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Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Radio astronomer; discoverer of pulsars

United Kingdom · b. 1943

Astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who identified the first radio pulsars in 1967 as a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. She received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 and the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 2021.

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What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?

The next generation of telescopes will see millions of events per night with computers that sift through huge amounts of data. If we had had access to a computer, we would never have programmed it to look for something so unexpected. How do you pick up the things you don't know exist, the things you can't tell it to look for? My project was to study quasars, and then we accidentally stumble over these things called pulsars. They were totally unexpected, totally unknown – and it's been huge fun.

Recorded Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020 source

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