Starmus festival: enough brains and Brians to fill the multiverse

Brians Cox, Eno and May joined Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins in Tenerife to celebrate the synergy between astronomy and music, while astronaut Chris Hadfield, interviewed below, talked of our innate instinct to explore

Around the giant pool of the Mediterranean Palace hotel in Tenerife hundreds of people are focused on a familiar star. As pounding bass-filled music booms out of the PA, a great mass of the young, the middle-aged and the old are all glazed with submission as they appear to seek the meaning of the universe in the transformative process of ultraviolet radiation.

A few yards away in a darkened auditorium beneath a strange mock pinkish pyramid the Starmus festival is under way. Dedicated to celebrating a synthesis between astronomy and music that is of a more transcendent kind than that practised around the Mediterranean Palace pool, it has drawn hundreds of people focused on very different but no less familiar stars: Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Brian May and, the greatest scientific supernova of them all, Stephen Hawking.

Related: Prof Brian Cox: ‘Being anti-expert – that’s the way back to the cave’

David Bowie loved the result and said it was the most poignant version ever

Should human exploration stop? That’s a ridiculous expectation because human exploration is innate

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by Andrew Anthony via Electronic music | The Guardian