Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Born	Susan Jocelyn Bell (1943-07-15) 15 July 1943 Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Nationality	Northern Irish
Fields	Astrophysics
Institutions	University of Cambridge University of Glasgow Open University University of Oxford
Alma mater	University of Glasgow (BSc) New Hall, Cambridge (PhD)
Thesis	The Measurement of radio source diameters using a diffraction method (1968)
Doctoral advisor	Antony Hewish
Known for	Discovering the first four pulsars
Influences	Fred Hoyle Frontiers of Astronomy (1955) Mr Tillott (her school physics teacher)
Notable awards	The Herschel Medal (1989), Fellow of the Royal Society (March 2003), Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2007)
Website
www.physics.ox.ac.uk/astro/people/SJocelynBellBurnell.htm

Dame (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars while under her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell was left out, because at that time, only the "senior men" would receive credit . Bell Burnell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and was interim president following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. She was succeeded in October 2011 by Sir Peter Knight.

The paper announcing the discovery of pulsars had five authors. Hewish's name was listed first, Bell's second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Martin Ryle, without the inclusion of Bell as a co-recipient. Many prominent astronomers expressed outrage at this omission, including Sir Fred Hoyle. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in their 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. Dr. Iosif Shklovsky, recipient of the 1972 Bruce Medal, had sought out Bell at the 1970 International Astronomical Union's General Assembly, to tell her: "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."

Background and family life

Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where her father was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium. She was encouraged to read and drawn to books on astronomy. She lived in Lurgan as a child and attended Lurgan College where she was one of the first girls there who was permitted to study science. Previously, the girls' curriculum had included such subjects as cross-stitching and cooking.

At age eleven, she failed the 11+ exam and her parents sent her to the Mount School, York, a Quaker girls' boarding school. There she was impressed by a physics teacher, Mr. Tillott, who taught her:

You don't have to learn lots and lots ... of facts; you just learn a few key things, and ... then you can apply and build and develop from those ... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was.^{[citation needed]}

Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four 3-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham, in which her career and contributions to astronomy were explored.

Academic career

Composite Optical/X-ray image of the Crab Nebula, showing synchrotron emission in the surrounding pulsar wind nebula, powered by injection of magnetic fields and particles from the central pulsar.

She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics) in 1965, and obtained her Ph.D. degree from New Hall (since renamed Murray Edwards College) of the University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered (interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones). In July 1967, she detected a bit of "scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. Ms. Bell found that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse per second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

After finishing her Ph.D., Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton (1968–73), University College London (1974–82), and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (1982–91). In addition, from 1973 to 1987, Bell Burnell was also a tutor, consultant, examiner, and lecturer for the Open University.

In 1991, she was appointed as a Professor of Physics at the Open University, a position that she held for ten years. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States. Before retiring, she was Dean of Science at the University of Bath (2001-04), and she was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. She served two years as the President of the Institute of Physics, her term ended in October 2010.

Non-academic life

Bell is the house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena. She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in professional and academic posts in the fields of physics and astronomy.

Quaker activities and beliefs

From her school days, she has been an active Quaker and served as Clerk to the sessions of Britain Yearly Meeting in 1995, 1996 and 1997. She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for life, at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen on 1 August 1989, and was the plenary speaker at the U.S. Friends General Conference Gathering in 2000.

She revealed her personal religious history and beliefs in an interview with Joan Bakewell in 2006. She served on the Quaker Peace and Social Witness Testimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit in February 2007.

Nobel Prize

She did not share in the Nobel Prize, even though it was she, having helped build the four-acre radio telescope over two years, who initially recorded and then noticed the anomaly, reviewing 96 feet of paper data per night, and, as she confirmed in the Beautiful Minds programme, had to be persistent in recording and reporting it in the face of scorn from Hewish, who was initially insistent the anomaly was due to interference and man-made. She referred in the programme to meetings held by Hewish and Ryle which she should have been invited to, but was not. After Ryle and Hewish had concocted a "little green man" intelligent life theory to explain the initial single pulse, further persistent recording and study of the data on Bell Burnell's own initiative revealed the presence of other similar pulses, finally leading to the explanation of them as pulsars.

Awards

Although she didn't share the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics with Hewish for her discovery, she has been honoured by many other organisations:

• The Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia (1973, jointly with Dr. Hewish).
• J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize from the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami (1978).^{[citation needed]}
• Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1987).
• Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1989).^{[citation needed]}
• Jansky Lectureship before the National Radio Astronomy Observatory(1995).
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Astronomy (1999)
• Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society (2000).
• Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (March 2003).
• Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to Astronomy (2007)
• The Grote Reber Medal at the General Assembly of the International Radio Science Union in Istanbul (19 August, 2011)

She has also been awarded numerous honorary degrees, including:

• Doctor of Science: Heriot-Watt University (1993), University of Warwick (1995), University of Newcastle (1995), University of Cambridge (1996), University of Glasgow (1997), University of Sussex (1997), University of St Andrews (1999), University of London (1999), Haverford College (2000), University of Leeds (2000), Williams College (2000), University of Portsmouth (2002), Queen's University, Belfast (2002), University of Edinburgh (2003), University of Keele (2005), "debretts"/> Harvard University (2007), Durham University (2007), University of Michigan (2008), University of Southampton (2008), Trinity College, Dublin (2008).
• Doctor of the University: University of York (1994).

Honours

In 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In June 2007 she was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Minds Documentary

In the Beautiful Minds documentary she talks about how in science, "nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally" and that "sometimes you have to abandon the picture". She demonstrates this with planetary orbits. Kepler recognised that orbits were elliptical, not circles on circles on circles and he made things simple again. She proposes that "our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier" and the documentary ends with her telling us that we are all waiting for a new picture, "we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way", she says. The documentary also looks at her schooling, the sexism and alienation she faced in a male-dominated field as an undergraduate, and also how she built and operated the radio telescope which she used to discover the pulsars. By the end of her PhD she could swing a sledgehammer. During the documentary she also talks about how being a Quaker is an important part of her life and how Quaker practice is similar to the scientific method. "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, it's 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."

Selected works

Books

• Burnell, S. Jocelyn (1989). Broken for Life. London: Quaker Home Service. pp. 58pp. ISBN 0-85245-222-5.  (Swarthmore Lecture)
• Riordan, Maurice; Burnell, S. Jocelyn (October 27, 2008). Dark Matter: Poems of Space. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. ISBN 978-1903080108. 

External links

Video

• Freeview video 'Tick, Tick, Pulsating Star: How I Wonder What You Are?' A Royal Institution Discourse by the Vega Science Trust (accessed 24 December 2007).
• Four video clips in which Bell Burnell gives a brief answer to the following questions: Having made a monumental discovery in science, how does that affect one's later career? What was the process for discovering pulsars? Were you looking for them based on a theory, or were you trying to clarify a phenomenon? Where are your research interests focussed at the moment?What future discoveries do you expect in Astronomy? (BBC/Open University Masters of Science website) (accessed 24 December 2007).

Audio

• Counterbalance Library: Bell Burnell talk “ Science and the Spiritual Quest” (24 Minutes) (Accessed 7 April 2010).
• University of Manchester - Jodcast Interview with Jocelyn Bell-Burnell
• Life Scientific 3 Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell (BBC IPlayer)

Text

• Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics: Burnell article. Procided by University of California at Los Angeles.
• Ferdinand V. Coroniti and Gary A. Williams (2006), "Jocelyn Bell Burnell" in Out of the Shadows: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press.
• Catalogue entry of Royal Society citation (accessed 24 December 2007).
• Gale - Free Resources: Article on Bell Burnell from Encyclopedia of World Biography 1998. (Accessed 24 December 2007).
• UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering Technology biographical webpage. (Accessed 24 December 2007).
• Biographical article, indicating Bell Burnell's beliefs and personal life, from California State Polytechnic University NOVA project. (Accessed 24 December 2007).
• Nicholas Wade and William Broad. Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983, pp. 143–151.
• Women in Science
• Irishwoman who discovered the 'lighthouses of the universe' Irish Times profile.

• "Northern Star" (PDF). Programme information (BBC Northern Ireland). 13 June 2007. pp. 7–8. Retrieved 2007-07-05.  (TV Documentary on Jocelyn Bell Burnell's life) (Not accessible online 24 December 2007).

Transcripts

• - An after-dinner speech by Jocelyn Bell Burnell on her life and the discovery of pulsars (accessed 24 December 2007).
• Transcript of interview by Joan Bakewell for the BBC Radio 3 series "Belief" (2 January 2006) (accessed 24 December 2007).