Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.
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Looking at the universe as a whole; cosmology, the birth, life and death of the whole universe, we used to have a nice simple model. Then we had to add things like dark energy, and our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier.
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Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, 'There goes some of the primordial universe.'
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Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.
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If we assume we've arrived: we stop searching, we stop developing.
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Scientists should never claim that something is absolutely true. You should never claim perfect, or total, or 100% because you never ever get there.
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I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often, jobs weren't open to me.
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I didn't always have research jobs.
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By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.