Biggish stars end their lives with a catastrophic explosion
The material that's exploded goes off into space
and we're left with this shrunk core
now spinning quite rapidly
and that's basically how the pulsar comes into being
They swing a beam of radio waves around the sky
a bit like a lighthouse
and when that beam shines in your eyes, so to speak
or on a radio telescope
You pick up a pulse
So, it's going
pulse
[sound of pulsing]
Radio telescopes – this particular one
really looks like an agricultural frame
What you might grow peas up or something like that
But there's four acres of it
So that's about 57 tennis courts
So it's huge
Not visually attractive in any sense
no nice bowl shape thing the way some radio telescopes have
So it looked quite primitive
One of the things that a large radio telescope does
is pick up...
human-generated interference
And one of the things I had to do was to identify
what was interference and what was the quasars
as I was meant to be looking at
Just occasionally
there would be something that I couldn't recognise
and I'd record it with a question mark
And obviously at some level this lodged in the back of my mind
Because after it had appeared a few times
my brain said
You've seen something like this before... haven't you?
And I knew this was...
...distinctly unusual
I didn't know what it was
But I took the trouble to phone
Tony Hewish my supervisor
who was teaching in an undergraduate laboratory
in the University that afternoon
And after a few minutes, he came to the telephone
and I told him it was a
string of pulses one and a third seconds apart
And he said 'Hm!'
'That settles it!'
'It's man-made.'
And in one sense, he was right
because that's just the kind of
interference you might get from
somebody's electrical equipment in the next door lab
But what he hadn't folded in
was that this was keeping its place amongst the stars
Tony came out to the observatory the next day
at the appropriate time
and stood looking over my shoulder
And saw the pulses come in with his own eyes
He became more convinced then
So the next job was to see if another telescope with its own receiver
could pick up these signals
So we went and stood by the pen recorder for this other radio telescope
And nothing happened
It was a horrible moment
It didn't appear
And we'd walked away along this
long, long lab
and suddenly, there was a shriek from Robin, "Here it is!"
We came charging back up
there it was
We had miscalculated by five minutes
when that telescope would see it
If we'd miscalculated by 25 minutes
we'd have all gone home!
And the story would be different
Women were not expected to be anything
other than sex objects, wives, mothers, housewives
You weren't expected to have any brain
You weren't expected to have any career
Getting married was the goal
I was quite convinced I wasn't clever enough to be in Cambridge and that
they would throw me out at some stage
But my policy was to work as hard as I could
so that when they threw me out
I’d know I’d done my best
These days we know about impostor syndrome
We know about how young women are often treated
So...
We're wiser and older
But I think that was a...
I think that was a pretty neat ploy on my part
This was the first time
astrophysicists had won the Nobel Prize.
My contemporaries were probably more upset than I was
and one of them labelled it
the No-bell Prize
as opposed to Nobel Prize
But it was fine by me
and I was really rather proud that it was my stars that
had convinced the prize committee that
there was good physics in astrophysics
To a woman scientifically proven
to be the real deal
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
This Breakthrough Prize happened very recently
I got an email from a US physicist
a very famous US physicist Ed Witten
saying could we have a telephone call
and he told me I'd won this Prize
3 million US dollars
That Breakthrough Prize money
is now being administered by the Institute of Physics
I was keen that the money
should be used in a way to increase the diversity in physics
I think a very significant component in my discovering pulsars was the impostor syndrome
and if there had been more women around
I probably would not have suffered impostor syndrome
There'd have been somebody to talk to
I found the second pulsar
about a month later
Three weeks later
And that suggested that they were natural something
We didn't know what
But they're part of the universe
They're not little green men
It's not interference from the lab next door
It's not this problem
It's not that problem
It's a new kind of object
Which...
were totally unexpected
and totally unknown
And huge fun therefore!
[chuckle]