Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born July 15, 1943) is a Northern Irish astrophysicist best known for her discovery of pulsars, a type of neutron star that emits regular bursts of radiation. In 1967, while a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, she detected unusual signals in data from a radio telescope she helped build, leading to the identification of the first pulsar. Although the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle, her contribution has since been widely recognized by the scientific community.
Quotes
- 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 (...). Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everyone thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.
- 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.
- If we assume we've arrived: we stop searching, we stop developing.