Jocelyn Bell Burnrll

Jocelyn Bell Burnrll

Postby SciFi Chick » Fri Sep 07, 2018 3:34 am

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Re: Jocelyn Bell Burnrll

Postby Rommie » Fri Sep 07, 2018 10:11 am

I met her back in January at Oxford when she came to my talk. She is a nice lady. This quote at the end sure drives that point home IMO-

"I feel I've done very well out of not getting a Nobel prize," she told the Guardian. "If you get a Nobel prize you have this fantastic week and then nobody gives you anything else. If you don't get a Nobel prize you get everything that moves. Almost every year there's been some sort of party because I've got another award. That's much more fun."


Also, because she decided she doesn't need $3 million, she is using the money to fund researchers who are women, minorities, or refugees who suffer from unconscious bias. As I said, class act. :)
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Re: Jocelyn Bell Burnrll

Postby Sigma_Orionis » Fri Sep 07, 2018 11:56 am

Reading up on her, it seems that not including here when her Boss's prize was awarded caused some issues back in 1974

From Wikipedia

The 1974 prize went to Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars". Hewish was not the first to correctly explain pulsars, initially describing them as communications from "Little Green Men" (LGM-1) in outer space. David Staelin and Edward Reifenstein, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, found a pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula. The notion that pulsars were neutron stars, leftovers from a supernova explosion, had been proposed in 1933. Soon after their 1967 discovery, Fred Hoyle and astronomer Thomas Gold correctly explained it as a rapidly spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field, emitting radio waves. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was later recognized as a pulsar.[138] While Hoyle argued that Bell should have been included in the prize, Bell said, "I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them."[139] Prize-winning research students include Louis de Broglie, Rudolf Mössbauer, Douglas Osheroff, Gerard 't Hooft, John Forbes Nash, Jr., John Robert Schrieffer and H. David Politzer.
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Re: Jocelyn Bell Burnrll

Postby Rommie » Fri Sep 07, 2018 11:59 am

Yes. My experience amongst astronomers is everyone agrees that Jocelyn should have been awarded the Nobel Prize, except Jocelyn herself. And the Nobel committee is now very careful to make sure students are also awarded the prize if they're on the work.
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