Begin Again with Davina McCall - Begin Again Moments: The Power of the Sun & Moon | Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock & Professor Brian Cox

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

In this special Begin Again Moments episode, inspired by this week’s solar eclipse, two of Britain’s most brilliant minds explore the extraordinary power of the Sun and Moon. Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores the mystery and influence of the Moon, while Professor Brian Cox turns our attention to the Sun, the star at the centre of our solar system and the source of the light and energy that makes life possible. As the solar eclipse captures attention around the world, these two fascinating conversations offer a chance to look beyond the spectacle and understand the remarkable relationship between the Sun, Moon and our place in the universe. To hear the full conversations, watch the complete episodes on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My father loved the moon because it was his friend when he was in Nigeria because it helped him when he was cycling across the savannah on unlit roads. Oh, wow, it lit the wave for him. Yes. Is that why he loved the moon? I think so, yes. I love that. Yeah, but also growing up in London, because we were sort of growing up in inner city London,

so you can't see many stars and stuff like that, but see the moon shining through. Last night, just moved to a new house, and it was quite cloudy. But I just saw a sort of a patch of moonlight. ran up and looked out the window and there it is shining. And it just lifts my heart. And so, yeah, even if you can't see the stars, you can see the moon. And the idea that people had gone there as well.

Yes. Yes, it is mad, isn't it? The other night, there was a meteor shower. Ah, yeah. Wasn't there? And they said, look north. Oh, yeah. So outside of look north and you might be able to see it.

And Michael and I went outside and we looked north. We saw five shooting stuff. Oh, it's five in an hour. Yes. It was unreal. I don't know we're out of town with no streetlights or anything. It was. Look, goosebumps.

It's like absolutely mind-blowing. So was it your dad then that gave you the kind of moon bug? I think so. So my dad was sort of mentioning this and also because I'm an insomniac. Sort of growing up. Yeah. You're wandering around the house when everybody else was asleep and you open the curtain and the moonlight shines in.

So it's his friend, it was my friend. And so my father always called himself a self-certified lunatic. Yes, he did that? Because when it said, I was reading about you, and it said that you were a lunatic. And I was like, well, that's a bit rude. And then it came to me. I was like, oh, lunar.

Yes. Under the lunar cycle. Because he always said, you, the self-certified is very important. So I'm not just a lunatic. I'm a self-certified lunatic. So I've bought this upon myself. And I think it was similar for him. He just loved the moon.

And growing up, I used to go to the top of the flats and look out across London. And you could see London lit up by, you know, sort of moonlight. And it's beautiful. So yes. And I always say it's hereditary because my father passed it on to me and I've passed it onto my daughter.

And so we go outside. We moved into the new house recently. And I said, oh, look, there's the moon. Oh, he said, stop that mother. The old neighbors used to hear me howling at the moon. No, I'm 16 now. We're not howling at the moon anymore. All right, come on.

Always howl at the moon. Come on. I know. I think it's necessary. And it is so wonderful. It's liberating and cathartic. And you're so, ow! I got slightly obsessed with these super moons.

And I've never really, never really got into astrology or the moon. But I did know from having three babies that babies often deliver on a full moon. Every midwife I met told me that if the due date was near a full moon, I would probably, you know, go into labour on a full moon. And then they also told me that the police brace themselves. Is that true? Yes.

One of the things I was exploring, I wrote a book about the moon. And it was my love letter to the moon, and it was celebrating. And it was looking at sort of, you know, lunacy. And the fact that, you know, and some police forces do actually put extra cops on the beat. They do, yeah. When there's a full moon.

And it's quite interesting because it's, you know, cause and effect. And we try and do it scientifically. Because you can say we're working in a hospital. And something interesting happens on the, and it happens to be a full moon. You remember that. But if something interesting happens and it's not a full moon, you might not remember it.

So it's trying to look at sort of the evidence and the sort of, yes, but I do like the idea. But also a friend of mine that was a social worker, she also said that they used to have more callouts for disruptions in the home on a full moon. They would all brace themselves for that. Oh, the phone's ringing more. Yeah, no. And I thought that's fascinating because we are made of water. Yes. And am I right in saying, does the moon affect tides?

It affect tide. And so large masses of water. Well, actually, the thing is gravity, the way gravity works, it affects everything. So, for instance, when I jump up, I fall down because the Earth's gravity is pulling on me. Yes. But also, my gravity is pulling on the Earth. Now, my gravity compared with the Earth's gravity, it's insignificant, yes. But people do say, if they've already jumped up at the same time, I still don't think we'll have much difference, but it's a large mass moving.

And so, yes, then it could have, you might see a noticeable effect. But yes, and so there is this interaction, the gravity. gravitational force, but it does, yeah, sort of, you know, pull the water because the water is fluid. When you have sort of the moon on one side and the sun on the other, for instance, then the water gets sort of elongated and you get high tides. So, and there's lots of things that spawn when there's a full moon. So, yes, it does have an influence. So they spawn at full moon? Yes, quite a few creatures. So that makes sense about having a baby at full moon. Well, yes. You try to work out why they spawn at a full moon.

And I think it is almost like timing. It's quite interesting. If you look back in time, people often use the moon as a calendar because it's sort of, you know, of the order of a month. And so it's a nice cycle. And there are all sorts of things like menstruation and things like that. We sync together. So, yes.

And the thing is it's nice to sort of analyze and get an understanding of it. But yes, I find it fascinating. There's something very satisfying about this synchronicity in the world. that when you start looking for it, it's everywhere. Yes. And we are, as humans, we're akin to patterns. We pick them up and we want to home in on them. Yeah.

We like that. Well, it's order. Yes. In the chaos. Yes. There's some kind of order in a pattern that makes you feel safe. Yes, yes. I went to see Brian Cox the other day.

Yes. And the first half, I was like, Oh. Like, oh my God, I'm trying to remember. all of this. I thought I should have taken a notebook and pen, but then the second half, he put it into practice. Yes. What it all meant? Yeah. And what it did and why. And I thought, God, this is it. This is so interesting. And that's what you do. There are very deep questions about why the universe is the way that it is. And if you think, what I mean by that is that, so we know that 13.8 billion

years ago, very close to the Big Bang, all the universe was was just the simplest, elements, hydrogen and helium. So there's stuff in party balloons, right? And hydrogen, which is the stuff that goes into water. And that's it, right? There's nothing else. It's just this soup of those things. And just some simple forces of nature, and that's it. 13.8 billion years later, those atoms have ended up in patterns like us that can have a conversation. So the universe can observe itself and think about itself through us here on Earth, right? It's a remarkable. remarkable property of the universe. So you say why?

Why is it that the laws of nature and the building blocks are such that they can get just this gas, right, can end up in patterns like human beings? Could you talk me through what happened to the hydrogen and helium and how it evolved? Because it's such an interesting way that they came together to create something else, which created something else. It's the grandest of stories. It's amazing. So you have this, and this is part of the heart of the show really, you have this hydrogen helium, just this gases, right? But the slight differences in, they're almost just featureless.

The universe is almost nothing. But it's got these little bits where there's a bit more gas here and a bit less here, and a bit more there and a bit. That's it. Tiny little variations. Then gravity, as the universe, universe expands and cools. Gravity can allow them to collapse into galaxies and stars. And that, by the way, is a huge story about how does that work. But essentially, just where it's a bit

denser, gravity takes over and they collapse and they make stars. And stars shine by sticking lighter elements into heavier elements. So the sun at the moment is making hydrogen into helium. Well, that's why he's doing it. It's just making heavier elements. But then at the end of its life, when it runs out of hydrogen to make into helium, it starts making carbon and oxygen and those things. So those things out of which we are made come from generations of stars that assembled them and then died through that stuff out into the universe.

And then gravity takes over and it recalapses that into new stars and then ultimately planets. And that's the story. of the universe. So it's, the story is 13.8 billion years, of which the earth has been around four and a half billion, by the way, so to get a scale of it, you end up from this simplest of elements, the heavy elements get made in stars, gravity collapses it all back together again, and ultimately you get places like this. And some of it, by the way, so you've got like gold, you've got like a gold ring or something like that, if you're listening now or watching, you look at that. It was one of the great mysteries.

actually. Where is that made? Because we didn't quite understand it until very recently. What gold? Yes. So we thought it's made, maybe it's made in supernova explosions when they explode. But then a few years ago, we had these experiments and they're called gravitational wave experiments. And they're in their own right are amazing.

So we can see things like black holes colliding and sending ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time. What happens around the black holes? They merge into two black holes. So they become massive. A bigger black hole. But it's really violent.

And so they make space and time ripple. And these things are called gravitational waves. And they go out. A friend of mine, Kip Thorne actually got the Nobel Prize for this work. Called it a storm in time. So this time storm goes. And we can measure it. So we saw one of these time storms in our detector.

And it was a collision between these things called neutron stars, which are stars that are the mass of the sun but they're collapsed to the size of a city they're about 10 kilometres across these things Wait, wait, say that again It's a star actually more massive than the sun Bigger than the sun collapses Until it's about the size of London

And are you talking about that's when it runs out Of, so it dies and collapses into London So you get these remarkable They're like a single atomic nucleus These things, really violent The last step towards a black hole If they get any bigger, they just go. But so these things are around.

And we saw two of them collide with these ripples. And we got our telescopes and sent them and looked in the sky and watched. And we saw gold being made. So we think that a lot of the gold, and this is this gold that you're wearing now, that came a lot of it, perhaps most of it, from the collision between neutron stars. And it ended up in Earth. Yeah. And then so it got made in these.

collisions and then gravity collapses it and we dig it up and make it into jewelry. It's part of that remarkable story.