Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1943 age 0

   Born

2. 1996 age 53

   CreditBreak the Science Barrier

• DADouglas Adams1 title
• DADavid Attenborough1 title
• RDRichard Dawkins1 title
• PKPaddy Kingsland1 title

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  Photo:VictoriaCC BY-SA 4.0

• The girls got sent to the domestic science room and the boys to the science lab. ... I protested — unsuccessfully.

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0

• There is now a thirteenth commandment "Thou shalt not make predictions in x-ray astronomy, lest the Lord thy God reveal the folly of thy ways unto all."

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Scientists should never claim that something is absolutely true. You should never claim perfect, or total, or 100% because you never ever get there.

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0

• One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background. Science has been named, developed, interpreted by white males for decades and women view the conventional wisdom from a slightly different angle — and that sometimes means they can clearly point to flaws in the logic, gaps in the argument, they can give a different perspective of what science is.

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0

• By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.

  Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CC BY-SA 4.0