent the last 15 years bringing astronomy and physics to a wider audience. His interests run across particle physics, cosmology, biology and music, and Emergence seems to be where those different threads come together.

Tickets start from £47.71, which includes the administration fee, facility fee and a £2.95 order processing fee per order. One practical thing to keep in mind: under-14s have to be accompanied by an adult. The show is at the M&S Bank Arena at Kings Dock, starting at 7:30 PM on Friday 16 October.