The Pulsar suPersTar
Right: Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Left: Emissions in the Crab Nebula powered from the central pulsar. NASA/ESA
seán Duke talked to one of the super-stars of Irish science
I
reland has just one Noble Laureate in science – the Waterford-born ‘atomsplitter’ Ernest Walton. However, many scientists believe there should be two. The other being Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the still working, Belfast-born 67-year old, who discovered pulsars – a new family of incredibly compact, tiny stars – back in 1968. At the time she made the discovery, Jocelyn was a 24-year old post-graduate student. She was also a woman. Those things still mattered in science in the 1960s, and might have helped explain why the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded for the pulsar discovery, went to Jocelyn’s male supervisor, Antony Hewish and his senior colleague Martin Ryle. Many astronomers are still unhappy about this decision and have openly suggested that Jocelyn should, at the very least, been a co-recipient of the Prize. That the two prize winners never felt the need to recognise Jocelyn’s work, is a scientific scandal.
Obstacles
It was far from certain that Jocelyn would attain the heights she has attained in science, and she had to overcome many
obstacles in her path. She was born in Belfast, but spent most of her first 13 years in Lurgan. She failed the ‘11 plus’ exam, the test that children take in Britain and Northern Ireland before entering secondary school. This exam is crucial as it usually determines whether a child is admitted to a ‘grammar school’ where the focus is on getting students to university. Her failure at the 11 plus wasn’t fatal, as she had been attending the Grammar School in Lurgan, and the school agreed to keep her on for a few years before she went off to a boarding school in England. However, she did admit much later that the failure ‘shook her’, and she didn’t chose to mention it until she attained the status of Professor. Looking back today, Jocelyn believes that the 11 plus curriculum at the time didn’t suit her, as she said there wasn’t any science in it. Her scientific ability was certainly obvious when she came top of her class in her first term in secondary school at Lurgan Grammar. However, before that, there was another hurdle to cross. That came when the girls and boys were segregated into two groups in her first year of secondary school. Jocelyn thought that the separation might have
‘something to do with sport’, but was horrified when she realised that the boys were being brought to the science lab, while the girls were being packed off to learn about domestic science. It was the 1950s and girls in Lurgan, and all over Ireland, north and south, weren’t given any encouragement to do science. Jocelyn’s parents decided to ‘kick up a fuss’ and, as a result she was permitted to join the boys doing science, along with the daughter of a local doctor, and one other girl. It was a close call, and Ireland almost lost perhaps its most accomplished ever female scientist before she even had a chance to show what she could do. She finished out her two remaining years in Lurgan Grammar and then it was off to England. Jocelyn’s family were Quakers, and there was a family tradition of sending the children to Quaker schools in England. Jocelyn attended Mount School, in York. She recalls that it was good to get away from home, though traumatic to begin with. In England, in the fifties, girls were not discouraged from doing science, so it was a different atmosphere to Ireland. Jocelyn did very well in her studies, despite what she recalls as a mixed standard of science teaching. She made it through the roller-coaster of her primary and secondary school education to get accepted into Glasgow University to study science. There she did well enough to be accepted to do a PhD in the University of Cambridge, a truly world-class university, choc-a-block with Nobel prize winning scientists, then and now. She began her PhD in 1965, working under the supervision of the aforementioned Hewish. The aim of the research project she was involved with was to find quasars. Jocelyn describes quasars as being “big, big things like galaxies, but they are incredibly bright and they send out a lot of radio waves”. The idea was to search for quasars by looking at natural sources of radio waves in the cosmos using a telescope array. An array is a group of linked telescopes, and a special array was constructed for the project at a fouracre site at the Mullard Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge. Jocelyn got stuck into the nitty-gritty of getting the project up and running, and spent
sCIeNCe sPIN Issue 47 Page 8