In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3 million (£2.3 million) prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics.[12][13][14][15]
Bell Burnell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, to M. Allison and G. Philip Bell.[5][6][4] Their country home was called "Solitude" and she grew up there with her younger brother and two younger sisters.[17] Her father was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium,[18] and during her visits there, the staff encouraged her to pursue a career in astronomy.[19] She also enjoyed her father's books on astronomy.
She grew up in Lurgan and attended the Preparatory Department[a] of Lurgan College from 1948 to 1956.[5] At the time, boys could study technical subjects, but girls were expected to study subjects such as cooking and cross-stitching. Bell Burnell was able to study science only after her parents and others challenged the school's policies.[21][22]
She failed the eleven-plus exam and her parents sent her to The Mount School,[4] a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England, where she completed her secondary education in 1961.[17] There she was favourably impressed by her physics teacher, Mr. Tillott, and stated:
You do not have to learn lots and lots ... of facts; you just learn a few key things, and ... then you can apply and build and develop from those ... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was.[23]
She next joined the University of Glasgow, where in 1965 she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics), with honours, and then New Hall, Cambridge, where she gained a PhD in 1969.[4]
Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four three-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham.[24]
Career and research
Chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar, exhibited at Cambridge University LibraryComposite Optical/X-ray image of the Crab Nebula, showing synchrotron emission in the surrounding pulsar wind nebula, powered by injection of magnetic fields and particles from the central pulsarBell Burnell attends the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting at Pasadena, California, 5 January 1987
On 28 November 1967, while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell 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.[25] 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. This was later documented by the BBC Horizon series.[26]
In a 2020 lecture at Harvard, she related how the media was covering the discovery of pulsars, with interviews taking a standard "disgusting" format: Hewish would be asked on the astrophysics, and she would be the "human interest" part, asked about vital statistics, how many boyfriends she had, what colour is her hair, and asked to undo some buttons for the photographs.[27] The Daily Telegraph science reporter shortened "pulsating radio source" to pulsar.[27]
In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth three million dollars (£2.3 million), for her discovery of radio pulsars.[37] The Special Prize, in contrast to the regular annual prize, is not restricted to recent discoveries.[38] She donated all of the money "to fund women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers",[39] the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics.[13]
Issued in July 2022, Ulster Bank's new science-themed polymer £50 banknote prominently features Bell Burnell alongside other women, including those working in NI's life sciences industry.[40] She said, "I'm passionate about encouraging more women to pursue scientific careers and I think it's something that is very important for Northern Ireland. There is a burgeoning scientific sector here. More women pursuing careers in science will support that ongoing growth."[6]
Nobel Prize controversy
Controversially, Bell did not receive recognition in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years[8] and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 96 feet (29 m) of paper data per night. Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made. She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Ryle to which she was not invited.[41][22]
The paper announcing the discovery of pulsars had five authors. Bell's thesis supervisor Antony Hewish[2][3] was listed first, Bell second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with the astronomer Martin Ryle. At the time fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle criticised Bell's omission.[42][43][44] In 1977, Bell Burnell commented:
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.[45]
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its press release announcing the prize,[46] cited Ryle and Hewish for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis technique and Hewish's decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.
Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, characterized Bell Burnell's contributions as follows:
She helped build the array she used to make the observation. She is the one who noticed it. She is the one who argued it's a real signal. When a graduate student takes that kind of lead in her project, it's hard to play it down.[13]
In later years, she opined that "the fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize."[22] The decision continues to be debated to this day.
Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018).[64] She donated the three million dollars of the Breakthrough Prize to the Bell Burnell Scholarship Fund to promote greater diversity within the field of Physics.
In February 2013, she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.[71]
She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2014.[72]
In February 2014, she was elected President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the first woman to hold that office. She held the position from April 2014 to April 2018 when she was succeeded by Dame Anne Glover.[73]
Bell Burnell is house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena, County Antrim. She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in professional and academic posts in the fields of physics and astronomy.[83][84]
Quaker activities and beliefs
From her school days, she has been an active Quaker and served as Clerk to the sessions of Britain Yearly Meeting in 1995, 1996 and 1997. Bell Burnell also served as Clerk of the Central Executive Committee of Friends World Committee for Consultation from 2008 to 2012. She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for Life,[85] at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen on 1 August 1989, and was the plenary speaker at the US Friends General Conference Gathering in 2000.[86] She spoke of her personal religious history and beliefs in an interview with Joan Bakewell in 2006.[87]
Bell Burnell served on the Quaker Peace and Social WitnessTestimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit in February 2007.[88] In 2013, she gave a James Backhouse Lecture which was published in a book entitled A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious?, in which Burnell reflects about how cosmological knowledge can be related to what the Bible, Quakerism or Christian faith states.[89]
Marriage
In 1968, between the discovery of the second and third pulsar, Bell became engaged to Martin Burnell and they married soon after; the couple divorced in 1993 after separating in 1989. In a 2021 online lecture at the University of Bedfordshire, Bell Burnell reflected on her first experience returning to the observatory wearing an engagement ring. Though she was proud of her ring and wanted to share the good news with her colleagues, she instead received criticism as, at the time, it was shameful for women to work as it appeared that their partners were incapable of providing for the family.[90]
Her husband was a local government officer, and his career took them to various parts of Britain. She worked part-time for many years while raising their son, Gavin Burnell, who is a member of the condensed matter physics group at the University of Leeds.[91]
^The Preparatory Department of Lurgan College closed in 2004,[20] the college becoming a selective grammar school for ages 14–19.
^"... upon entering the faculty, each student was issued a set of tools: a pair of pliers, a pair of long-nose pliers, a wire cutter, and a screwdriver...", said during a public lecture in Montreal during the 40 Years of Pulsars conference, 14 August 2007
^Interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones.[citation needed]
"German Astronomical Society 2021 Awards". German Astronomical Society/Astronomische Gesellschaft. 26 August 2021. Retrieved 14 September 2021. With the highest award for astronomical research in Germany, the Astronomical Society honours Professor Bell Burnell as an eminent scientist whose work has not only created the field of pulsar astronomy - with diverse applications in a wide range of fundamental physics and astrophysics - but has had a great impact on the field of astrophysics as a whole.
"Hawking receives Einstein Award". Physics Today. 31 (4): 68. April 1978. Bibcode:1978PhT....31d..68.. doi:10.1063/1.2995004. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, researcher on the staff of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College London, is the recipient of the 1978 J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.
"Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Jocelyn Bell Burnell for Discovery of Pulsars" (Press release). Breakthrough Prize. 6 September 2018. A Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics can be awarded by the Selection Committee at any time, and in addition to the regular Breakthrough Prize awarded through the ordinary annual nomination process. Unlike the annual Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Special Prize is not limited to recent discoveries.
Parachini, Jodie (2021). Listening to the Stars: Jocelyn Bell Burnell Discovers Pulsars. Illustrated by Alexandra Badiu. Chicago: Albert Whitman & Company. ISBN978-0-8075-4563-8.
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