Brian Cox in Birmingham: Scientist breaks his own world record of science tour ticket sales

The broadcaster and physicist had previously hit the record in December last year when his UK and Ireland tour, entitled Professor Brian Cox Live, saw him perform to more than 75,000 people from September.

More dates have now been added – including at Birmingham’s Barclaycard Arena on May 12 – to cater for the high demand from fans, meaning the overall total tickets sold has now

doubled.

Professor Cox will conclude the UK leg of the tour at his biggest venue to date, London’s Wembley Arena, before taking the show to four European cities, including Stockholm and Oslo.

Professor Cox told the Press Association that he is ‘very excited’ with the forthcoming shows, as performing in bigger venues this time around is allowing him to use larger screens to properly showcase the “beautiful” high resolution imagery of various galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope.

He said: “The exciting thing about these, from the (shows) before Christmas, we’re in really big venues.

“We have a really big screen, a ridiculous screen - it’s a state of the art LED display, it’s something like 30m wide and 15m high.

“It’s huge, and what you realise is the images we’ve now got from the Hubble and Cassini, which has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks, they’re such incredible high-res images, when you put them on screens like that and fill arenas with them, they look spectacular.

“I don’t think anyone ever gets a chance to do it, to give them the presentation they deserve because they are beautifully detailed, and that’s the most exciting thing.”

Professor Cox, who has presented several science programmes for the BBC across the topics of astronomy and physics, said he hopes people come away from his show with a heightened desire to learn, but admitted they may be left asking more questions.

He said: “They will know more in the sense that they might not have thought about the vastness of the universe, but one of the only things you can aim to do in a show is to trigger a desire to learn more, because you can’t even begin to scratch the surface of what we know.”

Professor Cox said he hopes to answer people’s questions about the meaning of life and the possibility of aliens with his shows.

“That’s why I’m doing this tour, so I can answer them once and for all,” he said.

“I should add that I don’t know the answer to either of those questions - I’ll give my opinion!”

Professor Brian Cox Live’s extra shows run until May 26. For further information and tickets visit briancoxlive.co.uk