Space boffin Professor Brian Cox has fumed at his publishers after they removed a swear word from his upcoming book on black holes.
The physicist and ex-D:Ream musician said he had written the word "s***" in a draft of the new volume on the ultra-dense collapsed stars, only to find it replaced with the word "bad" in a pre-publication proof. He took to social media to lament the censorship and declared swearing funny.
Writing on Twitter, he said: "Proof reading my book on black holes, I noticed that they have removed the word s*** and replaced it with bad. I have changed it back. WTF?"
The tweet rapidly picked up traction, securing over 22,000 likes, nearly 900 retweets and 1,500 replies from other Twitter users within 24 hours. And Prof Cox wasn't afraid to share the logic behind his frustration with others.
Responding to a tweet asking him why he had included the expletive in the original manuscript, the physicist replied: "Because swearing is funny sometimes." And asked what the swear word had referred to, he added: "A joke about spherical cows."
When is swearing acceptable? Share your views in the comments (but keep it clean!)
Prof Cox - who has been praised for making physics understandable for mass audiences on TV shows like Wonders of the Universe - even got support from some of his fellow physicists.
Dr James O'Donoghue, a former Nasa physicist now at Japan's space exploration body Jaxa, wrote: "If you can stub your toe on a coffee table and say the word s***, you get to say it about spacetime-bending, star-destroying black holes."
Other Twitter users chirped in with their own hilarious responses to the edits made by Cox's publishing bosses.
One joked: "Also going to the bathroom to take a bad doesn't make sense." Another added: "It [swearing] is big and it is clever."
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