Tuned in…
Last week I was arrested in the middle of the kitchen by a radio interview with Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I had never heard of the astrophysicist till then, despite the fact that what was essentially her work won, in 1974, a share in the first Nobel Prize in Physics ever awarded for work in astronomy. The prize was awarded jointly to Antony Hewish, Jocelyn’s supervisor (she was working on her Ph.D. at the time of her discovery in 1967) from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and Sir Martin Ryle, also from Cambridge.
Having listened to the story of her discovery, it was easy to hear, and to understand, the indignation in the interviewer’s voice as he asked Jocelyn Burnell if she hadn’t resented bitterly the fact that she was not included in the award. Her response, in a soft Antrim accent, demonstrated a pair of feet as firmly planted on the ground as her eyes were drawn to the skies…
She pointed out that it was the first time a Nobel Prize had recognised astronomy as a branch of physics, and said that “politically” it was wise to give it to her supervisor, rather than herself, a lowly research student, as well as a woman. It was more important that astronomy was recognised, seemed to be her argument, than Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She then added, practically, that the campaign by people like Sir Fred Hoyle, the eminent British astronomer, to have her share in the award, did her career a lot of good anyway!
It was a fabulous piece of radio journalism. Jocelyn Bell’s story is truly fascinating, and she has the real teacher’s ability to make very complicated things seem very simple.
Her father was the architect for the Armagh Observatory, and Jocelyn spent a lot of time there as a child – the beginning of her interest in astronomy, she says. Amazingly, she failed her 11+ and was despatched to a Quaker girls’ boarding school in York, where she discovered her love of physics.
She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965, but described her choice of physics as isolating her from many of her fellow students. The women students seemed to resent her choice, she says, while the male students engaged in a ‘ritual’ of foot-stamping, whistling, and cat-calling everytime the lone female physics student entered the lecture hall – and this was in the ‘liberated’ 60s…!
At Cambridge, preparing for her Ph.D. dissertation, she helped, physically, to build a giant radio telescope that was, she explained, “about the length of 57 tennis courts”.
“It was a very useful exercise”, she added. “I’ve been quite handy with a screwdriver and other tools ever since.”
The real object of the exercise was to use a newly discovered technique called IPS – interplanetary scintillation (and don’t ask me what that means) – to study quasars, but Jocelyn, who had sole responsibility for operating the telescope and analyzing the data, under Antony Hewish’s supervision, began to detect a regular signal coming through that nobody could explain.
“It was more regular than the tick of any watch”, she explains now.
She had discovered pulsars.
Throughout all of the consequent fuss, including newspaper reporters who were delighted to find a woman scientist at the heart of a ‘Are we receiving signals from little green men?’ story, Jocelyn Bell kept her head, emerging from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in 1969.
She continued to keep it throughout the controversy surrounding her exclusion from the Nobel Prize in 1974, through the birth of a son, through the break-up of her marriage, and through an outstanding commitment to education (particularly through Open University), as well as to astrophysics.
Towards the end of the radio programme, the interviewer asked her if many scientists believe in God. “A good number”, she replied, “but you hear more about those that don’t…”
She went on to explain that she felt she was lucky to have been brought up in the Quaker faith because it taught its followers to ’search for the truth’.
It was a fabulous documentary. I was glad I picked it up on the radio…