Brian Cox’s EBS Number

Brian Cox 

He’s an experimental physicist who works at the Large Hadron Collider (a ginormous particle accelerator), and yet you’d probably still throw your panties at him (I know I’d throw mine).  He started his career playing keyboards in a band called “Dare”, which (and I quote from Wired magazine) “made two albums and toured with Jimmy Page before they got into a fight in a Berlin bar and broke up.”   I think I speak for physicists everywhere when I say…  THAT IS AWESOME!   I know a hundred physics nerds who would LOVE to be cool enough to get into a barfight in Berlin.  He then went on to join the band D:Ream, who garnered three top-ten hits in the UK, a major accomplishment in light of the extraneous punctuation in their name.

Bacon Number:  This is the easiest to find, thanks to the Oracle of Bacon website (all the good website names are taken.)  He can’t be linked through Kevin Bacon through feature films, but can be through TV shows.  I realize this may strike purists as unfair, but I cheerfully ignore them.  Via the British TV show “Stargazing Live”, Dr. Cox can be linked to Bacon in three steps.

Sabbath Number:  Dr. Cox also has a Sabbath number of three, thanks to links through Darren Wharton and Tommy Aldrige to Ozzy Ozbourne.  Ross Churchley worked this out, significantly reducing my original derivation of 7 for his Sabbath number.  (Yes, I earn another “FAIL”)

Erdos Number:  Amazingly enough, Dr. Cox’s Erdos number was the hardest to find – we can once again thank Ross for working this out.  He’s shown that Dr. Cox has an Erdos number of 7, which seems pretty high for a physicist.  However, Ross put in quite a lot of tedious work just to get us this far, so be prepared for a coauthorship slog if you want to chop this number down further.  This gives Dr. Cox a total EBS number of thirteen!

I’ve mentioned that Ross put in a ton of work to get Brian Cox definitively on the list.  But hard work is its own reward, right?  Not this time!  Brian Cox himself was notified of the good news, and then retweeted a link to Ross’ page to all of his thousands of followers!  Pretty damn cool, if you ask me!  (You did ask me, right?)

 

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