
British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3M award for pulsar work - sohkamyung
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/06/jocelyn-bell-burnell-british-astrophysicist-overlooked-by-nobels-3m-award-pulsars
======
lostlogin
In the 70’s she said, “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.”
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell)

The last paragraph of the article seems to give a brief insight into her
position now on why she was excluded.

“The money will be handed to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships
for people underrepresented in physics. “A lot of the pulsar story happened
because I was a minority person and a PhD student,” she said. “Increasing the
diversity in physics could lead to all sorts of good things”

She slighly expands on that in the BBC coverage.

“The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was
because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas
required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more
than 50 years ago.

"I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at
Cambridge. I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I
think everybody else around me was southern English," she said.

"So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and
that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come
from left field."”

[https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science-
environment-45425872)

Giving all the winnings to the cause is impressive.

~~~
headmelted
I see her point, but I disagree and think that given her contributions, she
should at _least_ have shared the award.

Also, she's from Norn Iron which I didn't realize and am really rather pleased
to see.

Lastly, I'd love to get Hewish's take on this:

"The discovery was so dramatic it was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974. But
while Hewish was named as a winner, Bell Burnell was not."

What a mensch. This fine fellow sounds like a real David Drumlin.

~~~
ajross
It's not Hewish's fault. The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of
pulsars but for the aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it
possible. He didn't do the observation, but he did invent the telescope.

The guys's a legitimate Nobel winner on his own, and let's not tar his name
with the Nobel committee's mistake in skipping over Bell.

~~~
privong
> The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of pulsars but for the
> aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it possible.

Ryle's participation in the prize was for aperture synthesis interferometry
while Hewish's was for the discovery of pulsars. From [0]:

> The Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 was awarded jointly to Sir Martin Ryle and
> Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for
> his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis
> technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars."

Aperture synthesis is useful for achieving higher angular resolutions than
would otherwise be possible. But pulsars are unresolved and so angular
resolution isn't as important for their study (the localization of pulsars can
be done very precisely from the modeling of the arrival times of individual
pulses). Collecting area (overall sensitivity of the telescope) is the driving
consideration for pulsar science.

[0]
[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1974/summary/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1974/summary/)

~~~
headmelted
I'll not pretend to be schooled on this topic, so I'm happy to defer to you
folks on this.

In any case, it would be worth hearing from Anthony Hewish on this matter as
I'm inclined to find Sir Fred Hoyle's criticism of the decision quite damning
for Hewish.

------
xefer
The signal from the first pulsar she discovered was later famously plotted as
a stacked graph and ultimately became the cover to Joy Division's "Unknown
Pleasures"

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-
culture-p...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-
pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Which leads to this piece of pure pop culture hilarity:
[https://laughingsquid.com/what-is-this-unknown-pleasure-a-
jo...](https://laughingsquid.com/what-is-this-unknown-pleasure-a-joy-division-
album-t-shirt-for-the-tumblr-generation/)

(t-shirt with said graph and underneath it "What is this? I've seen it on
tumblr")

~~~
taejo
"Oh cool, they made an album cover from that t-shirt."

------
keithpeter
Quote from OA

 _" Having also ruled out broadcasts from “little green men”, Bell Burnell
gathered more observations until eventually she found three more repeating
pulses of radio waves emanating from different spots in the galaxy."_

I remember reading somewhere that Dr Bell was labelling the traces on the pen-
chart recording that showed the signal 'lgm'.

Really good outcome.

~~~
sandworm101
>> Really good outcome.

The best outcome would have been the confirmation of real lgm. That news will
blow away everything else every done in astronomy and physics combined. Every
time a new instrument comes online (LIGO) I cross my fingers, and then am
disappointed as the known universe becomes a little more empty.

------
billfruit
I often wonder why Oliver Heaviside, John Von Neumann and Claude Shannon were
not awarded the Physics Nobel.

~~~
mongol
For what discovery do you think they should be rewarded?

~~~
GlenTheMachine
Heaviside and von Neumann are probably not eligible. There's no Nobel Prize in
math, which more or less rules out von Neumann. Heaviside developed a lot of
tools still used in electrical engineering, but there isn't a Nobel Prize in
that either. And Heaviside's work was notorious for its lack of rigor, which
caused him to lose out on a lot of recognition.

But Shannon... information theory is an Important Tool in physics. It led
Stephen Hawking to predict Hawking Radiation, which was important for
understanding black holes. And it has a lot of other uses in physics as well.
He'd be eligible, I think. But it's still a marginal case; information theory,
itself, isn't physics. It's still math.

~~~
BeetleB
>Heaviside developed a lot of tools still used in electrical engineering, but
there isn't a Nobel Prize in that either.

For good or for bad, electrical engineering work has won Nobel prizes:
Transistors, integrated circuits, etc. These were inventions and did not
provide insights into physics.

~~~
GlenTheMachine
That's true, and a good point.

------
jdnier
Don't miss her first-hand account of her discovery (from 2009):
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/25/astrono...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/25/astronomy-
revolution)

------
sohkamyung
The BBC Archive on Twitter has a short clip of an interview with her after the
pulsar discovery from 1971 [1]

[1]
[https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1037634162138800134](https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1037634162138800134)

~~~
hi41
I love the way she speaks in full sentences. I find sentences the says to be
shorter. We sometimes shout out a short word.

------
wglb
My favorite line from the article: "If you don’t get a Nobel prize you get
everything that moves."

~~~
kowdermeister
And it gets better:

 _... Almost every year there’s been some sort of party because I’ve got
another award. That’s much more fun.”_

So any idea how not to win the Nobel prize? :)

~~~
ISL
Do Nobel-caliber work, and die before the award is given.

There have been so many great potential laureates who have gone unrecognized
by society at large because entropy caught up to them before the Nobel
committee got around to them.

Those who immediately come to mind: Debbie Jin and Ron Drever.

~~~
dnautics
Rosalind Franklin is a huge one. Everyone thinks she missed out because she
was a woman, which might have been the case, but we'll never know.

~~~
stan_rogers
She was deceased by the time the Nobel was awarded. (She died of cancer in
'58; the Nobel was in '62.) That's not to say that she wouldn't have lost out
on the three-recipients rule being female, but being dead is an automatic
disqualification.

~~~
dnautics
That was my point.

------
timthorn
And gives it away: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
environment-45425872](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45425872)

------
8bitsrule
"Bell Burnell phoned her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish. He said, ‘That settles
it, it’s manmade, it’s artificial radio interference.’"

Justice comes creeping around, at last. Glad she's alive to enjoy it.

(Recently I read somewhere that justice may be on its way for Henrietta
Leavitt ... for discovering, in the early 1900s, a way to measure the distance
to stars.)

