Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I'm sure some people think it was a flash in the pan.
-
Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.
-
There is stardust in your veins. We are literally, ultimately children of the stars.
-
When I got engaged to be married, it was assumed that I would quit science and be a housewife. It was considered shameful if a married woman had to work - it implied that her husband couldn't earn enough to keep her.
-
People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.
-
I think a spell abroad for anybody is incredibly useful. It gives you a great sense of perspective, and you see other ways of doing things.
-
My father was an architect.
-
In the field of astronomy in the mid-'60s, quasars were very sexy objects - gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope.
-
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
-
Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.
-
I'm one of the few women in science. I have pioneered that. One of the things I worry about is what that pioneering has done to me. I have had to fight quite hard most of the way through life.
-
Science is a quest for understanding.
-
I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I'm Scots-Irish, therefore.
-
That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.
-
People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.
-
I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.
-
I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'
-
We all have fundamental beliefs of one sort or another, and it is very threatening if somebody is saying they're wrong.
-
I've enjoyed being a single person, particularly because I'm travelling a lot. It would be hard to maintain a relationship - so I've really not tried.
-
I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.
-
We still don't know what about 96 per cent of the universe is made of. It is dark matter and dark energy, but we have no idea what it is.
-
Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.