Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes
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I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases.
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There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they'd had more diversity, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
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The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.
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There are some countries where there is not an issue with women in physics. Malaysia, for example, has physics departments where 60 per cent of undergraduates are female, and France and Italy are strong, too. It is not about ability but more about what the culture says is appropriate.
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When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that.
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Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries - the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don't think those countries have better brains.
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Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve... it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project.
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My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.
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Solar storms cause power outages. They pose a hazard to satellites. They might interfere with your GPS or send your compass a couple of degrees off course. But I don't think solar storms are a life-threatening event.
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A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
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You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.
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I know from another pulsar astronomer who won the Nobel that you get no peace. You're asked about every subject under the sun. It quite wrecks your life.
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We didn't get television until quite late, the late fifties, but we had radio, and I can remember listening to the Korean War news on the radio with my family and sensing the anxiety of the adults although not understanding it myself, not understanding exactly what was going on.
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Women of my generation who've stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.
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When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
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Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
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My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.
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The Sun's magnetic field reverses every 11 years. There have been a quarter of a million reversals since our predecessor, Homo Habilis, emerged, and they haven't killed us yet.
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I'm the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.
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In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
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As observatory architect, my dad was partly concerned with the maintenance of them all. I used to go with him on site visits quite often, from age 7 or 8. I have memories of crawling through the rafters of the old building, trying to find where the leak in the roof was.
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I am very conscious that, having worked part time, having had a rather disrupted career, my research record is a good deal patchier than any man's of a comparable age.
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Once a star dies, it's gone forever. There are no new stars to take its place. Eventually, there will be no stars, and the universe will turn black. That really will be the end.
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If you'd got a very conservative Republican in power, they might not be happy about some of the scientific research going on, because it conflicts with their fundamental beliefs.