I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don't think it's fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.
What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Question
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Money & investment
Question
What is the thing you are best at that nobody watching can see?
Craft & work
Question
What are you most proud of?
Identity & self
Question
How does a new work begin for you?
Craft & work
Question
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Daily life
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.
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020 source ↗
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Serena Williams
United States professional tennis player, 1995–2022
Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001
If I had to make the welfare decision again tomorrow, I’d sign it again tomorrow. We had a 60 percent reduction in the welfare rolls. We had an enormous percentage of poor people move into the workforce, start middle-class lifestyles, and when we had a brief tech recession of six months in 2001, after I left office, people who had moved from welfare to work were less likely to be laid off than the general working population. So I would do it again.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Director-General of the World Trade Organization from 2021; Finance Minister of Nigeria, 2003–2006 and 2011–2015
What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV/AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters. While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. This is the Africa of opportunity. This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
Recorded
His letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in the 1993 annual report, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., February 1994
source ↗
More from Jocelyn Bell Burnell
View profile →My contemporaries were more upset about the Nobel than I was not to be recognised. One of them labelled it the 'No-Bell' prize! But it was fine by me. There's no Nobel Prize in astronomy and I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
Yes, in 2018, I was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery. I was a bit dumbstruck, never expecting that kind of thing to happen. I was keen that the money should be used well and the best way to do that seemed to be to encourage a more diverse research student population from under-represented groups.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
I was very, very thorough, making sure I really understood how that telescope worked, and that it was working properly. I was quite convinced that I wasn't clever enough to be in Cambridge and would be thrown out at some stage. My policy was to work as hard as I could so that I'd know I'd done my best. We now label this as impostor syndrome, but we didn't recognise, and certainly didn't name it, back then.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
From one particular piece of the sky an unclassifiable signal sometimes recurred and my brain started to say: “You’ve seen something like this before, haven’t you? You’ve seen something like this before from this bit of the sky , haven’t you?” I got out previous recordings from that bit of sky. It often wasn’t there, but when it was, it was keeping its place amongst the stars.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
Occasionally there would be something I didn’t recognise and I’d record it with a question mark or, as a joke, LGM for Little Green Men. It was easier than saying “you know that funny pulsing source at right ascension 1919, declination plus 20”. So, it became LGM.
Recorded
Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020
source ↗
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