Words matter. These are the best Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I positively encourage time abroad to anybody. It’s worth taking the time to suss out which countries in the world are well funded for your subject and look for opportunities there.
In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.
You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.
Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries – the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don’t think those countries have better brains.
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, ‘There goes some of the primordial universe.’
Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve… it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project.
One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I’m sure some people think it was a flash in the pan.
I didn’t always have research jobs.
I think a spell abroad for anybody is incredibly useful. It gives you a great sense of perspective, and you see other ways of doing things.
If you’d got a very conservative Republican in power, they might not be happy about some of the scientific research going on, because it conflicts with their fundamental beliefs.
The universe is very big – there’s about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I’m pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don’t believe we’re alone.
When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.
Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.
Throughout my working life, I’ve been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.
If it wasn’t for the stars, we would not be here.
Science is a quest for understanding.
I’m the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.
I know from another pulsar astronomer who won the Nobel that you get no peace. You’re asked about every subject under the sun. It quite wrecks your life.
Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein’s theory of relativity – so far, it’s holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I’ll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.
Once a star dies, it’s gone forever. There are no new stars to take its place. Eventually, there will be no stars, and the universe will turn black. That really will be the end.
I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I’ve won countless other awards, including ‘Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.’
It’s now widely recognised that a diverse research group is usually stronger, more creative, and more robust and flexible. Such a group usually copes better in a downturn.
When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn’t too happy with that.
People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.
We didn’t get television until quite late, the late fifties, but we had radio, and I can remember listening to the Korean War news on the radio with my family and sensing the anxiety of the adults although not understanding it myself, not understanding exactly what was going on.
I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases.
If you look at other countries, you’ll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It’s something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what’s appropriate for each of the two sexes.
