Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Mentors, Pulsars & Prizes ​(#214)

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made an astounding discovery. On 28 November 1967, she detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. 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.

But as a young woman in science, her role was overlooked. Today's discussion is with one of the foremost astronomers of our time in a deep and revealing interview that shares a more personal side of her than ever before. In addition to describing her experimental research, we describe the surprising initial reaction to what was initially thought to be aliens, or Little Green Men.

Since then we reveal what we've learned about fascinating pulsars as well as what that may reveal about life in the universe. We also chat about her religion (Quaker) and mine (Jewish) and how her view of God has evolved. We discuss her book "A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist also be Religious? ", the Multiverse and Quakers: influence of mentors like Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel Prize and answer audience questions.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the £2.3 million prize money to establish the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, to help female, minority and refugee students become physics researchers. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics.

Bell on God "Recognising that there was not going to be any proof of the existence of God, I decided many years ago to adopt as a ‘working hypothesis’ the assumption that there was a God, a God that I will describe below, and to see how I got on with this picture of God. Perhaps evidence would accumulate that would lead me to decide that the hypothesis was wrong, that there was no God, or that God was very different from what I had imagined. Or perhaps evidence would accumulate that made it unquestionably clear that there was a God, maybe even evidence that God was much as I had envisaged."

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• Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating
• Edited by Stuart Volkow
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