Scientists should be celebrities, says Prof Brian Cox Prof Cox, who has recently returned to lecturing at Manchester University, where he teaches quantum physics and relativity, denied that his students were star struck by him however. He told the Sunday Times News Review: "Maybe in the first lecture that I give in September they'll behave differently when they first come in, but within minutes they're criticising the size of your writing or whatever." While he did not tend to listen to his critics, he said, "sometimes they make you aware of the clichés you've created or any laziness that's coming into what you do, so for that reason they can be good." Prof Cox, who played the keyboard in a hard rock band called Dare before joining the better known pop group D:Ream, said he had learned his lesson about critics then. "Our first album was criticised for not being heavy enough, so we followed it up with one that was heavier but basically fairly s***," he said of Dare. It was exactly the wrong thing to do and I've always remembered that.