After performing his smash-hit show ‘Horizons’ to nearly half a million people across the world, Professor Brian Cox is back with his new world tour Emergence. Brian has appeared in many landmark science programs for BBC radio and television over the last 15 years, from the Peabody Award-winning Wonders of the Solar System to the world-wide hit series The Planets.

In the winter of 1610 Johannes Kepler was crossing Prague’s Charles Bridge when he noticed a snowflake land on his arm. He pondered why all snowflakes are six-sided; “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that even in a snowflake, this ordered pattern exists at random.” Over 400 years later, we have part of the answer. Snowflakes are made of water molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks and electrons – which might be made of superstrings – all held together by forces of nature described by quantum theory. But how does such delicate beauty emerge from such abstract simplicity?

From the vast rivers of galaxies that make up the cosmic web, to the ecosystems of Earth and the structure of the human brain – from black holes to snowflakes – we see a Universe of dazzling complexity built on profoundly simple principles. How did this happen over 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution?

Emergence is also a scientific history of this astonishing 400 years. How did a quarter of a million-year-old species of great apes living on one small planet orbiting an average star come to understand so much about the cosmos? Guided by mathematics, curiosity, and an aesthetic sense of symmetry and beauty, our species has begun to read the story of the Universe and started to carry our spacecraft to the edge of the solar system and outwards to the stars.

Brian says – “I’ve loved creating Emergence – it’s the most ambitious live show I’ve ever written. I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with a wonderful group of scientists, musicians, film makers and graphic artists to bring cosmology, biology, philosophy and history to the largest and most advanced LED screens available, with the best sound and lights I could find. I hope the show is an all-encompassing experience, and I hope it leaves everyone, whether they love science or music or history, or simply contemplating the beauty of Nature, with something new to think about.