| Jocelyn Bell Burnell | |
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell (on the right)
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| Born | Susan Jocelyn Bell 15 July 1943 Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK |
| Nationality | British[1][2] |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Alma mater | Glasgow (BSc), Cambridge (PhD) |
| 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 | Fellow of the Royal Society (March 2003) |
Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born 15 July 1943), known as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, is a British[1][2] astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. She was 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 had five authors, Hewish's name being listed first, Bell's second. Dr. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Dr. Martin Ryle, without the inclusion of Bell as a co-recipient, which was controversial, and was roundly condemned by Hewish's fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.[3] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in their press release announcing the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics,[4] 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."[5]
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Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her father was an architect at the Armagh Planetarium,[6] she was encouraged to read. She was especially drawn to books on astronomy. She attended Lurgan College and lived in Lurgan as a child. She was one of the first girls at this college 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.[7] 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.
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.
She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965, and completed her Ph.D. 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[8] 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 degree, 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.[9]
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),[10] 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.[11] She served two years as the President of the Institute of Physics, her term ended in October 2010.[12]
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.[13]
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,[14] 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.[15] She served on the Quaker Peace and Social Witness Testimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit in February 2007.[16] She was appointed Clerk of the Central Executive Committee of Friends World Committee for Consultation for 2008–12, in August 2007.
She did not share in the Nobel Prize, despite the fact that it was she, having helped build[17] 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.[18][19][20]
Although she didn't share the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics with Hewish for her discovery, she has been honoured by many other organisations:
She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, for instance:
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).[29]
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, 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."[30]
Bell married Martin Burnell in 1968 (divorced, 1993); they have one son, Gavin Burnell (born 1973), who is also a physicist,[31] and two grandchildren.
Books
Scientific papers
For additional titles See Reference[9]
There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, 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. Finally, I am not myself upset about it -- after all, I am in good company, am I not!