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Jocelyn Bell on the Nobel that she was denied: “I didn't want to seem like a troublemaker because I was very precarious. Today she would speak differently ”

2022-11-20T11:13:46.968Z


The story of this astronomer who discovered pulsars is the best summary of how women were swept away from the scientific world. In this interview, Bell recalls how she lived through her exclusion from the Nobel Prize, the numerous macho obstacles she encountered in her career, and how she overcame her imposter syndrome.


The story of the astronomer Jocelyn Bell (Belfast, 79 years old) is perhaps one of the most emblematic of what the invisibility of their work means for many scientists.

She, hers, is the merit of the discovery of one of the stellar bodies that caused the most headaches for astronomers of her time.

And it is also her merit that for the first time a Nobel Prize was awarded to an astrophysical discovery, although she was not the winner.

But it was her patience, her rigor and her tenacity that led her to discover pulsars in 1967, those cosmic lighthouses made up of very dense stars that rotate fleetingly emitting a light signal.

So amazing is the regularity and precision of these signals that for a few weeks she and her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish, wondered if aliens were sending the signal.

Little Green Men

, little green men, was the nickname that was given to that strange radio source at first.

"Fortunately, when I discovered my second pulsar in another part of the sky, it became clear that it couldn't be two groups of aliens sending messages at the same time, on the same radio frequency, and to the same insignificant planet," Bell explains in an interview. with THE COUNTRY.

It hadn't been easy for Bell to convince Hewish that the signal she had detected was real.

She had spent the first two years of her thesis erecting a radio telescope: a huge series of cables dangling from 2,000 wooden poles over an area as large as 57 tennis courts in the muddy English countryside outside Cambridge.

A few months after starting to use it, she had noticed a tiny irregularity in a huge roll of paper, where a pen traced a red line of the received signal.

"Half a centimeter on kilometers of paper: another less careful person would surely have missed it," she now says.

Bell passed through Barcelona last week, invited by Cosmocaixa, to give a talk about the history of the discovery of these stars at the end of her life, very compact,

More information

More information on women in science

That discovery was not the first time that he had to fight to assert himself, such as when he entered a school at the age of 11 with the intention of studying science.

"It was clear to me that I wanted to study science and my parents had promised me that I could do it at that institute," says Bell.

When the expected day of the first science class arrived, they were sent to the home economics classroom.

Bell protested to her parents about what happened, and they contacted other families whose daughters wanted to be in that class.

In the end they made it: three girls in a boys' class.

“We were the first three who were able to study science in that school, and the first three that our teacher had never seen,” she recalls today.

Every time I entered class, the tradition was for everyone to whistle and hit the wooden bleachers.

The next anecdote on his way up the hill was the shocking experience at the University of Glasgow where he went to study Physics.

She “She was the only student in a class of 50 boys.

Every time she entered class, the tradition was for everyone to whistle and beat their hands and feet against the wooden steps,” she recounts.

“I had to learn not to blush, otherwise it would have been worse.

When I went back to my dorm and told them that she was the only girl, my classmates thought that she would change my course, because that's what most women did.

But I wanted to be an astronomer, and it was necessary to graduate in Physics, I had no alternative, ”she explains.

A person less focused on her goal would have thrown in the towel: “Probably, I would have done mathematics, where there was already a woman.

Always a minority

but at least they were more than one”.

He never found any male ally in his way.

On the contrary: “The teachers sometimes seemed like they wanted to join the students.

Fortunately, they never did."

Jocelyn Bell during the interview.Albert Garcia

The same thing happened when he asked a question.

“When someone came to give talks, all my classmates would raise their arms to ask

intelligent questions.

: I was silent to be able to make myself invisible”, he says.

“However, I developed a strategy.

He listened very carefully for the first five minutes of the talk, wrote down all the hypotheses that the researcher made and at the end asked: 'Sir —yes, they were always men— you have made this and this assumption.

How would your conclusions change if they were not true?'

It seems that the invited scientists and also my teachers were very impressed by this”, he recalls.

Only two of the teachers she had were women: "One gave us a mathematics course, and the other lasted only two months, she couldn't stand the pressure: what the students did to me, they did to her too!" .

People congratulated me on getting married and not on my discovery

When she started her PhD at Cambridge, she was convinced that they had chosen her wrongly.

Today we call it impostor syndrome, something that affects many women used to being looked down on.

That made her very careful and detail-oriented, especially in those turbulent months between the end of 1967 and the summer of 1968, when she finished her thesis while she discovered six pulsars.

“My thesis advisor took a long time to recognize that he was doing something important,” she says, “although it is clear that when you make an extraordinary discovery you have to be very cautious.”

One of the factors that contributed to the discrimination against her, according to Bell, is that there were very few women at Cambridge University.

“Many men thought it was unfair for us to study.

That's why we women had to be very careful,

Photomontage of Jocelyn Bell in 1967 next to the radio telescope she built for her thesis.Roger W Haworth

Also the journalists and photographers of the time contributed to the discrimination: she was always “the girl”, her boss “the scientist”;

he posed seriously, she was asked to undo some buttons on her blouse.

“When I got engaged to my future husband, between the discovery of my second pulsar and my third pulsar, I noticed that people were congratulating me on getting married and not on my discovery.

The expectation was that women would stay at home, ”he laments.

For her, they were frustrating years, in which she had to follow her husband's career and adapt her own.

“As a couple we decided to have a child.

And I knew that would have complicated my career a lot.

At that time there were no nurseries, since everyone knew that if the mothers worked, the children would become delinquents”.

And how did she manage those feelings?

“Surely, with a bit of resentment.

But I managed to work part-time in many interesting jobs as an astronomer.

Adapting a bit, sometimes working as a technique.

But at least I was able to keep up to date with the investigation, ”she recalls.

And suddenly the Nobel

Until one day, in 1974, while preparing to launch a rocket from Kenya with an X-ray telescope, he received the news that his boss, Antony Hewish, and his boss's boss, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Martin Ryle.

But not her.

Bell always said that she was happy that her stars had made the Nobel committee see that astrophysics was also top-notch physics, and that she was just a student, after all.

“In those years I felt that she needed to not be seen as a troublemaker because she was very precarious, without a steady job.

She couldn't stir the waters too much.

Today she would speak differently, ”she justifies herself.

She was aware of the unfairness of the decision, but she preferred that her colleagues be the ones to complain in her place: “They came to say that she was a Nobel

No-Bell

playing with my name.

Fred Hoyle, a great astronomer, was publicly outraged, but it was because he was confronting his bosses over the Big Bang theory: "I was instrumental in his war, and I couldn't show that I agreed with him." .

Artist's representation showing the two beams emitted by a pulsar.NASA

Finally, in the late 1980s, her son became independent and her husband left her to go live with another woman.

“For the first time in my life I was able to start looking for a job because I liked it, and not because I was where my husband was,” she recalls.

And that's how she got “a very nice job at the Open University, a very peculiar university, with very high-level students,” she explains.

And she adds proudly: "They made me head of the Physics department, and it was especially gratifying to teach adults in the afternoons who were trying to combine her work with their studies."

He explains that it took him many years, while racking up awards, to get over his impostor syndrome: “I feel like over time I've earned my place and gained confidence.

It could have broken me, but putting your energy into something positive helps overcome the frustration of not seeing your work recognized.

I feel that over time I have earned my place and gained confidence.

I could have broken

In 2018, he was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics: $3 million, triple the amount of the Nobel.

A sum that she decided to allocate entirely to scholarships for women, refugees and people from underrepresented minorities: “I am not involved in the selection of people, I discover them later.

So far she has awarded scholarships to 21 people, to which are added this year in which, for the first time, they are not only white women ”.

An important aspect for Bell is the religious aspect of his life.

“I am a Quaker, a very unusual religious movement,” she explains.

“Very different from the great religions.

It is a non-dogmatic church: it does not tell you what you have to believe.

It pushes you to be the one to work for yourself on what you believe.

The only guide is that people are good or, more formally, that there is a little bit of God in each one”, she describes.

What makes the Quaker religious experience different is the intellectual exploration of faith.

"It's not an experience like the conversion of Saint Paul, no," she says, laughing.

“At least, not for me: it is a very gradual path, of maturation, throughout your life.

Sometimes, we feel an experience or, as we say, an angel approaches us.

And we understand a little more, like in science: your thinking evolves over time.

The deeper understanding of things can happen to you by reading what Quakers have done in their lives, or by talking to people, or by observing nature.

In this church there is room for scientists, unlike in others, ”he says.

The branch of astrophysics that now fascinates him most is called "astronomy of transient phenomena."

“With the improvement of our telescopes, we can take images with shorter exposures.

And this allows us to discover that there are many more short-term phenomena than we thought with long exposures.

The most exciting part is being able to explain these phenomena.

There are some that happen at radio frequencies: they are called “fast radio bursts” and there is still no model for what causes them.

We only know that they come from outside our galaxy, from the spiral arms of other galaxies.

But there is a lot going on there!

It will be difficult to come up with a good explanation.”

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Source: elparis

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