Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, co-discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. She was credited with "one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century". The discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but despite the fact that she was the first to observe the pulsars, Bell was not one of the recipients of the prize.The paper announcing the discovery of pulsars had five authors. Bell's thesis supervisor Antony Hewish was listed first, Bell second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with the astronomer Martin Ryle. Many prominent astronomers criticised Bell's omission, including Sir Fred Hoyle. In 1977, Bell Burnell played down this controversy, saying, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them." The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its press release announcing the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, cited Ryle and Hewish for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish's decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.

Bell Burnell served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, as president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and as interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to give the whole of the £2.3 million prize money to help female, minority, and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers, the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics. The resulting bursary scheme is to be known as the "Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund". Wikipedia  

✵ 15. July 1943
Jocelyn Bell Burnell: 15   quotes 1   like

Famous Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

“Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

“I feel we are in that kind of phase.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way. I'm probably not one that can achieve this new thinking but somebody will and I feel at the moment we're kind of waiting for it to happen. A bit like a pregnant pause. A bit like what happens when there's a snowfall, first snowfall of the year, when everything goes quiet and kind of waits. I feel we are in that kind of phase.

“You can actually do extremely well out of not getting a Nobel prize,”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: You can actually do extremely well out of not getting a Nobel prize, and I have had so many prizes, and so many honours, and so many awards, that actually, I think I've had far more fun than if I'd got a Nobel Prize - which is a bit flash in the pan: You get it, you have a fun week, and it's all over, and nobody gives you anything else after that, cos they feel they can't match it.

“One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background. Science has been named, developed, interpreted by white males for decades and women view the conventional wisdom from a slightly different angle — and that sometimes means they can clearly point to flaws in the logic, gaps in the argument, they can give a different perspective of what science is.

“Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

“Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma. There's an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that's very like what goes on in "the scientific method." You have a model, of a star, its an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you're expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.

“By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes about science

“I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma. There's an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that's very like what goes on in "the scientific method." You have a model, of a star, its an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you're expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.

“Science is a quest for understanding.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: Science is a quest for understanding. A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe, or we are in danger of each believing, that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls. I think a search for understanding is much more serviceable to humankind, and is a sufficiently ambitious goal of itself.

“The girls got sent to the domestic science room and the boys to the science lab. ... I protested — unsuccessfully.”

Reflections on women in science – diversity and discomfort: Jocelyn Bell Burnell at TEDxStormont, 4 April 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp7amRdr30Y,

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes about space

“I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way.”

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way. I'm probably not one that can achieve this new thinking but somebody will and I feel at the moment we're kind of waiting for it to happen. A bit like a pregnant pause. A bit like what happens when there's a snowfall, first snowfall of the year, when everything goes quiet and kind of waits. I feel we are in that kind of phase.

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