In the 70’s she 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.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell
The last paragraph of the article seems to give a brief insight into her position now on why she was excluded.
“The money will be handed to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for people underrepresented in physics. “A lot of the pulsar story happened because I was a minority person and a PhD student,” she said. “Increasing the diversity in physics could lead to all sorts of good things”
She slighly expands on that in the BBC coverage.
“The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.
"I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at Cambridge. I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I think everybody else around me was southern English," she said.
"So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come from left field."”
FYI she still adamantly has the view that it was correct not to have been awarded the Nobel prize; not because the award wasnt sexist etc. but on the original grounds of being a research student.
It was somewhat sad that the bbc interview this morning was insistent on making the story about balancing the scales over not being awarded the nobel.
She was pretty passionate about pushing the story toward her latter point about the benefits of diversity in any field. Her clarity of vision on this was wonderful.
I feel the media have rather got lost/muddled on her point, which is a shame.
It's not Hewish's fault. The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of pulsars but for the aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it possible. He didn't do the observation, but he did invent the telescope.
The guys's a legitimate Nobel winner on his own, and let's not tar his name with the Nobel committee's mistake in skipping over Bell.
> The prize, FWIW, wasn't just for the discovery of pulsars but for the aperture synthesis interferometry technique that made it possible.
Ryle's participation in the prize was for aperture synthesis interferometry while Hewish's was for the discovery of pulsars. From [0]:
> The Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 was awarded jointly to Sir 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."
Aperture synthesis is useful for achieving higher angular resolutions than would otherwise be possible. But pulsars are unresolved and so angular resolution isn't as important for their study (the localization of pulsars can be done very precisely from the modeling of the arrival times of individual pulses). Collecting area (overall sensitivity of the telescope) is the driving consideration for pulsar science.
I'll not pretend to be schooled on this topic, so I'm happy to defer to you folks on this.
In any case, it would be worth hearing from Anthony Hewish on this matter as I'm inclined to find Sir Fred Hoyle's criticism of the decision quite damning for Hewish.
> believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.
I'm curious what she means by that. Did she have a particular world view not shared by the other students that helped with this discovery? The article mentions her experiencing the 'imposter syndrome' which caused her to work harder to standout than she would have usually, otherwise she might be exposed as a fraud who doesn't belong (even though she was clearly capable enough to have been at Harvard). But wouldn't a modern inclusive environment have eliminated that feeling?... So I'm curious if there was something else about her own personal experience helped her with that discovery, beyond working harder.
I think it was meant somewhat literally, with her being from 'The North West' - the implication being some godforsaken backwater just shy of Scotland (I'm not being insulting, I'm from the Eastern equivalent), so would have — like a small number of British Scientists — stuck out like a sore thumb in the male-dominated, figuroliteral cloistered Cambridge academia of the time.
Northern Ireland is & was comparatively technically "cultured" (see e.g. Kelvin) and I think Jocelyn Bell Burnell is talking more about being a woman than being from an alien culture.
I went to Cambridge (disastrously) from Dublin about 20 years ago, and I for one definitely experienced implicit bias, culture differences that had to be learnt, different presumed levels of academic preparation, etc. Maybe things have improved a bit now. The typical Cambridge student comes from a very privileged, homogenous British background.
The signal from the first pulsar she discovered was later famously plotted as a stacked graph and ultimately became the cover to Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures"
"Having also ruled out broadcasts from “little green men”, Bell Burnell gathered more observations until eventually she found three more repeating pulses of radio waves emanating from different spots in the galaxy."
I remember reading somewhere that Dr Bell was labelling the traces on the pen-chart recording that showed the signal 'lgm'.
The best outcome would have been the confirmation of real lgm. That news will blow away everything else every done in astronomy and physics combined. Every time a new instrument comes online (LIGO) I cross my fingers, and then am disappointed as the known universe becomes a little more empty.
Heaviside and von Neumann are probably not eligible. There's no Nobel Prize in math, which more or less rules out von Neumann. Heaviside developed a lot of tools still used in electrical engineering, but there isn't a Nobel Prize in that either. And Heaviside's work was notorious for its lack of rigor, which caused him to lose out on a lot of recognition.
But Shannon... information theory is an Important Tool in physics. It led Stephen Hawking to predict Hawking Radiation, which was important for understanding black holes. And it has a lot of other uses in physics as well. He'd be eligible, I think. But it's still a marginal case; information theory, itself, isn't physics. It's still math.
>Heaviside developed a lot of tools still used in electrical engineering, but there isn't a Nobel Prize in that either.
For good or for bad, electrical engineering work has won Nobel prizes: Transistors, integrated circuits, etc. These were inventions and did not provide insights into physics.
Did not Neumann put quantum mechanics on a firmer mathematical footing?
Heaviside reformulated Maxwells work in electodynamics into the form it has been used ever since, and had major role in developing vector analysis which is like indispensable in Physics now.
Do Nobel-caliber work, and die before the award is given.
There have been so many great potential laureates who have gone unrecognized by society at large because entropy caught up to them before the Nobel committee got around to them.
Those who immediately come to mind: Debbie Jin and Ron Drever.
She was deceased by the time the Nobel was awarded. (She died of cancer in '58; the Nobel was in '62.) That's not to say that she wouldn't have lost out on the three-recipients rule being female, but being dead is an automatic disqualification.
Clyde Hutchison missed out on two - he discovered Type I restriction enzymes, but they're extremely difficult to understand because their behavior is stochastic, and as a result also not as useful (his buddy Hamilton Smith, won for Type II restriction enzymes, which are still being used).
He also correctly identified (theoretically) the method by which site-directed mutagenesis would be done, published that, noting that it required advancements in oligonucleotide synthesis, then actually did the experiments in collaboration with Michael Smith, who won the nobel prize. He wasn't awarded the prize himself because it was split with Kary Mullis (who invented PCR). Possibly he was skipped over because Mullis and Smith were well known in the chemistry circles and Hutchison was more of a microbiologist, and the prize was a chemistry prize, not a physiology prize.
"Bell Burnell phoned her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish. He said, ‘That settles it, it’s manmade, it’s artificial radio interference.’"
Justice comes creeping around, at last. Glad she's alive to enjoy it.
(Recently I read somewhere that justice may be on its way for Henrietta Leavitt ... for discovering, in the early 1900s, a way to measure the distance to stars.)
The last paragraph of the article seems to give a brief insight into her position now on why she was excluded.
“The money will be handed to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for people underrepresented in physics. “A lot of the pulsar story happened because I was a minority person and a PhD student,” she said. “Increasing the diversity in physics could lead to all sorts of good things”
She slighly expands on that in the BBC coverage.
“The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.
"I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at Cambridge. I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I think everybody else around me was southern English," she said.
"So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come from left field."”
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...
Giving all the winnings to the cause is impressive.