Bell burnell biography

British astrophysicist (born )

This British surname is barrelled, existence made up of multiple names. It should be written as Bell Burnell, not Burnell.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; néeBell; born 15 July ) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate learner, discovered the first radio pulsars in The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in ; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.

Bell Burnell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from to , president of the Institute of Physics from October until October , and interim president of the Institute monitoring the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early She was Chancellor of the University of Dundee from to

In , she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3&#;million (£&#;million) prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become investigate physicists. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics.

In , Bell Burnell became the second female recipient (after Dorothy Hodgkin in ) of the Copley Medal.

Early life and education

Bell Burnell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, to M.

Allison and G. Philip Bell. Their country home was called "Solitude" and she grew up there with her younger brother and two younger sisters. Her father was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium, and during her visits there, the staff encouraged her to pursue a career in astronomy.

She also enjoyed her father's books on astronomy.

She grew up in Lurgan and attended the Preparatory Department^[a] of Lurgan College from to At the time, boys could analyze technical subjects, but girls were expected to study subjects such as cooking and cross-stitching.

Bell Burnell was able to revise science only after her parents and others challenged the school's policies.

She failed the eleven-plus exam and her parents sent her to The Mount Academy, a Quaker girls' boarding institution in York, England, where she completed her secondary education in There she was favourably impressed by her physics teacher, Mr.

Tillott, and stated:

You act not have to learn lots and lots&#; of facts; you just learn a few key things, and&#; then you can apply and build and grow from those&#; He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was.

She next joined the University of Glasgow, where in she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics), with honours, and then New Hall, Cambridge, where she gained a PhD in

At Cambridge, she worked with Antony Hewish and others to construct^[b] the Interplanetary Scintillation Array just outside Cambridge to study quasars, which had recently been discovered.^[c]

Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four three-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham.

Career and research

On 28 November , while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars.

The signal had been seeable in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds.

Temporarily dubbed "Little Lush Man 1" (LGM-1) the origin (now known as PSR B+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. This was later documented by the BBC Horizon series.

In a lecture at Harvard, she related how the media was covering the discovery of pulsars, with interviews taking a usual "disgusting" format: Hewish would be asked on the astrophysics, and she would be the "human interest" part, asked about life-giving statistics, how many boyfriends she had, what colour is her hair, and asked to undo some buttons for the photographs.

The Daily Telegraph science journalist shortened "pulsating radio source" to pulsar.

She worked at the University of Southampton between and , University College London from to 82 and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (–91). From to she was a tutor, consultant, examiner, and lecturer for the Uncover University.

In , she became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a position she held until She was Professor of Physics at the Open University from to She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States and Dean of Science at the University of Bath (–04), and President of the Royal Astronomical Society between and

Bell Burnell was visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College in She was President of the Institute of Physics between and In February she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Dundee.

In , Bell Burnell visited Parkes, NSW, to provide the keynote John Bolton lecture at the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) AstroFest event.

In , she was awarded the Particular Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth three million dollars (£&#;million), for her discovery of radio pulsars.

The Special Prize, in contrast to the regular annual prize, is not restricted to recent discoveries. She donated all of the money "to fund women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers", the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics.

Issued in July , Ulster Bank's new science-themed polymer £50 banknote prominently features Bell Burnell alongside other women, including those working in NI's life sciences industry.

She said, "I'm passionate about encouraging more women to pursue scientific careers and I think it's something that is very important for Northern Ireland. There is a burgeoning scientific sector here. More women pursuing careers in science will support that ongoing growth."

Nobel Prize controversy

Controversially, Bell did not receive recognition in the Nobel Prize in Physics.

She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes examining as much as 96 feet (29&#;m) of paper data per night. Bell later said that she had to be unyielding in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made.

She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Ryle to which she was not invited.

The paper announcing the discovery of pulsars had five authors. Bell's thesis supervisor Antony Hewish was listed first, Bell second.

Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with the astronomer Martin Ryle. At the time fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle criticised Bell's omission. In , Bell Burnell commented:

I think it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I perform not believe this is one of them.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in its compress release announcing the prize, cited Ryle and Hewish for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics, with particular mention of Ryle's serve on aperture-synthesis technique and Hewish's decisive role in the finding out of pulsars.

Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, characterized Bell Burnell's contributions as follows:

She helped assemble the array she used to make the observation. She is the one who noticed it.

She is the one who argued it's a real signal. When a graduate student takes that kind of lead in her project, it's hard to play it down.

In later years, she opined that "the proof that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize." The decision continues to be debated to this day.

Awards

Honours

• In , she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Astronomy and promoted to Dame Commander of the Instruct of the British Empire (DBE) in
• In February , she was assessed as one of the most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.
• She was recognized as one of the BBC's women of
• In February , she was elected President of the Royal Culture of Edinburgh, the first lady to hold that office.

  She held the position from April to April when she was succeeded by Dame Anne Glover.^[73]

• In , the Institute of Physics renamed their award for early-career female physicists the Jocelyn Bell Burnell Medal and Prize.
• In , she was elected an International member of the American Philosophical Society.
• In , she was awarded a Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Bath.
• In , she was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
• A painting of her by Stephen Shankand, commissioned by the Royal Society, was added to the collection in the Society's Carlton House Terrace headquarters in November
• In , she was included by the BBC in a list of seven important but little-known British female scientists.
• In , she was made an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
• In , she received the Matteucci Medal by the Accademia nazionale delle scienze, Italy.
• In , she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's Cunningham Medal and the Prix Jules Janssen from the Société astronomique de France.
• In , she was awarded the Hawking Fellowship by the Cambridge Union in the University of Cambridge.

Species named in her honour

A new nudibranch species Cadlina bellburnellae was named in honour of Jocelyn Bell Burnell^[82]

Publications

Her publications^[d] include:

Personal and non-academic life

Bell Burnell is house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge Home Grammar School in Ballymena, County Antrim.

She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in professional and academic posts in the fields of physics and astronomy.

Quaker activities and beliefs

From her school days, she has been an active Quaker and served as Clerk to the sessions of Britain Yearly Meeting in , and Bell Burnell also served as Clerk of the Central Executive Committee of Friends World Committee for Consultation from to She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for Life, at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen on 1 August , and was the plenary speaker at the US Friends General Conference Gathering in She spoke of her personal religious history and beliefs in an interview with Joan Bakewell in

Bell Burnell served on the Quaker Calm and Social WitnessTestimonies Committee, which produced Engaging with the Quaker Testimonies: a Toolkit in February In , she gave a James Backhouse Lecture which was published in a book entitled A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious?, in which Burnell reflects about how cosmological knowledge can be related to what the Bible, Quakerism or Christian faith states.

Marriage

In , between the discovery of the second and third pulsar, Bell became engaged to Martin Burnell and they married soon after; the couple divorced in after separating in In a online lecture at the University of Bedfordshire, Bell Burnell reflected on her first experience returning to the observatory wearing an engagement ring.

Though she was proud of her ring and wanted to share the excellent news with her colleagues, she instead received criticism as, at the time, it was shameful for women to work as it appeared that their partners were incapable of providing for the family.

Her husband was a local government officer, and his career took them to various parts of Britain.

She worked part-time for many years while raising their son, Gavin Burnell, who is a member of the condensed matter physics team at the University of Leeds.

See also

Notes

Citations

Works cited