Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Astrophysicist HARDtalk

tickets is illegal in the UK. That is the summary of the

headlines. Now it is time for My guess today is a scientist of

the rare distinction. Jocelyn Bell Bunnell was a Queen -- key member

of the team which discovered pulsars, neutrons stars. She became

one of the world's most renowned astrophysicists. Remarkable not

just for the originality of a research, but also for her gender.

The rat her career she has placed a trail for women in a predominantly

male world. -- throughout. Why are there so few women at sides's top

Jocelyn Bell Bunnell, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you. Our want to

take you back to your student life, when you were studying. How were

unusual was it to be a Yousuf Raza Gilani who loved and excelled at

science? -- girl. It was certainly unusual to be a girl who was

interested in the physical sciences. They have always been more women in

Britain to ring the biological sciences. Even as a kid going into

secondary school, the assumption was that the girls would do

domestic science and the boys would do science. Was it difficult being

the only goal in some of your classroom situations? I have been

the only female or the most senior female for a lot of my life. Parts

of it had been tough and clearly it is a bit more lonely if you are the

only one. Did it ever reached a point where you thought yourself,

actually, I am not really enjoying this? There were times when it was

tough, undoubtedly. I knew I wanted to be an astronomer and the path I

was taking would make me an astronomer. So I gave it my best.

haven't had some extraordinary things about you. At one point you

said you have learned how to control your blushes because the

young men at Glasgow University were being so vociferous when you

were in class that you had to be able to control things like

blushing. If you blushed, they enjoyed it and made even more noise.

I discovered that one can control one's pleasures. I have lost it now,

but I know it can be done. Your commitment to astronomy, it must

have been quite profound. What was it about the study of the universe

and stars that 10 g one? It is big, it is beautiful, it is stirring

stuff. I fairly quickly realise that the physics I was learning at

school could be used to study stars and galaxies. What we haven't said

is that you actually went to a Quaker school end you, I think,

have retained a build bridges conviction throughout your life. I

want to talk about that early on. It strikes me that you're one of

the very few top scientists who has set in the HARDtalk Chair who has

managed to find our way of being comfortable both live cutting-edge

science and with a practising religious conviction. How have you

done it? It works well for me. Partly because Quakers do not have

a dogma, a creed, in advance. You are meant to work it out for

yourself. A bit like being a research scientist. Except that in

religion, there is the notion of a divine intervention, a design, but

in the end comes from God. Is that something that you have always

believed in? That is only in some religions. Tonight generalise.

is it not in your religion? It is not in mine. There is one other

thing I want to say. I think it is because I'm Quaker that I have come

through in spite of being female. Quaker women are listened to, the

way women in many other churches were not listened to. That gave me

an inner security, assurance, stubbornness. You mean they are

listened to by people outside the Quaker community? No are was

thinking more inside the church. Women other son to as much as men

are there some do. -- women are listened to it as much as men are

listened to. He went to Cambridge University to further your research

studies and you worked on a project which had its time it was taking

astronomy into new areas because you are developing a telescope the

like of which we had not quite seen before. Can you explain it to me?

The technique we were using was looking for the fluctuation in

brightness in the radio emissions from stars. That had not been done

before. In order to steady fluctuations, Q needed to collect a

lot of the radio waves. So we had this massive radio telescopes that

cover the area of 57 tennis courts. When I think of telescopes, I think

of May be great big dishes, but it wasn't like that? It was more like

an agricultural frame, it what you might grow something on. Wooden

posts and wires and the wires were the antennae. But no dishes.

here we are, we are in the 1960s, you are in your mid-20s, you are

working with his leading astrophysicist but you are in

control of the day-to-day charting of the results. What you find is

some extraordinary pulses coming up on your charts. Intermittent, but

when they come there is a search. What on earth did it means you at

the time? I knew it was peculiar. Sufficiently peculiar that I'm

anode -- notified my supervisor. He knew a lot more astrophysics then I

did. Sometime is under no -- sometimes it is an advantage not to

know much. He was immediately sure it was not astronomical. I, in my

ignorance, did not see why it was not astronomical and I already knew

that this thing went round the sky with the constellations. So we did

not see eye-to-eye at that point. One possibility that you always get

in your head was that it might be evidence of another life form

somewhere in a distant galaxy or something. That idea got scotched

very quickly. There were lots of reasons why it wasn't. The most

impinging of which was when I found a second similar source of pulses

in a totally different part of the galaxy. You do not have to lots of

little green men on opposite sides of the universe signalling to a

planet at the same time. It just does not add up. Not as far as we

know. Let's cut to the chase, what you and the research team

ultimately decided end proved beyond doubt was that way you have

here was the remnant of a star very far away. A star which died but had

left behind these incredibly dense, massive ding. Which is now known as

a poor start. A pulsar or a neutrons staff. Big stars, like the

once in the galaxy will end their life with an explosion. In the

explosion, the call will be compressed and goes down to being

about ten miles across, but Wayne 1,000, million, million, million

tonnes. It spins very rapidly and sweeps a bin around. Every time the

beam comes across you, you see a pulse. The discovery of this, I

think it was labelled by one siders as the most important astrological

discovery in the past 100 years. It tells people like you a lot about

the origins of the universe, it tells a lot about Einstein's

theories of gravity and relativity and whether they really work

throughout the universe. And also about Buchholz. All -- of all those

things listed, what do you think it tells us the most about? I do not

think it tells us about the origin of the universe, but it tells us a

lot about how stars behave and how they died. They tell us a lot about

how material behaves when you squash it into a ball ten miles

across. They are also very good clocks. When they start spinning,

they keep spinning. It then means we can check out Einstein's

theories. Did they always did? far, but the pulsar astronomers

have not done yet, but certainly Einstein was right to a remarkable

amount of accuracy. I mentioned at the very beginning day you are one

of the leading female scientists in your field. What many people always

associate with the stunning work that you and others did is that it

won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. Others got the prize, but you

did not. Correct. Does that rankle? No. Do you want to know why?

think I ought to know why. First of all it was the very first time that

a physics prize had gone to anything astronomical. There is no

astronomy Nobel Prize. It was an incredibly important precedent. And

I was incredibly proud that these pulsars were the thing that

convinced the physicists that there was good physics in astronomy. So

it opened a door which has been pushed on a good many times since.

It raised the profile of astronomy within the physics community.

that commentary is very selfless because you did not include any

consideration of your own role. Another leading astronomer and

astrophysicist, he seemed to think it was one of the great injustices

that the Nobel committee had inflicted upon you. I wonder

whether there was not a part of you that actually resented being

written out of that particular script? It was a little bit

difficult. At the time of the prize I had a small child about 18 months

old and was trying to keep working. It was proving very difficult. In

those days, mothers did not work. A bit of me said, yeah, men get

prizes and young women look after babies. Actually I think it was not

so much the fact that ours was a woman, it was the fact I was a

student. They just did not know I existed, let alone what gender I

was. I have discovered that even if you describe it as an injustice,

and you can do incredibly well out of not getting an a ute -- a Nobel

Prize. This is not just about gender issues, it is about the way

research is done. Let me quote to you something that the guy who did

get the price said: Suggesting that you, a research student, should

have gotten the prize was like suggesting somebody in the Crows

nest on a ship that is on a voyage of discovery who actually sees land

first should somehow be rewarded for that. He said, the question is,

who inspired the journey? There is a difference between skipper and

crew. Do you buy that analysis? think that that skipper knew they

were looking for new land. Housekeeper was not expecting to

find anything like this. The analogy breaks down a bit. What is

behind this is a different understanding about how science

works, how science operates. My image, and I think the image today,

is a group of people working together as a team. Somebody is the

lead person, somebody takes the praise if things go well, takes the

trouble is there is trouble, but there is a group of people working

as a team together and each contributing from their strengths.

The old model of science and the one that pertained won Nobel prizes

were set up was that there was a boss man and it was a man and under

this man were a whole load of very junior folk who were not expected

to think or contribute, they just did what the boss man told them to

Science is no longer that hierarchical. It may have been. I

would argue that his is not now. It has changed a lot. We will talk

about that more in a minute. I will come back to the discussion of

religion and science. He said that a poor start did not tell us

anything about the origin of the universe but how it worked. --

pulsar. We had Richard Dawkins not that long ago. I am sure you are

familiar with his work. In his book, he talked about evidence of

evolution which, in his phrase, reveals a universe without design.

Whether you believe that God created the world and the universe

or not, do you see our universe as having a design? Only the design

that nature, the laws of physics, have put on it. I do not see the

hand of God in the universe. what is your God all about? I start

with some of the -- negative points and moved on to positive points.

The God that I envisage, not true of all Quakers, was not the prime

creator. The God that I envisage is not in charge of the world. But I

do still believe that there is a God, and he works three people, in

films as the world through the way people behave and interact and

react. It is a court of creativity, of inspiration, rather than a

quarter of Prime creation. But the Let us go back to the research that

got to enable price. As soon as it was over, he went to get married.

And soon, you raise a child. Since, you said you worked part-time for

the next 18 years. Yes. You are the -- one of the most successful situs

in the land, and he went part-time. Looking back, does that seem like a

questionable decision? Not at the time. At that time, married women

were not expected to work, and mothers were not expect to work.

You hear people on the radio telling you that if mothers wept,

the children would be to link it. Male professors telling you that on

the radio. Absolute rubbish. But that was what believed. And if a

married woman worked, a man would not afford -- could not keep her.

You were looking at why they were not women at the top table in

science. You committed a lot of you like to that question, finding

answers. When we look at your own career curve, maybe your decisions

do not provide the model that you would like many young women to

adopt. You are failing to notice the immense effort it took for me

to keep working at all. It was very hairy, scary. If I had not had the

discovery of course us behind me, I would not be here today. There was

a time when... I was going to work. Regularly,... Since then, you have

blazed a trail of women in places women have not been before. You

were the first female at the head of the Institute of Physics. You

were then the head of the astronomical Society. Have you

faced hostility from many in your career? I have not faced real

hostility or discrimination, but there is a lot, still, of

unthinking us. This is in the UK. This program will go to many

countries like South-East Asia, where it is perfectly normal for

women to do physics, engineering, what have you. It is a cold Roar

thing. -- colt rule. Why is that. It is something to do with cultural

history. It may be something to do with defensiveness by the males. In

South-East Asia, the government has seen that they made all the

scientific and engineering talent they have. They make sure it is

perfectly OK for women to do science and engineering. And it

shows. It is not just the Higher Studies been the subject, it is

finding professional careers in it. One of the working groups who were

involved in, in Scotland, of all the females who studied science and

into professionals -- professions using what they had learnt. For men,

it is around a half. Had the EU fix that? You are saying, how do we

change society and culture? There are a number of ways you can do it.

Being a role model is an important one. You can do it through, for

instance, paying better, or alarming special recruitment to

counteract historical imbalances. There are many things he can do.

The most important one is to make sure the climate in an organisation

is open to women. Everything you talked about his cultural, and

social. Yes. What if, Larry Summers, expressed something at the time

this was hugely controversial. He said, that maybe biology was

involved, between men in women, there is a different availability

of aptitude at you high and when it comes to science. Do you accept

that as a biological possibility? There is no evidence for it. Look

again at South-East Asia. More than 50% of physics, engineering are

female. He is confusing nurture and nature. He is confusing the effects

of a culture, a sociology. He is looking at some biological studies.

I quote one more psychologist. He has written and what a lot of what

he calls, the extreme male brain. There is something about most bail

brings that is into system might have -- system might think then

female brains. Females system lies in a different way. The network

different league. It is less linear. Your message to young women around

the world is, do not believe that there is anything deterministic

about whether or you can make a career in science. There is nothing

stopping you. Yes. If you want to do it and you are good at it, you

can do it. Before we end, I want your thoughts on a huge scientific

issue. There is a scientific desire to find a fury of for everything. -

- fury. Trying to understand the origin of the universe. Will we get

to a point where we understand the science of everything? The

universe? History suggests not. Every time you find and also to a

question, you also find a lot more questions. It is diverging, not

converging. As we see these diverging ideas developed, we are

going to jettison what we think about the universe. When we get new

series coming in, the old theories are tactfully refrained. With Isaac

Newton and consign, Newton's staff is right in its context but

Einstein showed that this lovely horse and cart is much -- part of a

bigger picture. The horse and cart are valid in their peace. But there

is surrounding staff where things are slightly different. We do not

prove there is something wrong. We prove that it has limited