50 years after discovery, physicist bestowed honor

When Jocelyn Bell Burnell began her doctoral studies in physics at Cambridge University in 1965, she was convinced that they had made a mistake by admitting her. “I’m not bright enough for this place,” she now recalls thinking at the time.

It didn’t help that she was one of only two women in her graduate program. And Cambridge was far more affluent than anywhere she had lived before. Both factors likely contributed to her impostor syndrome, she told The Washington Post, “although of course we didn’t know that term then.”

Bell Burnell’s response was to work as hard as she possibly could. If they threw her out anyway, she figured, she would know that she wasn’t smart enough to be at Cambridge.

Her diligence ended up paying off. Two years after she arrived at Cambridge, Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars — a groundbreaking revelation that on Thursday earned her the $3 million special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which was previously awarded to Stephen Hawking, among others.

It’s a recognition that many feel is long overdue. Bell Burnell’s male PhD supervisor won a Nobel Prize for the same discovery — in 1974.

Like the stars of “Hidden Figures” and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell’s personal story embodies the challenges faced by women in scientific fields. Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, she had to fight to take science classes after the age of 12. “The assumption was that the boys would do science and the girls would do cookery and needlework,” she told The Washington Post. “It was such a firm assumption that it wasn’t even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter.”

By her junior year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in honors physics. Men whistled and heckled her every time she walked into the lecture hall, she said.

“I learned not to blush,” she said. “If you blushed, they just got louder.”

At Cambridge, the sexism was somewhat more subtle, she said. When Bell Burnell got engaged, the automatic assumption was that she would be dropping out of the program soon, since it was still considered shameful for married women to work. “I got a bit of the sense that because I was quitting, it probably wasn’t worth investing in me anymore,” she said.

Then, in 1967, Bell Burnell alerted her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish, to an “unclassifiable squiggle” on the readout from the radio telescope that she was in charge of monitoring. It was the kind of detail that others might have disregarded or overlooked.

“The source didn’t seem to be man-made — it was moving around with the stars, keeping pace with the constellations,” she told The Guardian in 2009. “We estimated it was 200 light years away, far beyond the sun and planets, but still within our galaxy, the Milky Way.”

As a joke, they labeled it LGM-1, which stood for “Little Green Men.”

Jocelyn Bell Burnell