Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, on 15 July 1943. Her father was an architect with a working library that ran from cathedrals to cosmology, and the family lived close enough to the Armagh Observatory that the staff astronomers, finding a curious eleven-year-old at the gates, lent her books and let her sit in. She failed the qualifying exam at her village school the year girls were first allowed to take science alongside boys (the timetable had previously routed the girls to cookery and needlework), and her parents, who were Quakers and methodical about injustices of this kind, fought the school until the policy was reversed and the result was overturned. She was sent on to a Quaker boarding school at Mount School in York, then to the University of Glasgow, where she took her bachelor’s in physics in 1965 as the only woman in a class of about fifty. The men whistled and stamped their feet whenever she entered the lecture theatre. She kept her composure and kept her grades.

She arrived at Cambridge that autumn as a graduate student of Antony Hewish, who had just been awarded the money to build an interplanetary scintillation array, a sprawling lattice of dipole antennas designed to catch radio sources whose signals twinkled as they passed through the solar wind. The array covered four and a half acres of Cambridgeshire field outside the village of Lord’s Bridge. Bell spent her first two years building it. She and the rest of the small team strung roughly two thousand dipole antennas between row after row of wooden posts and ran 120 miles of wire and cable between them with sledgehammers and pliers. The telescope produced about a hundred feet of pen-and-ink chart paper every day, and Bell was responsible for reading it all by eye.

In August 1967, six weeks after the array switched on, she noticed something she could not place. There was a quarter inch of what she later called “a bit of scruff” near one of her sources, a faint repeating wiggle on the trace, in a strip of sky that should have been empty. She had read enough of her own paper by then, several hundred feet of it, to know the difference between the smeared smudge of an ordinary scintillating quasar and this clean, almost regular flutter. She flagged it for Hewish, who at first thought it was terrestrial interference. She and a fellow student went out to the array with a faster chart recorder and caught the source again, and the trace resolved into a string of sharp pulses spaced almost exactly 1.337 seconds apart. The clock was steadier than anything in the sky had a right to be.

For several weeks the group considered, in private, the possibility that they had picked up a beacon from a civilisation. The signal was filed in the lab notebooks under LGM-1, for Little Green Men. Bell, who wanted to finish her thesis and resented the implication that her natural sources had been hijacked by extraterrestrial drama, went back to the chart paper. Three days before Christmas 1967 she found a second scruff in another part of the sky, pulsing at a different rate of 1.2 seconds. Two independent species in two corners of the galaxy could not both be alien transmitters. The team announced the discovery in February 1968, and within months the theorists, led by Thomas Gold, identified the pulses as the lighthouse beams of rotating neutron stars: stellar corpses no larger than a city and as dense as an atomic nucleus, spinning so fast that their magnetic axes swept past the Earth dozens of times a minute. The neutron star, predicted by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934, had at last been seen.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; Bell; born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. This discovery later earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, but she was not among the awardees.

The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle for the discovery of pulsars, with no share for Bell. The omission was contentious at the time and is more so now. Fred Hoyle protested it publicly. Bell herself declined to complain. “It would demean Nobel Prizes,” she said later, “if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.” Many in the field disagreed with her assessment and still do. She got on with the work, holding posts at Southampton, University College London, the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, the Open University, and Princeton, in fields that ranged from gamma-ray astronomy to X-ray binaries.

The recognition the Stockholm committee withheld arrived in other forms. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2007, elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2002 and of the Institute of Physics in 2008, and in 2018 awarded a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics worth three million dollars. She donated every penny of it to the Institute of Physics to endow graduate scholarships for women, ethnic minorities, refugees, and other students underrepresented in physics. “I don’t want or need the money myself,” she said, “and it seemed to me that this was perhaps the best use I could put it to.”

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; Bell; born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. This discovery later earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, but she was not among the awardees.

Pulsars themselves have become one of the most generous laboratories in physics. Their pulse timing is accurate to better than a part in a quadrillion over a year, sharp enough to test general relativity in the strong-field limit (the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar provided the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves), to navigate spacecraft, and to detect the gentle compression of spacetime caused by mergers of supermassive black holes elsewhere in the universe. Every one of those measurements traces back to a graduate student reading her chart paper at Cambridge and refusing to throw out the wiggle she could not explain.

What Bell Burnell means to the quantum story is this: she is the proof that the bizarre objects predicted by quantum mechanics at the extremes (neutron-degenerate matter, packed to nuclear density and held up by Pauli exclusion alone) are not theoretical curiosities but ordinary inhabitants of our galaxy, ticking out the time.