Heroes of Irish Science - Jocelyn Bell-Burnell
The Irish Times today began a new series of articles on the Heroes of Irish Science. The first looks at the life and works of the Irish astronomer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, who discovered pulsar stars, and is written by Ronan McGreevy.
THE
ASTRONOMER Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is one of Ireland’s most accomplished
scientists. While still a research student she discovered pulsars and
went on to become a distinguished scientist who made important
astronomical discoveries.
She is a true hero of Irish science for her many accomplishments and
for her ongoing contribution to a better public understanding of
science. Her discovery of pulsars is one of the famous stories in
science and it is also one of the most infamous.
In 1967 Jocelyn
Bell was a 24-year-old PhD student from Belfast, reading radio astronomy
at Cambridge University and examining newly-discovered quasars
(quasi-stellar radio sources), incredibly bright and incredibly compact
structures of light and energy at the centre of galaxies. She spent
months reviewing print-outs from a radio telescope when she noticed
small rhythmic blips on the paper one night in July.
The blips
turned out to be signals from a radio source which had never been
conceived before, let alone discovered. At first it was called – half in
jest, half with a nod to the remote possibility that they might be
signals from intelligent alien life forms – Little Green Man 1 (LGM-1).
The signals turned out to be pulsars (pulsating radio stars). The announcement was made to an astonished scientific world in
Nature magazine in 1968. Six years later Prof Bell-Burnell (she
married fellow scientist Martin Burnell in 1968), was denied a Nobel
Prize for the discovery. Instead, her supervisor, Prof Antony Hewish,
became the first astronomer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics,
which he shared with Martin Ryle, the then Astronomer Royal and pioneer
of radio telescope technology.
It remains a
cause célèbre of modern science. Here was a young scientist and
a woman in a male-dominated profession, denied the ultimate prize in
science. Though many took up the cudgels on her behalf, Bell-Burnell has
always been admirably philosophical about it. Research students do not
usually win Nobel Prizes, however noteworthy their discoveries.
Hewish
himself described it as crediting the discovery of the New World to the
look-out who first spotted land on Christopher Columbus’s expedition,
though Bell-Burnell had a part in designing the experiment.
The
decision was not fair, she says, but a lot of things in life are not
fair and besides, she has had a successful career, Nobel Prize or
No-Bell Prize, as it was deemed at the time. “It is an awful waste of
time and energy to be grieving over something that you can’t do anything
about,” she says.
Bell-Burnell had already moved several times
after leaving Cambridge by the time the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1974.
After a spell at the University of Southampton, she joined the Mullard
Space Science Laboratory at University College London working on the
Ariel 5 satellite which was launched in 1974 to study X-ray astronomy. “I was very, very lucky. It (
Ariel 5 ) was hugely successful. I found myself wishing
somebody would invent a Lord’s Day observant satellite so we could get a
day off. It was phenomenally exciting.”
There have been many
compensations, not least a slew of honours, most notably when she was
made a Dame in 2008 for her work in science.
It was followed by
her becoming the first female president of the Institute of Physics,
which operates in the UK and Ireland. She has been a recipient of the
Oppenheimer Prize and the Michelson Medal and holds several honorary
doctorates.
She is also known for her championing of women in
science and for her Quaker faith, which remains unmoved by the appliance
of science. She has always been an advocate for the idea that science
and faith can, as she put it, sit “lightly with each other” and it is
part of the Quaker faith to believe that you can get closer to God by
observing his creation.
She is critical of the well-known atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins saying he has a “fundamentalist view” of the subject.
“He
believes science can prove anything. If it is not amenable to
scientific proof, it doesn’t exist. If you care for a young child, for
instance, is that science?”
Before Christmas she gave a lecture in
Trinity College Dublin about the former planet Pluto. By her admission
she was no expert on the subject of this cold and remote world when she
was asked to chair a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in
2006 at which Pluto was downgraded to a minor planet.
Several
hundred people turned up to hear her recount the often farcical
circumstances in which delegates made the decision on the last day of
the conference when many of the planetary scientists had gone home.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, she still believes it was the
right decision taken for the wrong reasons.
As perhaps the most
famous living Irish astronomer, Bell-Burnell has been invited to chair
several events at the Euroscience Open Forum 2012 meeting taking place
next July in Dublin. She will host discussions on exoplanets and black
holes, a subject very close to that of pulsars. She will also give a
keynote address on a topic yet to be decided.
Read the original article here (which includes a bried introduction to pulsars).
