[MUSIC PLAYING]
“I remember, when my brother was born, people would say,
‘Isn’t it great that Mrs. Bell has a boy now?’
As a small child, I found that difficult.
I knew I wanted to be an astronomer.
But at that stage, there weren’t any women role models
that I knew of.
Even when I got engaged to be married,
many people would congratulate me on that
and say nothing about making a major astrophysical
discovery —
pulsars.”
“The discovery of pulsars, for which U.K. —”
“A girl —”
“— wrote one of astronomy’s most exciting discoveries.”
“Of course, back then, nobody knew what a pulsar was until
I found the first two.
I was born in Northern Ireland, 1943.
My father was an architect for the observatory in Armagh.
I was in secondary school, enjoying it very much
right from the beginning, until the Wednesday
of the first week. They sent the boys to the science
laboratory and the girls to the cookery room
because they were going to be homemakers.
I knew that wasn’t right.
I tried protesting to the domestic science teacher,
but she wasn’t hearing anything of it.
But when I told my parents that night,
they hit the roof.
As Quakers, we believe there is
something of God in everybody, literally everybody.
So everybody needed a scientific education.
The next time the science class
met, there were three girls and all the boys.
I was reading one of my father’s library books,
which was an astronomy book, ‘Frontiers of Astronomy,’
by Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer.
I knew, before I left school, I wanted
to be a radio astronomer.
I went to University of Glasgow in Scotland.
I ended up being the only female in a class of 50.
And it was the tradition that when a woman entered
the lecture theater, all the guys whistled, cat-called,
banged their desks.”
[BANGING]
“I had to face this on my own.”
[WHISTLING]
“It’s nasty, yes.
If I hadn’t been clear what I wanted to do,
I would probably have gone some other way.
I rather belatedly put in an application to Cambridge.
I didn’t think I was clever enough for this top
university.
But rather to my surprise, I got in.
‘Oh, they’ve made a mistake admitting me.’
‘They’re going to discover their mistake and throw me
out.’
That's impostor syndrome.
I got around it by deciding I would work my very hardest,
so that when they threw me out, I wouldn’t have a guilty
conscience.
Tony Hewish had this particular project
to pick out compact objects called
quasars, the very hot topic.
So the first job was to build the radio telescope
that I was to use.
No, no, you're thinking of an optical telescope that uses
light.
This is a radio telescope that uses
radio wavelengths to pick out very, very distant objects.
Some of the radio telescopes are dishes.
Ours was like an agricultural frame.
We had to carry a bundle of about 20 cables
that were 50 meters long.
Then you’d yell, ‘Lift!’ They’d all lift,
and ‘Right’ — this sort of caterpillar of people
carrying cables.
It took about half a dozen of us two years to build.”
“The array rotated with the Earth, scanning continuously,
night and day, across the sky.
And it was to be operated full time by one person, a girl,
a graduate student who helped to build it, Jocelyn Bell.”
“My presence as a female student was an anomaly.
The only other females were the secretaries.
At this stage, there was nobody else on this project.
It was Tony Hewish and I. He’s the person who’s had the idea
and he’s the person who’s got the money to build the radio
telescope, but it’s my Ph.D.
I’m running the telescope, and I’m analyzing the data.
You end up with a long chart with a sort
of squiggly line on it.
Ooh, there’s a big source.
That’s routine chart analysis.
And five minutes was one inch, so one foot
for a hour, 24 foot a day.
And I had four chart recorders going almost 100 foot a day.
There was rather more of that chart paper
than I had imagined, I must say, yes.
One day I was looking for quasars, and there was
a signal there that I couldn’t explain.
It wasn’t a quasar.
And it didn’t look like any kind of interference that
I’ve seen before.
I shouldn’t be seeing something like that.
I wanted to understand what it was.
And I ended up taking this problem to Tony.
And he said that it was interference.
He had one idea, that Jocelyn had wired up
the radio telescope wrongly and it was
something to do with that.
I kept observing.
And this thing took up about a quarter inch on the charts.
You actually need an enlargement
to run the chart faster under the pen
so everything gets spread out.
So I would go out to the observatory,
turn the chart on to high speed
while it should have been there,
at the appropriate time switch the high-speed recording,
and in comes pulse, pulse, pulse.
What is this?
I telephoned Tony.
I told them it was a string of pulses
one and a third seconds apart.
His immediate reaction was, ‘Oh, well that settles it.
It’s interference.’ I knew it wasn’t interference.
Next day, Tony came out.
And he saw the pulses with his own eyes.
And it wasn’t interference.
That started a whole new research project, basically.
What is it?
How are we getting this curious thing?
Tony and I together, we had some ideas.
I was excited to be heavily involved in discovering
whatever this was.
I went to ask Tony something, and the door
was shut, which was most unusual.
And I stumbled on a discussion between Tony
and Martin Ryle, the head of the group,
which in retrospect was a discussion I
think I should have been part of right from the beginning.
How do we publish this result?
It’s incredibly hard to get people to believe you’ve
discovered something amazing if you've only got one.
I knew that finding more would be the clincher.
I’m back in the lab, doing some routine chart analysis,
and suddenly see something that looks awful like that
first pulsar had looked.
I was convinced we now had two.
Tony gave a colloquium in Cambridge.
And every astronomer in Cambridge came.
[CHUCKLING] It was —
Fred Hoyle, the eminent astronomer
that influenced me when I was a schoolgirl
was in the audience. Very exciting.
Tony was doing the lecture, announcing the discovery
of this new radio source.
Tony could have cited me more and didn’t,
but I was Miss Bell, the student.
Fred Hoyle was the first to speak.”
“This cosmic anarchist is the most controversial
of theorists.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of these things.
I think it’s a supernova remnant.
Fred Hoyle hadn’t heard of these things 45 minutes
previously.
But within that time, he has assimilated the information
and actually come up with the right explanation, the one
that turns out to be correct.
Gradually it became clearer and clearer
that this was hugely important.
We wrote up a paper announcing the first one.
And when it was published, it produced an enormous amount
of interest.”
“— are entirely new.”
“The press would ask Tony about the astrophysical
significance of this discovery.”
“— how greater than a planet could really —”
“And then they turned to me for what they called
the human interest.
How many boyfriends did I have at once?”
“Oh, yes.
If there —”
“Would I describe myself as brunette or blond?”
“Nothing in nature could do this.”
“What were my bust, waist and hip measurements?
How tall was I?
The photographers were the worst.
They wanted me to undo some buttons on my blouse.”
“A girl, Jocelyn Bell —”
“The popular press were certainly putting me
in the little girl, sexually attractive role.
I barely rated as a scientist.
Tony just let it happen.
It was dreadful.
I was leaving because I was going off to get married.
My husband was working elsewhere.
So I had to move jobs, and I left Cambridge.
Nineteen seventy-four, I was working in X-ray astronomy.
And the satellite we were to use
was launching that morning.
One of my colleagues came rushing into my office,
‘Have you heard the news?
Have you heard the news?’
I thought the satellite’s gone, but it wasn’t.
It was the announcement of the Nobel Prize.
“Prof. Anthony Hewish, the discovery
of pulsars, for which you played a decisive role,
is a most outstanding example of how in recent years
our knowledge of the universe has
been dramatically expanded.”
“They’ve given the prize jointly to Martin Ryle,
who was the head of the Cambridge Radio Astronomy
Group, and to Tony for pulsars.
Fred Hoyle was quite furious for me.”
“And here we can see Dr. Tony Hewish,
who will tell us more about it.”
“When you plan a trip of discovery and somebody
at the masthead says, ‘Land ho,’ that’s great.
But, I mean, who actually inspired it and conceived it
and decided what to do, when and so on?
I mean, there is a difference between skipper and crew.”
“I think the fact that I was a graduate student and a woman
together demoted my standing, in terms of receiving a Nobel
Prize.
It didn’t bother me.
I was actually pleased.
I was really pleased that pulsars
were considered important enough to rate a Nobel Prize.
The very name “pulsar” is an abbreviation of “pulsating
radio star.”
It’s the remains of a big star that exploded near the end
of its life.
And this tiny star is spinning.
And as it spins, it sweeps a radio wave round the sky.
And if it shines in your face, you see pulse, pulse, pulse,
pulse.
But if it doesn’t shine in your face,
you don’t see anything.
Now, whether if I'd stayed single,
I think things might have been very different.
I think I would have been offered a postdoctoral place
in Cambridge.
I would probably continued have working in radio astronomy
the whole of my career and be a much more narrow-minded
astronomer as a result. But I’ve actually had huge fun
in my career.
Even if it has not been a string of prestigious jobs,
it’s been a string of very, very interesting jobs,
usually working in great places with great colleagues.
July in 2018, I had a phone call from Ed Witten,
who’s a very eminent Princeton physicist,
saying that I’d won this Breakthrough Prize
for the discovery of pulsars.
The reason I discovered pulsars
was because I was a bit of an outsider who
felt maybe not entitled to be there and so on.
And I thought if I could give more minority
people an opportunity to do Ph.D.s,
some exciting things might emerge.
Phone up the chief executive of the Institute of Physics
and say, ‘Hello, Paul. Could the Institute of Physics use
a $3 million award to provide research studentships
for people from minorities?’ And he didn’t hesitate.
He said yes.
Fred Hoyle influenced me and turned me on to astronomy.
It’s important to be a good role model.
I do think it’s important that there are role models
for young women.
So, OK, I’ll be it.”
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