Case Studies of Women Astronomers: Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943 ...

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Case Studies of Women Astronomers: Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943- )

Radio Astronomer

Objective Students will learn about the life and career of astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell through her own words. Introduction1 Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on July 15, 1943. Her father was an architect and an avid reader. Through his books, Jocelyn was introduced to the world of astronomy. Her family and the staff of the Armagh Observatory, which was near her home in Belfast, encouraged her interest in astronomy. Jocelyn Bell's parents very strongly believed in educating women. When she failed the examination required for students wanting to pursue higher education in British schools, they sent her to a boarding school to continue her education. In 1965, Jocelyn Bell earned a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Glasgow. Later that same year she began work on her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. It was while she was a graduate student at Cambridge, working under the direction of Antony Hewish, that Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. Bell's first two years at Cambridge were spent assisting in the construction of an 81.5-megahertz radio telescope that was to be used to track quasars. The telescope went into operation in 1967. It was Jocelyn Bell's job to operate the

telescope and to analyze over 120 meters of chart paper produced by the telescope every four days. After several weeks of analysis, Bell noticed some unusual markings on the chart paper. These markings were made by a radio source too fast and regular to be a quasar. Although the source's signal took up only about 2.5 centimeters of the 121.8 meters of chart paper, Jocelyn Bell recognized its importance. She had detected the first evidence of a pulsar. In February of 1968, news of the discovery made by Jocelyn Bell was published in the journal Nature. Further studies by groups of astronomers around the world identified the signals as coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars. These objects, first noticed by Jocelyn Bell, became known as pulsars. The term pulsar is an abbreviation for pulsating radio star or rapidly pulsating radio sources. Jocelyn Bell received her Ph.D. in radio astronomy from Cambridge University in 1968. She married during that same year and changed her name to Burnell. Since leaving Cambridge in 1968, Dr. Bell Burnell has studied the sky in almost every region of the electromagnetic spectrum. She has received many honors and awards for her contributions to science. Instructions In small groups students will read assigned sections of the transcript an oral history interview with Bell, conducted by Dr. David DeVorkin, senior curator of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum on May 21, 2000 at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. Students will answer as many discussion questions as possible and then compile their answers in a class-wide discussion.

1 For the full biography and related audio clips, visit http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/ whos_who_level2/bell.html.

The Open University, courtesy AIP Emilio

Segre Visual Archives

Prepared by the Center for History of Physics at AIP

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#physics

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/bell_1975.html

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#radio

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#telescope

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#quasar

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#astronomer

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#rotation

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/glossary_level2/glossary_text.html#spectrum

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/%20whos_who_level2/bell.html

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/%20whos_who_level2/bell.html

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In Class Time 45-90 minutes Prep Time 15 minutes Materials

Photocopies of oral history excerpts and discussion questions

Copyright Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, courtesy

AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives


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Excerpts from an Interview with Dr. S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell2 by David DeVorkin Section I: Burnell’s Early Life and Educational Expectations of Her Parents Burnell: Our parents were obviously much more delighted when we did well at school and that was obviously valued by them. And if you hadn’t done well it was going to be less enjoyable going home after school. They really saw education as being important, and important that we were stimulated and reached whatever level we could reach; that we reached our potential academically. DeVorkin: Did they have specific expectations? Burnell: I don’t know that they had thought it through. Probably particularly not for the girls. I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often jobs weren’t open to me. You know, so in that sense I think they hadn’t thought it through and they hadn’t thought what young women do when they have a university education and they get married and have children. It’s issues just like that where I think they hadn’t seen it through, but perhaps it’s asking too much that they should have. DeVorkin: Of that generation, certainly. But I’m curious as to how much gender specificity there was in your family between you, the three sisters, and the brother. Were you definitely on different tracks? Burnell: Depends who you’re talking of. As far as our parents were concerned, no, we were not; we were equal. But I mentioned maids and cooks and nannies. They were almost invariably Southern Irish Roman Catholics, and they came out of a society that was very strongly patriarchal. And one of the incidents from my early life is my brother came along eighteen months after me, and the nanny would go out with the baby in the pram and me togging along beside and go meet other nannies, you know, other young women like them, and they would say, “Isn’t it great that Mrs. Bell has a son now?” in my hearing. And I don’t quite know what happened, but somehow or other I was taken to the family doctor and the family doctor spotted this and told my parents what was going on. DeVorkin: And what did they do about it? Burnell: They say, “Very obviously, we value little girls as much as little boys.” And I can remember that, because it didn’t quite seem to ring true, or it didn’t seem to me to be the whole story is perhaps a fairer way of saying it. You know, I think my brain was already saying, “Well, you may say that, but the nanny says differently,” you know. DeVorkin: Did you ever envy boys? Burnell: Yes, frequently in my life. On sex differences and early schooling: DeVorkin: Do you recall when it was that you first started realizing that boys had a better shake of it in this world? Burnell: I think the first instance was when my brother was born and the reactions of the Irish staff in the house. That was the first sense of it. I probably didn’t meet it again until college level, I suspect. No, I can remember one incident. This gets a little complicated, so bear with me while I explain it. In Britain in those days kids sat at exam at age eleven, and this exam was supposed to determine — it was called the 11+

2 To access the interview transcript in its entirety, visit http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/31792.html.


http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/31792.html

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(“eleven plus”) which was the age you sat it at. This exam was supposed to determine whether you were academic or non-academic, and they segregated kids into two streams, with very little cross currents thereafter. And if you passed this exam you went to a school where you did academic subjects; if you failed this exam you went to a school where you were taught carpentry and metalwork if you were a boy, and secretarial skills and cookery if you were a girl. And I failed this exam at the age of eleven. My parents had already decided to send me away to this boarding school in England, and that would happen in about two years’ time. And for the intervening two years they somehow wangled it that I went in with the academic stream and had the sort of full academic education for those two years. DeVorkin: How did you fail it? Have you thought about that in your life? Burnell: Yes. I think I can see what was going on, because my brother and the next sister also failed it. My parents deliberately chose not to send us to schools that crammed you for that exam. They sent us to a much smaller school where they thought the education might be broader. I’m not sure it was, because the standard of education — well, it may have been broader, but it wasn’t to a good standard. So, I don’t know. So basically I think we weren’t very well prepared for it. We were probably also late developers, and I think it’s something to do with the fact also that they tested you on English, math and what they called intelligence. They gave you a number of shapes and said, “Which two are the same?” You know, I can’t think of another word for it, but you’ve maybe come across those kinds of tests. And fairly simple numerical tests — you know, 1, 3, 5, and 7, what’s the next number kind of thing. They didn’t do any science. And I’ll come back to that in just a moment. Now I can remember the first day of those intervening two years where I was with kids that had passed the exam. Word went ‘round that at two o’clock in the afternoon all the girls were to go to the domestic science room and all the boys were to go to the science lab. And I was a bit puzzled by this, but I went along in case it was some kind of special announcement or something. And it turned out that there was an assumption that all the girls, even these academic ones, would take domestic science: cookery and needlework. DeVorkin: That’s what domestic science is. Burnell: Yes. While the boys were doing physics, chemistry, biology. And I suspected this was wrong, so after about twenty minutes in this first domestic science class I said to the teacher, “I think I’m in the wrong place.” And so did two other girls, and three of us moved to the science class. But there were presumptions about our roles in society. DeVorkin: Sure. But no resistance from the teacher? Burnell: Not once we’d had the courage to challenge it, no. If we hadn’t had the courage, it might have taken a week or two to get it sorted out. So I went to the science, and that first term we were doing astronomy and physics. And in the exam at Christmastime I came top of the class, in spite of the fact that I was the one who had failed this 11+. DeVorkin: So you were in a state school, and there was the two-year interval before you were going to go off to boarding school. Burnell: That’s right, yes. DeVorkin: And you took astronomy at that time. Burnell: They taught a little bit of astronomy as part of a combined science course that we did in the first year, maybe the first two years. So it started with astronomy, physics; it moved on to chemistry; it moved on to botany, as far as I can remember. And I don’t recall what we did in the second year.


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DeVorkin: What access did you have to educational materials that would be astronomy or physics or science related in the school? What facilities were available to you? Burnell: I don’t remember a lot in the school other than the textbook that we would have been issued with for that particular course. There probably was a school library, but I don’t remember a lot about it. My parents however were frequently buying us books, and particularly when my parents realized that I might have a scientific bent, having come top of this science exam, if I expressed an interest in a book about science it would come along pretty quickly. DeVorkin: So again there was nothing but encouragement. Burnell: Yes, indeed. Absolutely. Section II: On Burnell’s Interest in Astronomy and Physics DeVorkin: Back to this scoring the highest in astronomy, tell me a little bit about what your impressions are of how this happened. Burnell: I just took to the subject. It was rather more physics than astronomy, I have to say. It was just a little bit about the constellations but you might be interested to know, I got 97% on that exam and the one thing I got wrong was the speed of light. They asked us what was the speed of light and I wrote down 186,000 miles per second, which is correct. And for the first time in my life, looked at that number and thought, ‘That’s very big. That can’t be right.’ Scored out ‘seconds’ and wrote ‘hours.’ DeVorkin: Wonderful. So that’s the first time you realized just how big that number was. What was it that triggered that; that you saw something that just was so counter-intuitive? Burnell: I guess what I’m saying is, even in that first exam I had learnt to check that my answers seemed sensible, that where I came up with a numerical value, that it was reasonable, whatever reasonable means. DeVorkin: Oh this wasn’t a memory thing, you had to calculate it? Burnell: No, it was a memory thing, but one can remember numbers wrongly or units wrongly so I think I had already built in some kind of checking system, and it was just unfortunate that I had never sort of thought about that number before this exam. DeVorkin: What was it about physics that fascinated you most, that drew you to it? Burnell: Well, first of all I could clearly do it, when actually a lot of my classmates couldn’t do it and that gives one a great boost. I think we tend to like the things we’re good at. So, first of all I could do it. When I went away to boarding school at age 13, not only did I discover that I could do it and my classmates were struggling, I also discovered that I could explain it to my classmates and quite a few evenings in that boarding school were spent explaining to classmates how to do the problems that were physics homework. That gives one authority as well! Section III: On Burnell’s Early Experiences with Astronomy DeVorkin Did you see any astronomical facilities like the early Jodrell Bank? Burnell: I don’t recall seeing anything from school, but one of the places where my father was architect was for the Armagh Observatory. Quite close to where we lived.


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DeVorkin: Oh. I didn’t make the connection. Well, we should talk about that. Please. Burnell: Yes. Well, the Armagh Observatory has a lovely old main building for which they need architectural advice for maintenance — you know, the roof is leaking and you know what do we do and how much do we need to do kind of thing, and we want to convert this, if we take down this wall will it fall down kind of thing. So there were those kinds of responsibilities. But he was also the architect for the new planetarium that they built there. This comes a little bit later. This was about 1967, ‘68, but features in the pulsar story. He was the architect for the planetarium because it was part of the observatory. And there were various other jobs an architect had to do. You know, one of the domes was leaking, and that kind of thing. DeVorkin: So he was an architect who would do detail technical work; he was not only conceptual, but mechanical as well. Burnell: Yes. He did both new buildings ab inicio and gave advice on a sort of contract basis for existing buildings. And at one point he let fall to the astronomy people at the observatory that his eldest daughter was interested in astronomy. I must have been in my teens — fifteen, sixteen by this stage. DeVorkin: And you were already at boarding school. Burnell: Yes, but the staff there were very kind and very helpful when they learnt that I was interested, and they showed me the telescopes and they showed me this and they showed me that. And one of them made a very significant statement. He said, “If you want to be an astronomer, you have to be good at staying up at night.” And as a teenager I knew I loved my bed and my sleep. And I became very depressed at that point, because I didn’t reckon I could make it as an astronomer. DeVorkin: I take it that was probably not Ernst Opik who said that. Burnell: I think it was not Ernst Opik. He was always very kind, very helpful. I think it may have been Grassie. Yes, and I’m pretty certain this was one of their observation lists. Yes. DeVorkin: Did he say that to the whole class or did he say that to you? Burnell: No, this was just me. I’d gone one vacation time when I was back home from boarding school. Father will have said something like, “I’m going over to Armagh Observatory on a job today. Do you want to come along for the ride?” and I said “yes” and quite often went with him — more, I think, than my younger brothers and sisters did. I sometimes went along as a surveying assistant holding a surveying pole. And he would sometimes let me do the Theodolite reading and record the data. And that was another place where I learnt to check back. Because when you are surveying you do a sort of loop closure, and if it doesn’t close you know you’ve got your numbers wrong somewhere. So I can remember doing that with him. It was very good training. Sometimes it was also in fields where there were stinging nettles that were waist high, but yes. DeVorkin: I know this is speculation, but the astronomer who said this to you, do you think he would have said that to you if you were a boy? Burnell: I wonder. I hadn’t thought of that. He might not have. It certainly was an era where there were very few female astronomers, and those that were, were being directed. For instance Mary Bruck, who married one of the directors of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, she was steered into solar astronomy because you could do it in daytime. And a couple of my contemporaries who ten years later will have been observing at the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceaux, two women were allowed to observe in


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pairs. A single woman was not allowed to observe; a man and a woman was not allowed to observe. And if two women observed in pairs, they weren’t allowed to drive home afterwards. It was not deemed safe. DeVorkin: A lot of obstacles put in your way that are supposedly for your safety, but not necessarily logical. Burnell: And sometimes excluding in some sense, yes. Section IV: On Burnell’s College Experience and Institutionalized Sexism DeVorkin: Were your parents talking about college? Burnell: Yes, and what I would do and what I wanted to be and that kind of thing. DeVorkin: And how did those conversations go? Were they conversations you looked forward to, or like any teenager or most teenagers, that you dreaded? Burnell: What I think was remarkable was that the decision about what I would do was left up to me. There was no pressure put on me to go any particular way. I did consider architecture. Through following my father around on his visits, I learned quite a lot about architecture and was quite interested in the history of architecture. Still am. So I wondered about that, but reckoned I probably wasn’t good enough on the art and design side. I could judge, but I could not create. DeVorkin: You realized this as a child? Burnell: Yes. I mean, in school, high school, you have a chance to sample all kinds of subjects, including art classes, and I wasn’t terribly good at art classes myself — although I was good at judging what was good. I could identify good design, but I couldn’t make it myself. So I looked at architecture. I looked at archaeology as a possibility. I was interested in that. I started an Archaeology Society at this boarding school, and we went digging — for a Roman road, because York is a big old Roman center. We didn’t find the Roman road, but we were assured by the local archaeologist who was supervising us that, you know, a negative — result was useful — which is also very true in science. So we had established that down to a depth of about six feet the Roman road did not run through the school grounds. But my father brought home some astronomy library books one day. He brought home Fred Hoyle’s Frontiers of Astronomy and something by Dennis Sciama — and I can’t remember the title of that book. It dealt a lot with Mach’s principle. I remember struggling. And I didn’t just flip through these books; I took them off to my bedroom to read. You know, and a fortnight later Dad was saying, “Where is my library books?” Sorry, “a fortnight” means two weeks. I became hooked. And that’s when I decided I wanted to do astronomy. And then followed the incident at Armagh Observatory where I was told you have to be able to stay up at night. And I became quite depressed at that point, because it didn’t look as if I could do astronomy. DeVorkin: So that really did affect you. Burnell: It did, yes. DeVorkin: Did you talk to your Dad about it, or anybody? Burnell: Probably, although I don’t remember doing that. But a few months later I discovered there was a subject called radio astronomy which you can do in the daytime, so I decided I was going to be a radio astronomer. I must have been about fifteen, sixteen, and it was getting to the stage where you had to decide what subjects you were going to study. The British schoolchildren specialize a lot, lot sooner. By about age


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sixteen you are down to three subjects and you pursue those subjects at college. The careers mistress at the boarding school had not heard of radio astronomy. DeVorkin: Even with Bernard Lovell being so well known? Burnell: She still hadn’t heard of it. So I took the initiative and I wrote to Bernard Lovell. I didn’t have a proper address. It was Jodrell Bank, somewhere in Cheshire, you know. And I said, “I want to be a radio astronomer. What subjects should I do at university?” And (a) he got the letter, and (b) he replied. And he told me what I needed to know. ….. DeVorkin: Right. So, he wrote back to you. Do you remember what he said? Burnell: He said, “Do physics.” He said some people come in through electrical engineering, and there are some people doing this new computing stuff, but basically physics was a good route to go. So I was still a little bit uncertain about whether I should do some astronomy or not, so I applied to universities where you could do astronomy, but I ended up doing physics, straight physics. DeVorkin: So you chose Glasgow. How would you typify your experience at Glasgow? Burnell: Well, it was certainly very different from what I expected. One of the things that took me by surprise is that almost all the students lived at home. They came in on the bus at nine o’clock and they went home on the bus at five o’clock. Which I hadn’t expected, but actually is quite the norm in — well, certainly in Glasgow and in one or two other Scottish Universities. It was a big city. I had certainly achieved that okay. It was a big city that was beginning to decline. The ship building was going, the heavy industry was beginning to go, and it was quite, quite rough in parts — very rough in some parts. I lived in digs for the first year — sorry — in lodgings for the first year, and then was in a women’s dorm for the next two years and in the first coed dorm for my final year. Living in the women’s dorm was an interesting experience. It’s where I first really came across questions like, “Are you sure you want to do physics? Can you bear to do physics? How can you do physics?” DeVorkin: Really? Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: From your peers. Burnell: Yes, from my peers. And also the attitude, “Well, you are only going to get married, so why are you bothering about doing an honors degree? Why not just do general degrees like the rest of us, a pass degree, and a three-year degree?” There wasn’t a lot of ambition amongst women, other than to get married. Which caught me slightly by surprise? I met it amongst the less academic girls at my high school, but the more academic ones, the brighter ones, were going to go and get full honors degrees. DeVorkin: Did you seek out other more dedicated academics among the students as your friends? Burnell: Yes, except I was the only female in the honors physics class in a class of fifty. DeVorkin: Would you typify that as self— selection? Burnell: Yes. I think that’s probably a fair comment. Yes. There were many others that could have done physics honors but didn’t. It was also an inhibiting atmosphere for women. There was a tradition in that university that whenever a woman walked into a lecture hall all the guys in the room would stamp [makes noise of loud stomping and banging on desktops] their desks and whistle and catcall. Every time. So for my


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junior and senior years, I had to face that every time I went into a classroom. And again, the women in my dorm said, “Jocelyn, why don’t you change course?” So I had to stop and think, “Do I really want to do physics badly enough that I am going to live with this?” DeVorkin: This was a tradition? Was this a British tradition? Burnell: It was a Glasgow tradition. I’m sure there were other schools that did it, but it wasn’t throughout Britain. DeVorkin: How far back does that go, do you think? Burnell: That I don’t know. DeVorkin: I wonder where it came from. It certainly is a very derisive sort of thing. Burnell: Yes. What really annoys me in retrospect is my contemporaries probably didn’t in a sense realize what they were doing; it was just, you know what people did. But the faculty did nothing, and thereby condoned it. Indeed, one or two of the faculty smirked and looked as if they’d like to join in. DeVorkin: But they didn’t. They didn’t join in. Burnell: They didn’t join in, no. DeVorkin: Did you ever protest formally? Burnell: No, I didn’t. Looking back on it, I’m not quite sure why. But in part I guess it’s as I got older that I got a perspective on things, that I’ve seen more clearly the injustices or whatever you want to call them — the thousand pinpricks. I wasn’t terribly alert — I wasn’t at all alert — as a feminist in those days. DeVorkin: It’s a very curious custom. Could it have been so ingrained that it was just something they did? Burnell: Yes, absolutely. They learnt it from the class ahead of them. DeVorkin: And you didn’t take it personally, I take it, but it was still this identification of being a woman. Burnell: Yes. . And being the only woman, I mean it was fairly clear who it was directed at. DeVorkin: Did this happen in classes where there was a larger fraction of women? Burnell: I suspect in arts faculties where women were in the majority it must have been a much feebler affair and probably petered out. DeVorkin: Extraordinary. Burnell: It was teasing. Here was only one occasion where it was hostile, and that was the time I came top in a subsidiary math exam, and they were livid. DeVorkin: Really? Burnell: Yes. I was scared on that occasion. DeVorkin: Did you ever question your resolve?


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Burnell: I knew I wanted to be an astronomer. I knew that I had to get a degree. And probably in most sciences in Glasgow you would have faced that kind of barricade, harassment, so actually changing and doing another science wouldn’t actually help. DeVorkin: Did you ever go home and say you’d like to find a university where they don’t do this sort of thing? Burnell: Somehow I don’t think that occurred to me. There weren’t many people who transferred university. What I did do was to learn not to blush. You can actually control your blushing. And within a few weeks I had achieved that. And that gave the guys much less reward. But I was obviously quite nervous in class. We sat in long benches, continuous wooden benches and continuous wooden desks. DeVorkin: Highly tiered? Burnell: Tiered, yes. And the women sat in the front row, always. We were put there. In some classes there were assigned seats; in some classes it was just the norm that the women sat in the front row or two, depending on how many women there were, and the men sat behind them. And I can remember on one or two occasions being sufficiently nervous that my pen fell over the edge. And the Instructor came and picked it up and handed it to me. And that provoked [makes loud banging and stomping noises]. DeVorkin: Really? Burnell: Yes. Oh yes. Yes. And if I asked a question in class, it would probably be accompanied by a bit of that — particularly if my question was a good one. DeVorkin: But it was always just that? When you scored highest in this exam, was it still just a— Burnell: It was an amplified version of that. And more sort of booing and hissing and catcalling. DeVorkin: Here many times when people hit or stomp their feet, its applause. Burnell: Yes. No, this wasn’t. This was barracking. This is Irish slang. I guess a combination of harassment and teasing would be the translation. DeVorkin: How did you keep from blushing? Did you try to turn it into applause —? Burnell: No, it was part of entering the Lecture Theater. You took a deep breath and you sort of mentally controlled your face. You can actually stop from flushing, with a bit of practice. DeVorkin: Did this ever make you think how you were going to survive a whole life of this? Or did you think, “It can’t be this way once I’m an astronomer.” Burnell: I’m not sure that I remember. I think I suspected that it was peculiar, or that it was local. I don’t know how I came to that conclusion. Maybe I met up with some of my high school friends and asked them, you know, “In your university, do they do this?” and they said, “No.” That’s probably most likely what happened, so I knew that it was a local and temporary phenomena; that I wouldn’t have to, at least in that form, tolerate it the whole of my life. DeVorkin: As you moved through Glasgow and took courses in Physics, what was your first course in astronomy, or did you take any astronomy?


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Burnell: In the end, I didn’t take any astronomy. I had quite a discussion with an advisor when I arrived in Glasgow because I had said on my form that I wanted to be an astronomer. I had judged that I ought to do some university level chemistry. One of my reasons for doing physics was that I knew I you could only do astronomy in an academic environment and I had no idea at that stage what class of degree I would get; I didn’t know whether I was academic caliber or not, so I was very carefully keeping my options open and I judged I’d be better equipped to get a job in the outside world if I’d actually done a bit of university level chemistry than university level astronomy. It was also the case that astronomy in Glasgow, at that time, was pretty dull. It was positional astronomy, with all the little modifications that you have to make, the precessions, the corrections and so on, and it didn’t strike me as being very exciting. So, although it was a real struggle, because I hadn’t done any chemistry for several years, I actually did the first year of chemistry at Glasgow. DeVorkin: And was this on the advice of the person you talked to? Burnell: I think I had it in my mind and I will have discussed it with them but the initiative probably came from me. DeVorkin: So you decided not to take the astronomy there. What were your plans for the future, or is there anything that I’m missing in Glasgow that is important to development of your career that we should cover. Burnell: There’s probably not a lot else from Glasgow that’s relevant. I wanted to be a radio astronomer, I was clear about that, if I was of sufficient academic standard. DeVorkin: But did you have any idea what a radio astronomer did? Burnell: Yes. By that stage I had read at least one of Bernard Lovell’s books; I had been to hear Martin Ryle lecture ... I think it must have been something like an IAU meeting in Ireland. It was some big meeting and Martin Ryle gave a big lecture in Belfast and a big lecture in Dublin, as part of it, on radio astronomy, and I can remember that. My parents took me to the Belfast one. DeVorkin: And what do you recall fascinated you about what you could do with radio astronomy? Burnell: What I particularly liked was that it was astronomy plus physics. It was applying a lot of the physics, the electromagnetic theory that I was learning as an undergraduate and I became more and more convinced that that was what I wanted to do. DeVorkin: Were there particular problems that fascinated you? Burnell: No, I think like many kids I was grabbed by the sheer scale and splendor of the field, of the cosmos, the sizes, the quantities, really struck me, and also the number of beautiful pictures of galaxies in books. DeVorkin: But they weren’t coming out of radio astronomy, not those pictures. Burnell: No, but they were beginning to identify radio galaxies which was fascinating — how did the radio galaxies relate to these beautiful spirals that we saw photographed in the books? So it was good. DeVorkin: What about the technical or instrumentation side? Was that something attractive to you? Burnell: I’ve been a user of instruments but I’ve never been particularly keen on building instruments and unlike many of my male contemporaries I did not build radios as a high school kid, or things like that, didn’t


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do any of that. I read books but somehow, the radio ham stuff passed me by, maybe just because of the worlds I moved in. DeVorkin: But you had a radio? Burnell: We had a radio in the house for listening to the BBC, yes. DeVorkin: But you didn’t tinker with it? Burnell: No. I wasn’t particularly interested, possibly because there was nobody else around who could’ve anyway told me what the bits were; there was nobody else in the house taking radios to bits. DeVorkin: What about in your school experience? Did you take electronics courses? Burnell: No such thing existed. DeVorkin: Not even at Glasgow? Burnell: Oh in Glasgow, yes, but in boarding school, high school, nothing like that existed. DeVorkin: Electronic circuitry? Burnell: We did a bit of electromagnetic theory, yes. DeVorkin: Making a motor? Burnell: I doubt if the school had the equipment for that. Remember it had to buy in stuff so we could sit the practical exams? At university we had courses on the electronics, yes and we will have had some labs on electronics and so on. I did them — don’t remember being particularly grabbed by them. What I did do which made a big impression was Jodrell Bank started running summer schools in the year between my junior and senior year at college and I went on this summer school. DeVorkin: And what year would that be? Burnell: Summer of 1964. It was the first ever summer school that Jodrell had run. They did not expect women to apply; they had no dormitory accommodation for women and two of us did apply so we were accommodated in the course organizer’s house — Henry Palmer, he was one of the Jodrell Bank astronomers. DeVorkin: Who was the other woman? Burnell: Her name was Julie Turner and she was a physics undergraduate at Birmingham and I kept up with her for a few years after but lost contact. DeVorkin: What was that course like? Burnell: It was very good and it was immense fun. We typically had a few lectures a day and the rest of the day we were attached to a research group. I was attached to Rod Davis’ hydrogen line group which had just started studying the OH radical and it was OH in absorption; they hadn’t even discovered the maser stuff then. It was fascinating, because the OH clouds were not in the same place as the neutral hydrogen clouds and they couldn’t believe this and they thought I’d done the data analysis wrong, so they kept saying, “Re— do it, re— do it.” But it genuinely was the case that the OH distribution was different from the neutral hydrogen. I also remember that there was a computer in Manchester at that stage; there was a land line


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connection to the computer in Manchester, but this land line was broken for most of the summer we were there and we, the summer students, were doing long multiplications, long divisions and it really made a difference to my arithmetic which showed for several years. I can remember in the Senior Honors class, the Faculty being impressed with my arithmetic. You know, we were doing something in the laboratory and I would produce the answer far, far quicker than they could or anybody else could and it was because I spent six weeks doing long arithmetic. DeVorkin: This was not something from your early childhood? Burnell: No, I mean my arithmetic was perfectly competent. We were a generation that learnt tables and things like that, but this made it brilliant! DeVorkin: I see. Did the Jodrell summer change your ideas about anything? Burnell: I was even more convinced I wanted to do radio astronomy. By that stage, it was clear that I was going to get a respectable Honors class degree and therefore that I was in the running for a grad student position. I talked with some of the Jodrell people and the Faculty would say, “Yes, do apply to Jodrell,” and the grad students would say, “You know, Sir Bernard has the reputation of being a misogynist.” There had been a grad student many years before; she and a male grad student had put the dormitory to a use for which it was not intended. The male had bragged; it had reached Sir Bernard’s ears and he said, “I’m not having a woman on site ever again!” It’s interesting the women carry the consequences for some of these actions! So I was warned by the grad students that I wouldn’t get accepted. But my options were Jodrell Bank or Cambridge and I didn’t think I’d get into Cambridge, so I applied to Jodrell Bank and there was a stony silence. Section V: Graduate School and Marriage Burnell: We were thinking that there was something wrong. Of course the first thought is, ‘Jocelyn’s connected up this aerial wrongly, she was responsible for the wiring.’ So I had an anxious time while we checked out the antenna… Tony [] and Paul [Scott] started walking down this very long laboratory saying “Now what is it that shows up in our telescope but doesn’t show up in yours , what’s going on?” and I was pattering along behind them trying to keep up in every sense of the word. Robin stayed by the pen recorders and we got down the far end of this very long laboratory and there was a strangled cry, “Here it is!” We went charging back up the lab; we’d miscalculated when it was due to appear! Fortunately by only five minutes. If we’d got that calculation more wrong, who knows? But that was good. Their instrument wasn’t totally east— west or it was not on horizontal ground or something like that and we had just miscalculated when it would appear. It was also a transit instrument, we had miscalculated when it would go through their beam, and it was as simple as that. DeVorkin: This must bring tremendous feelings back to you? Burnell: It was a bad moment when it didn’t appear because it suggested that there was a fault with our equipment and I was the person who had wired it up and my Ph.D. was on the line, it was not just my Ph.D. but probably my whole scientific career. I think I still felt bit of a country bumpkin in Cambridge, I wasn’t a suave southern English person. DeVorkin: Was it an emotional time for you then? Burnell: I think it was a very important time. It was a very significant time. Until another radio telescope picked up this signal, we were afraid that it was some fault in our equipment. DeVorkin: Right.


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Burnell: And since I had been responsible for the wiring of the whole radio telescope, I was very scared until — well, even more scared at that point when it didn’t appear — that I had done something drastically wrong and I was about to be booted out of Cambridge, no Ph.D. or anything else. DeVorkin: Did you feel you were living on the edge throughout all of this time? That you had to prove yourself? Burnell: Yes. With hindsight I can see that part of the Cambridge ambience is a supreme self-confidence I think not always purely justified. But that was inhibiting. DeVorkin: What is this Southern culture you’re talking about? Burnell: There is a distinct difference between Southern England and Northern England plus Scotland plus other fringe parts of the United Kingdom. The people from the North and the fringes tend to have an inferiority complex in the face of the Southern English confidence, and in Cambridge there is that par excellence. And I think I was always a little surprised to find myself in Cambridge. I mean, I had never expected to go there. I had only applied just in case while I waiting to go to Australia, so I was always anxious that I was not going to make the grade. And I worked jolly hard as a consequence. And as a consequence of working jolly hard ended up being one of about half a dozen people out of a few hundred grad students they had who got their thesis in the regulation three years. But that moment where it didn’t appear in Paul and Robin’s antenna was dire. …. DeVorkin: What was your feeling when you heard Robin calling? Burnell: It was Robin. Yes. It was relief. Excitement. DeVorkin: Did you run? Burnell: Yes. We all ran back. And one of the interesting things was to see whether the pulses looked the same, you know, with another system — how different, how similar. And we must have had to do something with the time constant of Robin’s receiver, because he wasn’t normally observing rapidly fluctuating things, so he probably had some flash up there. But yes, it turned out to be very exciting, having gone through a desperate moment. That was desperate, but that showed that it was not the radio telescope or the receiver. It was external to that. DeVorkin: Were you getting any kind of feelings from Hewish or from the others that you had failed when they were walking down this very long corridor? Burnell: It was getting to that, yes. What was also happening around about this time, initially it was Tony Hewish and I. And then we needed some help, so we brought in somebody else. And I think the first people we roped in were Paul and Robin, who then became party to this amazing result, and of course were interested and continued to ask what was going on and offer suggestions about tests we could do and so on. And the group, so to speak, gradually grew, and more and more experienced and powerful Cambridge brains came in on this problem. It wasn’t a fault with the equipment. I had to work very hard to keep up with all these bright ideas that were tumbling in. It was quite a tough time for a grad student. You could get marginalized very easily in that kind of process. DeVorkin: And you certainly didn’t want to be marginalized.


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Burnell: No, I didn’t want to be marginalized. I was hanging in there, but I did also have to keep an eye on a thesis which I had to produce. So I was trying to keep several balls in the air, and it was quite hard work. DeVorkin: Did you ever go to Tony Hewish and say, “Forget the thesis. I want to concentrate on this anomaly”? Burnell: Yes. In effect, I did. And Tony informed me I couldn’t, because the thesis title had been registered as “The Angular Diameter of Quasars.” I couldn’t change it at this late stage. DeVorkin: But isn’t that just bureaucracy? Burnell: From what I now know of university systems, I believe he was wrong. But I believed him at the time. DeVorkin: Did he believe it? Burnell: I don’t know. He was sometimes a bit laid back and inclined to take a course of least action, least effort. I just don’t know. I think he should have known that you could change a thesis title or could have asked some of his more senior colleagues. I had one or two encounters with Tony over the thesis, and that was one of them. He told me the thesis had to be the scintillating quasars, and I had to get on and measure their angular diameters. And because a lot of time was going on the pulsar observations, obviously, this was getting a little tough. DeVorkin: So you’re supposed annoyance at these pulsars, as you expressed in some of these interviews, is just — actually it’s misleading. You were very interested in the pulsars. Burnell: Oh, extremely interested, but also very practical. I had at this stage become engaged to be married. My grant money was running out in the fall, and I had a very limited window in which to get a Ph.D. DeVorkin: But you were onto something really potentially important? Burnell: But I couldn’t do the thesis on that, apparently. DeVorkin: Okay. Burnell: So I had to do that as well as pull together the thesis. DeVorkin: Did you ever think of appealing to the university? Burnell: No, that didn’t occur to me, but something played into my hands rather well. I asked Tony to read the first draft of the first chapter of the thesis, and he agreed, but very reluctantly. Incidentally he read it and said it read more like an after dinner speech than a Cambridge University thesis, and would I mind sobering it up a bit. But he also said he wouldn’t read any more of it; it was my responsibility, this thesis. Until it was done. DeVorkin: But you had to do it. Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: Looking back at it now, how do you feel about that?


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Burnell: Well, different thesis advisors play things different ways, and that was Tony’s style. At least it was his style with me. DeVorkin: Do you know if he treated others the same way? No one else had such a poignant thing happen to them; such an unexpected turn of events. Burnell: What I did notice is when, after that Christmas break, I appeared in the laboratory wearing an engagement ring, many people’s approach to me changed. DeVorkin: In what way? Burnell: Well, in those days in Britain married women didn’t have careers. They might work a little bit ‘til the kids came along, and then they stopped work. So this was a signal that I was exiting. And other interesting phenomenon from that time, I found that people were much more willing to congratulate me on my engagement to be married than congratulate me on making a major astrophysical discovery. So I was going, wasn’t I? DeVorkin: Did you start wearing the ring before this fateful night? Burnell: Between pulsars number two and three. DeVorkin: The conversation between you and Hewish about your thesis? Burnell: That was probably earlier; at least the conversation about the main thrust of the thesis was earlier. DeVorkin: It was earlier, so it had nothing to do with your marriage or your engagement. Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: And what about your decision to be engaged? Did you know that this was the stigma? Burnell: No, I definitely had not at that stage fully appreciated the social pressures that there were on the woman — to get married, or when she was married, or when there were children. DeVorkin: So that was something that you had relatively compartmentalized. Burnell: I was naïve. I can remember actually thinking, “Men can have careers and marriages, so why can’t women?” I assumed symmetry. DeVorkin: Pretty reasonable. Today. Burnell: It was totally stupid; totally stupid in those days. DeVorkin: Okay, well let’s go back to the point where you didn’t want to be marginalized and carry on. You were continuing to observe, working on your thesis, and you discovered more of these things. What was Tony doing at this time? Burnell: Well, Tony was taking quite an interest of course, particularly in the pulsars, and there were ideas coming from various directions about further observations and tests we could do. DeVorkin: But they weren’t called pulsars yet.


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Burnell: No, no. They had various nicknames. The one that stuck was “little green men.” Which is a phrase that was current in Britain in those days to indicate extraterrestrial civilization? And radio astronomers had at the backs of their minds that if anybody made contact with extraterrestrials it probably would be the radio astronomers. DeVorkin: Speculation about what this was. How did that go? Were you still in the race? Did you feel marginalized? Burnell: I had to watch it. And if I tell you about the night I found the second one, it actually illustrates quite a few things. I went down to Tony’s office about four o’clock, five o’clock in the afternoon to talk to him about something, and the door was shut — which is very unusual in that department. So I knocked and he said, “Come in.” I put my head around the door and he said, “Oh, come in, Jocelyn, and shut the door.” So I went in and shut the door. And it was quite a high level meeting. It was Tony, it was Martin Ryle who was head of the group, and another senior radio astronomer — I can’t remember who. And they were actually discussing how to announce this discovery. We didn’t seriously think it was little green men, but we didn’t have a natural hypothesis to put in its place. We actually had very little clue what this thing was at that stage, and we had only one of them. Well, we didn’t resolve the issue that evening, and I went home to get some supper, very disgusted. You know, some silly lot of little green men had chosen my frequency and my antenna to signal to planet Earth, and here was I trying to get a Ph.D. and running out of money and time and blah blah blah. DeVorkin: I think you were annoyed about something else. Burnell: Subconsciously I may have been, but I wasn’t articulating that actually. I was just annoyed at the position I found myself in, without time and money to exploit all these things, even half exploit them. DeVorkin: But you had gone to his office unannounced — Burnell: Unannounced. Uninvited. DeVorkin: Uninvited. And there was a meeting underway that didn’t include you. Burnell: Yes. That’s right. So as I say, I was struggling to keep in there. I came back into the lab that evening after supper to do some more of the routine chart analysis and was examining another patch of sky and because scientists may listen to this I’ll say a little bit about what it was. In the UK we are sufficiently far north that Cassiopeia A is circumpolar. Cassiopeia A never sets. Now your radio telescope looks south, but if it has any response northwards it can pick up Cassiopeia A when it’s due north. And our telescope did this and there was a chunk of sky around about 11 hours, 30 minutes, which was often unusable because of Cassiopeia A at lower culmination. DeVorkin: And it’s so intense in the radio. Burnell: Yes, that’s right — that it still shines through the back of the telescope [beam] and in amongst all this mess from Cassiopeia A seen through the back of the radio telescope, it looked like there was a bit of a signal like the first pulsar. Scruff. From a totally different bit of sky. It was about ten to ten at night at this point, and the Cavendish laboratory was locked at ten. And you could choose to be locked in or locked out. So very rapidly I got out the other chart recordings that covered that patch of the sky, strew them all over the floor, and saw that there was on occasion, in amongst this mess of lower Cassiopeia A, another of these signals. That signal was due to transit at about three o’clock in the morning, so I got out of the Cavendish lab at about half a minute to ten, before I got locked in, and drove out to the Observatory at two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning, to switch to that beam in the fast chart recorder. And it nearly didn’t work. It


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was extremely cold. It was December the 2 1st, and in cold weather something in the antenna only worked at half power. And it was only at half power when I got out there. But by flicking switches and breathing on it and swearing and praying and cursing and everything I could do, I got it to work for five minutes — and it was the right five minutes, and it was the right beam setting. And in came another string of pulses. That was the good moment. That’s the Eureka point. The first one was just a worry. But finding a second one first of all scotches the little green men idea. There won’t be two lots of little green men on opposite sides of the universe. So that was very sweet. And it also suggested that we were hitting the top of an iceberg of a whole new population. DeVorkin: You did. Burnell: Yes. I suspected. I knew that instinctively when the second one came. DeVorkin: When the second one came? Burnell: Yes. First one, no. It could have been anything. Second one, similar but not identical, a different part of the sky, this must be a new stellar population of some sort or galactic or, you know, astronomical thing. And that was lovely. That was very, very good. So on that instance I piled the charts on Tony’s desk and said, “Look at this, Tony,” and went off on vacation. And of course that helped the publication problem as well, because it’s not little green men, there’s more than one of them. You publish the first one and say, “We’ve found some others.” And the day I came back from Christmas vacation I found another two suspects on the charts, and they were confirmed over the next few weeks. DeVorkin: Finding the suspects means scrutinizing hundreds and hundreds of feet of chart paper. Burnell: About three miles. DeVorkin: Was this the same scrutiny that you had to do for your thesis? Burnell: Yes. I mean it was part of the thesis scanning. But I came back from vacation, I found these two further suspects. Tony wasn’t around, so I just did some chart analysis. Tony reappeared. At the end of that afternoon I said, “Hey Tony, I think I found another two. And his reaction was, “How many more have you missed? Go back through all your recordings.” And that going back was of course different. It was an extra scan. And no way could feed into the thesis. DeVorkin: And when he said it like that, in what sounds like a negative way to say it, and then asks you to spend this extra time, did the issue of the thesis come up again? Burnell: I was in general banging away about my concern about the thesis. Around about that time, maybe two or three weeks after that, I said to him that I wanted to stop observing; that I needed time to analyze the data that was still unanalyzed and write the thesis. And he agreed. And I think at the end of January I stopped observing. I’d need to check that date, but it was somewhere around about there. DeVorkin: Now what about your thesis defense? When did that take place? Burnell: That took place the following January. I put the thesis in at the end of September. The system is Britain is different. You need a bit of time for the examiners to read it. Tony took great pleasure in not telling me who my external examiner was until the night before. I knew who my internal was because I had been negotiating dates and times with him. In Britain, you do not always know who your external examiner is when you write the thesis, so you cite everybody, just in case!


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DeVorkin: He already knew you were getting married and this was just generally a write-off. Did you ever consider not getting married? Burnell: No, I don’t think I envisaged that. A bit of me believed that I could be married and have a career and a bit of me knew fine well that women in Britain at that stage who were married didn’t have careers. DeVorkin: A few did. For example, Margaret Burbidge. Burnell: Margaret Burbidge, yes. Her career has got hiccups in it as well. DeVorkin: But I’m wondering, was she or anyone else, by this time, a role model for you? Burnell: No. One of my great regrets is that there was no role model, and not even a mentor, actually. There were times when I could have done with a good mentor. So I was very much on my own. I was married to a man who expected wives to be at home. He said he didn’t but he actually did! DeVorkin: You certainly came to international attention when Tony Hewish got the Nobel Prize. Burnell: Mmm [affirmative]. DeVorkin: But what was it like personally for you? Because I heard all of the controversy that we all know. How did that controversy develop? Who were the voices? Burnell: I think there was fairly widespread feeling amongst my generation, sort of postdoc generation, that things had been a little bit unfair. And I can remember for instance I was one of the editors of the Observatory magazine. There were four or five editors — I think four of us at that time — and there was a question of whether we should put a note in an issue of the Observatory congratulating Martin Ryle and Tony Hewish. And I was for it, but the other three editors said, wrote, “Nobel = No Bell.” DeVorkin: I haven’t seen that one. Is that in print? Burnell: No, no. That was amongst ourselves as we were making decisions. DeVorkin: My God. Nobel = No-Bell Burnell: No — space — Bell. Yes. DeVorkin: Who was it that turned that one up? Burnell: It was probably Mike Penston, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. DeVorkin: That sounds so British, the humor. Burnell: Yes, yes, that’s right. DeVorkin: How did you feel about that? Burnell: Well actually, I was very pleased about the Nobel Prize. I can remember the day vividly, because something else happened that day, and if I put this in a novel nobody would believe it. The main project I was to work on at the Mullard Space Science Observatory was an X-raysatellite called Ariel V. This was in the days when Britain could afford its own satellites. You know, it was British Domestic Space Science Program. And that was huge fun to work on and so on.


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DeVorkin: There were high-energy components to that. Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: So is this a direct result of your getting into this gamma ray group? Burnell: No. This is because my husband moved to a job nearby, and I wrote a begging letter to the director of the Mullard Space Science Lab saying, “Would you have a job for me?” And the job I actually got — although I disguise it on my CV — was on the technical support staff. Which was no problem out at Mullard Space Science Lab, but when I went into University College London to use the library, they said I couldn’t. Technicians couldn’t use the library. Well, the lab wangled me special permission, but you know I was in a pretty lowly status. Well anyway, this satellite launched mid-October from its site off the coast of Kenya. We had a radio linked to the launch site, and we all came into the lab at eight o’clock in the morning and listened to the controllers’ launches, their discussions. And it launched and went through the various stages, and gradually we drifted off back to our offices to work. And then on the midday news program was the announcement about the Nobel Prize. And the wife of one of the faculty heard this, and he came rushing along to my office to relay the news, I think expecting me to blow a fuse. And I didn’t, because I have a strategic sense, a political sense. This was the first time that a Nobel Prize in Physics had gone to anything astro. For the first time astronomy and astrophysics had been brought within the purview of physics. And I saw that as extremely important and nice incidentally those pulsars were part of it. But I wasn’t cross or anything. It did have a slight social effect in the sense that it said to me that, “Men get Nobel Prizes and women stay at home looking after babies,” because I had a wee one by then. So it’s had some consequences for me in my self-understanding, but I was very, very pleased that a Nobel Prize in Physics was going to astronomy. DeVorkin: Well, yes, but — all well and good, but there must have been at least, considering what the reaction of your co-editors at the observatory was, a pretty swift reaction among those close to you. For instance, how did your husband react to it? Burnell: It became really public about six months later, when Fred Hoyle spoke, supposedly in an impromptu manner at a press conference. He managed to remember my married name, which not many people do in impromptu circumstances — so I just wonder how impromptu it was. And he was using the incident to berate some of the Cambridge folk, establishment. So I think it was a convenient issue for him for other reasons. DeVorkin: That’s a very important point. You have always appeared to me to be — from the media side or reading secondary reports — to be very reticent at being publicly taking anything but a positive attitude about it. Burnell: Mmm [affirmative]. DeVorkin: And I often wondered whether that was a hundred percent sincere. Burnell: I think so. Yes. Yes, I think so. DeVorkin: Okay. But that there could also be an element there that you don’t want to be used. Burnell: Well, that’s something one always has to look out for in life — I mean, forever and ever, and particularly when you get a name of some sort. People are always trying to hitch you to their cause. So that’s something I’ve had to learn post-pulsars.


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DeVorkin: When did you first know that you had a name? Burnell: Well, I guess I would not have got the job I got at the Mullard Space Science Lab unless I had had the discovery of pulsars behind me. I think a woman writing a begging letter probably wouldn’t stand much chance at the job, particularly since I wanted to work part time. DeVorkin: But having the pulsars in your Vitae, however you are given credit for it, is something you earned. Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: It isn’t something that was given to you in any way that I can think of. So — how to say this? That doesn’t afford you an undeserved privilege. Burnell: Yes, okay. DeVorkin: Your name opens doors. It is issue-related. Did you try to avoid that? Burnell: I discovered quite quickly that my husband became twitchy at my successes, and I learnt to play them down, certainly at home and probably in other circumstances as well. When my marriage broke up ten years ago, I can see that my profile just went up like the side of a house, because I was free to accept rewards and to do things like broadcasts and things like that. DeVorkin: And you were not free when you were married? Burnell: It was more difficult. For example, I did not receive my Ph.D. in person. My husband said we couldn’t afford for me to travel from the South Coast of England to Cambridge for the degree ceremony— which I didn’t actually believe. I think it was more significant that he did not have a Ph.D. And I didn’t have to go in person to receive the degree. I mean, it’s a nice occasion, but you don’t have to go. And it made an honorary degree ceremony in Cambridge a couple of years ago all the more meaningful. It is difficult, because there is still the perception that in a partnership, a marriage, the male is the leader, the dominant, and the women is often there — think of photographs — as the attractive accompaniment. Less often do you see a woman being photographed and her man standing sort of behind her right shoulder? You know, the world is not actually symmetric. DeVorkin: So you feel that you’re being able to take these jobs to accommodate your husband, it was just lucky that you were also a name, someone with a major discovery under her belt, someone who evidently was capable. Burnell: Yes. I kept changing wavelength. DeVorkin: That’s right. Is there anything we should cover between Southampton and the move to Mullard dealing with the gamma ray work? Is there any connection there? I think you said there was not. Burnell: No, there isn’t, no. The connection was my husband’s career path, not mine. Section VI: Later Career Burnell: I can remember in the begging letter I wrote saying that So— and— So and So— and— So could be approached, you know, “if you want information on the quality of my work.” And I would imagine when I moved to MSSL I would have given one Southampton and one Cambridge — probably Tony Hewish, but


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maybe Martin Ryle. I don’t quite remember. It was a very — in British terms — a very unorthodox way of getting a job, to write a begging letter. DeVorkin: How did you get the editorship at the Observatory? Burnell: Oh, I was invited to do that. There’s a British woman astronomer, Carol Jordan who is just a year or two senior to me. And she had been an editor and was retiring and suggested my name. And it was good, because it was something I could do at home — keep my hand in, you know, while I brought up a family. DeVorkin: During that time the Quarterly Journal was still quite active. Burnell: Yes, that’s right. The Observatory was not officially part of the RAS. I was one of the editors responsible for reporting the meetings of the RAS. We had the jobs divided up between us. You know, one liaised with the printer and two of us did the RAS meetings, and one dealt with book reviews and that kind of thing. DeVorkin: Right. So you did have to attend the meetings. Burnell: Yes. I actually did this quite deliberately to sort of maintain some visibility. So I was at every RAS meeting except probably the one where the kid was born, but every RAS meeting in that interval. Taught at Open University Section VII: Personal Life DeVorkin: Did you have any friends or any people that you could confide in and just unload your anger? Burnell: Yes, I had a very good flat mate, a person with whom I shared an apartment that final year in Cambridge. She was terrific. She was interesting. She was a mature student doing theology, and we would talk alternatively about who wrote the books of the Bible and what the latest theories of cosmology were over supper at night. It was very stimulating. DeVorkin: And what was her name? Burnell: Janet Smith, now Janet Nightingale. She is active, alive, but with a condition that has a death sentence at the end of it. So we don’t know how long for. DeVorkin: That’s awful. I’m sorry to hear it. But she might be the kind of person that a biographer would like to talk to. Burnell: Right. I think she would be very good at that. She has done that kind of role before sometimes with a TV company that’s recreating the story or something like that. So, she knows the story, and she lived it with me. DeVorkin: Later on did she remain your confidante throughout, even at Edinburgh? Burnell: No, I had other friends in the Edinburgh area that I was quite close to. DeVorkin: These were people who were local and you didn’t correspond with them. Burnell: I’ve kept up a correspondence with a large number of people, but at any one time I would tend to be talking more with whoever was the most local of my friends.


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DeVorkin: Oh, of course. If they’re available and local. But sometimes writing out your feelings and your view of things— just as you said you kept a notebook. Burnell: Yes. DeVorkin: Did you keep diaries through all of this? Burnell: No, I didn’t. I had that logbook at Cambridge, but nothing else actually. There have been one or two special events where I kept a diary, like in 1993 Joe Taylor invited me to be his guest at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, and I kept a diary of that week, you know, which you just wouldn’t believe you had remembered accurately unless you had a diary. Burnell: No, I didn’t. I had that logbook at Cambridge, but nothing else actually. There have been one or two special events where I kept a diary, like in 1993 Joe Taylor invited me to be his guest at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, and I kept a diary of that week, you know, which you just wouldn’t believe you had remembered accurately unless you had a diary. DeVorkin: That’s very nice to know. And you have these diaries. … DeVorkin: The question is, who could act as your emotional vent, somebody that you could simply talk to, express your feelings. And anyone who would be using this interview at some time in the future would want to probably know those kinds of contacts. Right. Okay. Well, when I was in Edinburgh Christine Davis, who is a fellow Quaker, and Liz Sim, who was also at the Observatory at the same time as I was. They were probably the people that I used most for support. The time at MSSL what did I do? I’m not sure I can remember. Well, there was Christine Davis then also actually. Known her many, many years, even though she wasn’t local. I think probably when I was at Mullard Space Science Lab, because the child was small I actually had very limited time for myself, and I probably was not sustaining many friendships at that stage, you know, outside the marriage. DeVorkin: Sometimes when you have a very local friend who also has a kid— Burnell: Yes, you can do that. DeVorkin: Did you ever have that sort of situation? Burnell: Yes. Across the road where we lived there was a woman with two boys — one my son’s age and one a bit younger. And she and I — her name is Valerie Orr she and I got on very well together. DeVorkin: How would you typify how you became a spokesman for women and women in science? If you were asked to describe in 100 words or less, how would you describe it? Burnell: I think it really took off when I became Professor of Physics at the Open University. The OU Press Office played this “doubling the number of women professors of Physics.” DeVorkin: Ah, okay, I have seen that statement in several places. Did you think this would be one of the consequences of your taking the Open University position? Burnell: I suspected it might be. I had been on the fringes of some women’s things in Edinburgh, previously, and my eyes were beginning to get opened, quite remarkably, it was not surprise.


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DeVorkin: Was there any part of this in your visiting appointment in Princeton? Burnell: Yes, I think there’s a bit of it because they are desperately short of women in the Physics Department, women Faculty, I think that certainly was an issue but it was probably rather more that they’d heard and seen me speak and knew what style of teacher I was, because it’s a teaching appointment. DeVorkin: Well, of course, you were at Southampton and I imagine you’ve taught at other many places but this experience at Princeton, would you mark this as a milestone in your career? A new experience, new opportunities, new horizons? Burnell: Well, I haven’t yet got enough long sight on it but I have been very conscious that for the first time probably since I left Southampton I have been an ordinary academic; I have had very little management responsibility, I have one committee. I’ve been teaching, I’ve been doing research, I’ve been interacting with students; I’ve done one or two other things like take a group of students to Broadway to see Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, things like that, so it’s been very, very good. How I fit it into the career pattern, I don’t know, because it was an unexpected opportunity that I grabbed at. They came to me and I thought, “I can’t turn this up; if the Open University will give me leave, I’m going.” I guess now, over the next few months as I go back to England, I’ve got to start and try to fit the jigsaw together.


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Discussion Questions 1. How did Burnell’s family life encourage or discourage her from pursuing a career in science? 2. What role(s) did Burnell’s teachers play in the development of her interests in astronomy? 3. What do you think were the most important experiences of her youth that led her to this career

path? 4. What kind of discrimination did Burnell face in college? In graduate school? 5. Describe Burnell’s relationship with thesis advisor Tony Hewish. 6. Why did Burnell’s peers and supervisors treat her differently after the discovery of pulsars? 7. Did Burnell’s marriage enhance or detract from her scientific career? 8. What work occupied Burnell in the later stages of her career? 9. What kind of support did Burnell have in her personal life?


Case Studies of Women Astronomers: Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943 ...

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