Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Profession : Scientist

Birth : July 15, 1943

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I positively encourage time abroad to anybody. It's worth taking the time to suss out which countries in the world are well funded for your subject and look for opportunities there.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell