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mythologyandhistory
@mythologyandhistory@mas.to  ·  activity timestamp last week

It's 1967 & she's 24 years old. It had taken her 3 months to go through the chart-recorder paper manually. She had helped build the radio #telescope that picked up the waves. There was a pulsating signal, regular; it turned out to be a #pulsar.
Her supervisor didn't believe her. She insisted it's real.

It was. But the press would ask her about boyfriends. Her male colleagues were asked about science.

7 years later, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
would be excluded from the #Nobel Prize of #Physics.

This is a photo of the chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar. 

It is a yellowed scroll of paper, with small squares and numbers to find interferences & record them correctly. There are red squiggly lines indicating the radio signal. In black ink, Burnell shows the exact points at which the signal quivered differently than normal - these are hard to see. 

The map is display at the University of Cambridge Library.
This is a photo of the chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar. It is a yellowed scroll of paper, with small squares and numbers to find interferences & record them correctly. There are red squiggly lines indicating the radio signal. In black ink, Burnell shows the exact points at which the signal quivered differently than normal - these are hard to see. The map is display at the University of Cambridge Library.
This is a photo of the chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar. It is a yellowed scroll of paper, with small squares and numbers to find interferences & record them correctly. There are red squiggly lines indicating the radio signal. In black ink, Burnell shows the exact points at which the signal quivered differently than normal - these are hard to see. The map is display at the University of Cambridge Library.
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Philip Kaludercic
@pkal@social.sdf.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 days ago

@mythologyandhistory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#1974_2 quotes Bell saying "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.". Does anyone know any background to this? Did she change her mind later or was she incentivised to make the statement?

Nobel Prize controversies - Wikipedia

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