Prof Brian Cox: Physics or Metaphysics?

Much as I appreciate the work of the physicist Brian Cox in popularising scientific knowledge and countering nonsense or pseudoscientific "woo", there were a couple of occasions in his programme "Night with the Stars" on BBC2 TV last night where it seems to me he slipped from physics to metaphysics.
This was also noted by Arifa Akbar in a review in The Independent:

Physics began to sound first like metaphysics ("Particles that make this diamond are in communication with every one of you and with everything in the universe") and then, like Buddhism ("When I heat this diamond up, all the atoms in the universe change their energy levels... Everything is connected to everything else"). These wondrous statements made quantum physics seem suddenly clear cut, until it got complicated again.

Similarly David Butcher in The Radio Times:

he shows how diamonds are made up of nothingness, and how one such precious gem in the heart of London is in communication with the largest diamond in the cosmos. He also reveals how things can be in two places at once

It is good to see the actual equations of quantum physics, or a version of them, in this case Feynman's path-integration method, actually being shown in a popular presentation, but the interpretation given to it is just one of many, none of which are yet entirely satisfactory. The problem is that electrons are not analogous to "particles" of sand, although that term is still used to describe them. I sometimes think that they are perhaps more like a "cloud" or "swarm". Surely his interpretation of the Pauli exclusion principle is just plain wrong.

Brian Cox's Voltaire Lecture

I've just returned from The Voltaire Lecture given by Brian Cox at Conway Hall. It was a privilege to have been able to get a ticket, since there was greater demand than the hall could contain. Not only was his recent TV programme on "The Wonders of the Solar System" inspiring and instructive, but he is also an excellent speaker. He made it clear that this country still "punches above its weight" in Science, but a lot of this is down to our scientific heritage and we may end up living off this capital and decline if we fail to invest in research. The other side of his lecture was on the simplicity and elegance of the standard model of the fundamental particles, as it is now conceived, and the details of the big bang scenario. He joked about an astrologer's claim that everything in the universe is connected, but pointed out that this is in fact the case, though possibly not in the way envisaged by the astrologer.