La Palma has it’s own version of the stars in Hollywood Boulevard. Ours are stars from astronomy
rather than show business and we don’t have nearly so many of them, but in October we got a fifth star, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She discovered pulsars in the 1960s, so they gave the Nobel Prize to her boss and her boss’s boss, but not her.
She’s physically a small lady. She’s 81 now, but still entirely with it. She’s been rather a hero of mine for decades, and I got a selfie with her. I had a hard time not squeeing.
She was almost squeeing herself, delighted with her visit to the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, and I’m chuffed to say that she was pleased to get a copy of my book about the observatory, A Breathtaking Window on the Universe.
After Palacio Salazar, we went out to the seafront. They haven’t put a star down for her yet, because that bit of seafront is going to be completely remodelled, with The Stars in the wall rather than the floor.
That evening she gave a talk about her discovery. She’s a good speaker, with a knack for explaining complex science in a very simple way. She mentioned that several people had almost discovered pulsars before her. Two of the anecdotes involved young women looking at the Crab Nebula through a telescope, and saying this they could see something flashing in the middle. Some young women used to be irritated by mains electricity in Canada flashing at 50hz. Not older women or men, just young women. When the frequency was changed to 60 hertz, the problem disappeared. So it’s entirely possible that these young women were seeing the pulsar at the heart of the nebula, which flashes 30.2 times per second. This sort of thing happens when you reflexively disbelieve young women, or any other demographic.
Her boss initially dismissed the strange signal as mere interference, and she had a hard time convincing him. And then once it was all confirmed, the press asked him about the science and her about her “vital statistics” – bust, waist and hip measurement.
But the bit that stayed with me the most is that when she first arrived at Cambridge, she had a bad case of what we now call impostor syndrome, feeling that everyone else was cleverer than her and she didn’t belong. So if you’re feeling that way now, you might win a Nobel Prize one day.
