Brian Cox once toured as a keyboardist in major rock and pop bands. Now he’s a particle physicist on a new world tour with a dazzling show he designed in an era of science disinformation and denial.

A crisis more than a century ago involved U.S. aims to assert military supremacy, a hard-partying dictator and frictions among the great powers. By Simon Romero Serhii Tyschenko, a Ukrainian combat ...