Professor Brian Cox is back with his new world tour Emergence.

Brian has appeared in many landmark science programmes 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. Why, he asked, are all snowflakes six-cornered? “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that even in a snowflake, this ordered pattern exists at random.”

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?

Emergence is a celebration of the intricacy of the Universe and an exploration of the laws of nature that sculpted it. From the largest structures in the known Universe – the rivers and flows of galaxies that trace the cosmic web – to Earth’s interlinked ecosystems and the structure of the human brain – from black holes to snowflakes – we observe a world of dazzling complexity underpinned by magnificent simplicity.