The Astronomical Life Of Quaker Scientist Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Download the transcript and discussion questions.

Discussion Questions:

1. Jocelyn Bell Burnell says, “I didn’t set out to be a beacon. But having become a beacon, you’d better be a beacon.” Have you been given a responsibility that you didn’t ask for? What was your response?

2. Jocelyn also says that, for her, science and faith “feel more like parallel streams rather than interacting streams.” How do you view the relationship between science and faith?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Whenever a woman entered the lecture theater, all the guys would whistle, catcall, stamp bang the desks. Old wooden lecture theaters made a hell of a lot of noise. And if you blushed they made more noise, but I knew what I wanted to be and I needed a physics degree to do it. So, I persevered.

Various: Thee Quaker Podcast: Story, spirit, sound.

Georgia: I’m Georgia Sparling and today I’d like to introduce you to someone new, our guest interviewer for this episode Naveed Moeed. 

Naveed Moeed: Hello. Thank you for having me. 

Georgia: So Naveed was one of our board members at Thee Quaker Project. And he got to sit down with today’s guest Jocelyn Bell Burnell, but before we get to her, I’d love it. If you would tell us a little bit about yourself, Naveed?

Naveed Moeed: Well, I’m from the UK, which I think your listeners have probably already picked up on. I live primarily in the US where I attend Chapel Hill Friends Meeting in North Carolina. Currently, I ply my trade as a writer, theater critic and photographer. But astronomy Georgia, that was my first love and continues to remain one of my deepest passions. I’m still involved in the field as a consulting scientist at the Willis Observatory in western North Carolina, where we work to introduce astronomy to marginalized and underserved school pupils. Yeah,

Georgia: That’s really cool. And you have a PhD in astrophysics. Is that right?

Naveed: It is. My area of study was looking at interplanetary dust clouds that actually exist within the earth’s moon system. In particular, for those of our listeners who are interested, the L four and l five points of the earth’s moon system. I completed this around 2002, which was the same time that I started attending Quaker meeting in the UK. Yeah. 

Georgia: So you were uniquely suited to do this interview with Jocelyn Bell Bernell, who is in fact, a celebrated astrophysicist. But I’m guessing that not all of our listeners are familiar with her. So would you tell us a little bit more about her?

Naveed: Well I’d be happy to. First of all, it was such a privilege to speak with Jocelyn. She is someone I’ve looked up to for a long time. More than her discovery of pulsars. She has been at the forefront of advocating for women in a very male dominated field. She has also helped promote the public understanding of science and technology in the UK and beyond. She has been a pioneer many times over. She’s a Quaker. She was born into an evangelical Quaker family in Northern Ireland. And as you say, she’s an astrophysicist. A pretty well known one partly because when she was still a PhD students back in the ‘60s, she discovered the first pulsar, and then the second, and then the third, and the fourth.

Georgia: And pulsar is a word that I know but I don’t actually know what it means. So please give us a definition for all of us who last had physics many decades ago in high school.

Naveed: Imagine a pulsar like a cosmic lighthouse. It’s a tiny super dense star left after a big star explodes. It spins very fast and shoots out beams of light and radio waves from its poles. When these beams point towards Earth, we see regular flashes, like a blinking light. So a pulsar is a spinning star that looks like it’s pulsing. That discovery was important because it confirmed the existence of neutron stars and type of stars scientists had theorized but never observed. Pulsars also became precise cosmic clocks, helping scientists test the laws of physics, especially Einstein’s theory of relativity. 

Additionally, studying pulsars has provided insights into extreme states of matter, and the behavior of intense magnetic fields. But what you’ll see, if you Google Jocelyn, is that her professors took home a Nobel Prize for a discovery, and she did not get the recognition you would expect, which is something that we talked about. And you might also notice on Google, that she’s actually Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, though, as Quakers we’re not big on honorifics is just evidence of what a trailblazer she had been in her field.

Georgia:

Yes, and I know we’re going to hear a lot about how Jocelyn became this trailblazing scientist who broke through a lot of barriers as well as, of course, her thoughts on Quakerism. It’s really such a rich conversation.

Naveed:

Thank you.

Georgia:

Okay, well, let’s get started.

Jocelyn: My early years were rather unusual. I was born during World War II, 1943, in Northern Ireland, and lived in a house we called Solitude, which was the family home, quite a big house, but rather isolated, hence the name Solitude. And because it was war time, we had living with us, several German Jewish refugees. Well, they may not all have been Jews, but there were Jewish sympathizers. Quite a few family members and some other close friends. And there were, I don’t know, 14 or 15 adults, and myself in the house. Quite a big house, it has to be said, it’s. So that’s where things started for me under wartime conditions. My father was an architect, but wasn’t actually practicing architecture at the time, he was taking responsibility for farming our land. And some of my earliest memories are of me helping in inverted corners, commas, getting the harvest in.

Naveed: When it comes to that part of your life, and growing up as a birthright Quaker. How, how close to God, or the notion of God at that time? Do you feel that you were as a family especially coming out of the war?

Jocelyn: Being in Northern Ireland gives things a rather different flavor. I don’t know how much you know about Quakers in Northern Ireland, but many meetings tend towards the evangelical, as did our local meeting in Lurgan. Quite a lot of preaching ministry about being washed in the blood of the Lamb, which is vocabulary that you would not hear elsewhere in the British Isles in Quakerism. And I must say the color scheme confused me as a child, how do you become washed whiter than white in red blood? So you can see I didn’t fully understand these concepts as a child.

Naveed: What was the moment where you felt you really owned being Quaker?

Jocelyn: Once I got to The Mount, which is a Quaker boarding school for girls, we had a very good R.E., religious education, teacher, Dorothy Webster, who was a York Quaker. And she very quickly introduced the whole class, but probably it most strongly affected me to a much more liberal kind of Quakerism, where you didn’t have to be a tubthumping evangelist, where you could ask questions where you could explore. And my understanding of Quakerism very rapidly deepened. And began to appreciate very much the meeting for worship that there would be in York, as opposed to the meeting for worship there was in my local Northern Irish town.

Naveed: What was that difference?

Jocelyn: The theology in York is liberal Quakerism. Whereas Northern Irish, it was very, very much about being converted. And very, very little of the consequences of being a religious person that you find here in England, where people are thinking, right, well, should we do something to support the poor? Should we do something about world relationships? Should we do something about reconciliation between this community and that community? There was none of that in Northern Ireland. It was, it was pretty narrow. Part of it, I think was you know, the era, but most of it was Northern Ireland. 

Naveed: Your father designed, he was the architect for the Amargh Planetarium and part of your love, in fact, maybe the seed of your love for astronomy grew from visits there. But being in a culture where, you know, presumably most of the elders were white men. 

Jocelyn: Yes.

Naveed: And having this patriarchy very much in your face all the time. How did you as young Jocelyn feel about breaking a barrier and going into a career that was male dominated?

Jocelyn: I think for quite a lot of my time in Northern Ireland, I was working out what it meant to be female. In British society in, in that age, I can remember I was about a year and a half old when a brother was born, I was the eldest followed by a brother. And in Ireland men count and women don’t. This wasn’t the case in my family, but I can remember being quite upset by people saying how important it was that Mrs. Bell had a boy. And saying that in my presence, and Northern Ireland continued to have a curious, not curious, wrong, says she bluntly, gender arrangement. 

As you may know, there used to be an exam in Britain, over here, it was called the Eleven Plus, back in Northern Ireland called the Qualifying. And it was determined who would get technical education and who would get secondary education, and who would get academic secondary education. And in Northern Ireland, there was a higher passmark for the girls. And that continued until probably about 10 years ago. Because everybody knew that girls were only going to become wives, mothers, stay at home. And it was boys who’d contribute to the economics through the workforce. But too many girls were passing this exam, and depriving boys of grammar school education. So they put a higher pass mark for girls. And that continued until very, very recently. 

I failed this important exam at 11 and should have gone on to have technical education, learning to be a secretary, or a cook or a nurse, something like that. But my parents had fought for me to be kept in the upper stream until age 13, when I would go away to York. And I was in the upper stream. And I did extremely well in the upper stream. Also, interestingly, how to fight to get to do science. And I wanted to do science, my parents said, I’d get to do science. And I got sent to the domestic science room. But when I told my parents that evening, they hit the roof, and phoned the head teacher. And I think phoned one or two other parents as well, and we were the first ever girls to do science in that school. The teacher clearly had never taught girls and wasn’t quite sure what we do to the dynamics in the classroom. He made us sit right up against his bench, you know, within spitting distance as soon as he could keep an eye on us. But actually, we did physics that first term, and I came top of the class, which I think was good for the image of girls doing science in that school.

Naveed: It leads into your work promoting girls and women in STEM. For me, that is almost as important, if not more important than discovering pulsars. So I think what would be fascinating for our listeners to understand is some of the things that happened to you that motivated you to make things better for women.

Jocelyn: The fight I had at age 11+, 12 to get to do science was part of the motivation, the assumption that women did domestic things, and the boys did science and engineering and technical drawing seemed to me to have me segregated in the wrong half of society. Like, because many of my interests were in the in the other half. And I just gradually became more and more clear that I should be doing something with physics. And astrophysics was the bit that really gripped me. So that was my motivation.

Naveed: So can you tell us about some of the misogyny you faced, at the university level, at the undergraduate and then the graduate level as well?

Jocelyn: I did my undergraduate degree in Glasgow, a lot of physics, a lot of maths. Going into the honors physics classes, a four year course and years three and four are the two owners years. It turned out I was the only female doing honors physics, in a class of 50. 

Glasgow at that time, the student body was quite sexist. And whenever a woman entered the lecture theater, all the guys would whistle, catcall, stamp, bang the desks, old wooden lecture theaters made a hell of a lot of noise. And if you blushed, they made more noise. I learned to control my blushing, which was quite important. And could march into the physics lectures, stony faced, you know, as the only female, take my desk. But equally if I asked a question in class or made a comment, stamping, whistling, catcalling, banging the desk. It meant basically, I had nobody to work with. There was there Well, there was me. And that made it tougher. I must admit, I mean, I survived it. But Had there been two or three or four women we could have worked together and helped each other. And I didn’t have that. But I knew what I wanted to be and I needed a physics degree to do it. So I persevered.

Georgia: After the break, Jocelyn and Naveed talk about pulsars, black holes, faith and what it means to be a beacon for women in science.

We often like to share stories of the people who listened to this podcast. So I recently called up one of our board members to learn why she signed on to be part of Thee Quaker Project.

Lisa Motz-Storey: Well, hi, Georgia. I’m Lisa Motz-Storey. And I live just outside of Denver in the mountains, and I attend Mountain View Friends Meeting. 

Georgia: So Lisa, tell me a little bit about what drew you to Quakerism. 

Lisa: Well, I actually started out as an ordained United Methodist minister, and I left the Methodist church over gay rights back in ’91. And I had visited Mountain View meeting and knew a little bit about Quakers. And I wanted to join a faith community that pulled me more in the direction that I wanted to go instead of me being inside of an organization that I was always trying to drag toward change in the future. Quakerism has always challenged me, pulled me more in the direction that I know I need to go and continue to help me grow. And I’ve been a Quaker for most of my adult life now. 

Georgia: Lisa, you’ve known Jon for a little bit. When you heard about his plan to start a Quaker media organization? What were your thoughts? 

Lisa: A lot of people just don’t know the Quakers exist. And a lot of the people who are Quakers and are really active, or older, and we just, you know, we’re like, how can we get people to find Quakers? How can we get young people? And this is the way to do it. I was just really excited that by doing media like this, that you would reach an audience that had never heard of us or maybe sort of heard of us and get the message out about what we believe in. We do.

Georgia: Yeah. Well, you’ve been listening to the podcast. Tell me a little bit about how it’s impacted you so far.

Lisa: I was surprised that every single time I learned something new, or I’m challenged in some way, by somebody’s spiritual practice that they share. And I realized that you get in a rut when you’re in a monthly meeting, and you’re just into what your monthly meetings doing and your community there. And I find that every single time I learned something from the podcast, I feel like I grow as a Quaker myself. I mean, here I thought it was for other people to find us and it’s actually teaching me stuff and challenging me to grow.

Georgia: What’s your message for anybody out there who’s listening who maybe is considering becoming a monthly supporter of the podcast?

Lisa: I would say that Quakerism still has something to say to the world and this is a way to support getting a message out that is different than what we hear in mainstream media. and that could encourage people to work for social justice to work for change, to find a community that in which they can be spiritually grounded in that social justice work. And the podcast is such a good way to get that word out, get get it to people who are just so frustrated, and they want to be doing something, but they don’t know what to do. And so I would encourage people to support this because I mean, the quality is amazing. The content is amazing. And I just think it’s so worth it.

Georgia: Wow, thank you so much, Lisa, I really appreciate that. 

If like Lisa, you have learned from this podcast been encouraged by it or inspired by it, we would be so thankful if you would consider partnering with us to help us become a sustainable long term project. Please go to QuakerPodcast.com to find out how you can become one of our supports. Thank you so much and now back to the show.

Naveed: As much as I still am an astrophysicist we haven’t really talked about science and, and discoveries. Probably the most thrilling discovery of your life was. Well, not just discovering the the first pulsar because that could have been an anomaly. 

Jocelyn: Yes, yeah.

Naveed: But the second one, yeah. And as a scientist, I know just how thrilling it is when you see the confirmation. So can you tell us the stages that your heart went through, when you discovered the first the second, then the third and fourth.

Jocelyn: 

The first one was an absolute surprise. I mean, I knew there was this funny anomaly in my data that I couldn’t explain. And that it kept concentrated attention kept his place amongst the stars, so it wasn’t terrestrial. And then finally catching it and seeing it as a string of pulses, one of the third second depart. Deaf definitely not want what one expects, and nothing like it had never been seen before. So I knew it was special. But I also knew that I might still have failed to notice something very obvious, and it wasn’t genuine or something like that. So the slightly remains slightly uncertain. Thesis advisor came out the next day and watch this I set up because I think he thought I’d got some wires crossed, but hadn’t. And he observed it for himself and saw it was pulsing at the same rate. 

The next milestone was to get another grad student and his supervisor to look at it with their telescope, their receivers, and they saw it, which was a huge relief. And then I found a second one. And then I found a third, which again, was fairly similar. And a fourth one, which went much faster, which began to give an indication of the range of properties, then it began to get a bit tricky, because I began to lose control, in the sense that my supervisor was having discussions behind closed doors with other people, really about how we published these things. And I wasn’t included in those discussions, which was since I was by that stage, a third year grad student. I thought it was a bit a bit off.

Naveed: You you were able to prove categorically that women could do science could do good science.

Jocelyn: Yes.

Naveed: And rigorous.

Jocelyn: Yes. 

Naveed: Peer reviewed, but to then not be included in the Nobel Prize. Do you now think that maybe it was a disservice to not include a woman in that prize at that time?

Jocelyn: Well, it would have been a first if they had included a woman. And I think then the question really becomes, how early on does do organizations recognize that women can do good scientific work?

Naveed: I see the fire inside you for for making that prominent contribution and for that prominent contribution. To be the beacon for others. And I see inside you also the desire to hold that beacon high.

Jocelyn: Yes, I didn’t set out to be a beacon. But having become a beacon, you’d better be a beacon. 

Naveed: When did you realize that was your responsibility?

Jocelyn: I think in part, the response to the pulsar Nobel Physics Prize, which required quite a lot of tactful handling on my part. Oh, indeed, and a lovely sort of side story there. I worked for a couple of years in Princeton, but one of the things I did not only to support the female students, but to try and improve the lot of women in general, was to set up afternoon tea, for women in physics, for the undergraduates, studying physics, postgraduates, and we just sort of sat and talked about what it felt like to be in such a male dominated area, and support each other. And you know, that younger students could ask the older students what, what to look out for and what not to do, and that kind of thing. So it was it was good. It was very nice. 

Princeton physics was very male dominated. It was a bit bit natural. You know, you didn’t take time off from work, you work 24/7 kind of thing. And I remember one of the other young women was singing in a choir, which I discovered because I went to listen to the choir. She said, Don’t tell my boss. Not focused enough, clearly not dedicated enough, you know? So don’t tell the boss.

Naveed: So all these women who are bearing the frontier of physics for women, are being held to a much higher standard. 

Jocelyn: Yeah, yeah. Yep. Astronomy is slightly better, because it contains a much larger fraction of women. It’s not 50-50. Don’t get me wrong. But it is changing and astronomy has been one of the bits of astrophysics has been one of the bits of physics that has been more liberal deliberated than some of the mainstream physics.

Naveed: How has your your faith and your trust in continuing revelation helped your science and how has your How have your discoveries and your methodology in science helped your practice and faith?

Jocelyn: I’m not sure that there is that kind of linkage. They feel more like parallel streams rather than interacting streams. I think I would say uncomfortable in both and in both you have to be open minded. Keep inquiring, looking, revise your understanding as you learn more. So there are very, very close parallels, parallel processes in both I’m not sure that in me they interact more than that, to be honest. And I don’t say isn’t science wonderful? It shows how glorious God is. You know, I don’t don’t say that at all. Maybe what I’m saying is I I’m not really going into the area of God the Creator. I think I’m avoiding staying clear of that. Whilst obviously I do believe in a God and God’s guidance

Yeah, I’m not sure I can say more than that.

Naveed: Is it okay if we sit with for that for a moment because it is quite profound?

I have a notion. And it’s something that I’m led to of God the observer.

For me, I come back to Shroedinger and how the observer merely in the act of observation affects the outcome. And I feel that that is how God moves for me. Not necessarily pushing buttons or guiding or building. But observing the outcome

Jocelyn: So, it’s an interactive God, it’s not a distant God. 

Naveed: It’s an interactive God. 

Jocelyn: Yep. 

Naveed: How would you say God has interacted with your life?

Jocelyn: I think I’d have to say, I don’t know for sure. I have had some very deep meetings for worship. There have been particular moments in life where I’ve had to say something or do something. And there’s been a quick fire prayer, you know, God helped me and then you know.

Naveed: Could you describe one of those moments for us?

Jocelyn: I think for me, the nearest equivalent might have been when you’re doing Friends World Committee work, and you have a committee or a group of people from very different traditions within Quakerism. And the way you present an issue to that kind of group, can very much affect how the group responds, react, and how the business goes along or doesn’t go along, if you mess it up.

Naveed: So that brings you to think my very final question, a couple of times, at least in what I’ve read, you’ve mentioned that, you know, eventually the stars will go out, yeah. Eventually, we will be in a universe full of black holes. That almost paints a dark, almost nihilistic view of where this all ends, regardless. I mean, this could be billions of years short to humanity’s, or even hundreds of billions of years off.

Jocelyn: I disagree with the almost paints, it paint that picture. Yes. Might not spell it out quite in so many words, but…

Naveed: What does that picture mean for you spiritually, in a faith like Quakerism, where we hold tight to so much, so much hope?

Jocelyn: Not sure that it has a spiritual impact. But I live in the knowledge that things do not go on forever. Our lives don’t go on forever. This universe won’t go on forever. There may be other universes, there may not. If anything, it adds a bit of immediacy, you know, better make good use of it while we’ve got it kind of thing. More than anything else, I mean, if you accept death, then accepting the death of the universe is not such a very big step beyond that, to be honest.

Naveed: So for you, it’s about acceptance, making the most of the moment that we’re in.

Jocelyn: That’s right. Thank you. So what you have at the moment? Yeah. Yeah.

Naveed: And is that something that you but you’ve imparted in your life to your son to to your community.

Jocelyn: I don’t know about imparting to my son if need to ask him. It’s but I think it’s partly what’s behind things like trying to get better recognition for women in physics for instance. While we can let’s make this as good as it can be.

Naveed: Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, thank you very much.

Jocelyn: Thank you. Thank you for all your time.

Georgia: Thank you for listening and thank you to our guest Jocelyn Bell Burnell and to our guest interviewer Naveed Moeed. Check out our episode page for more information, discussion questions and a transcript of this episode. That’s at QuakerPodcast.com. This episode was recorded by Naveed Moeed and produced by me, Georgia Sparling. Jon Watts wrote and performed the music. Studio D mixed the episode. Your moment of Quakers Zen was read by Grace Gonglewski. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a podcast supporter. You can do that on a monthly or a yearly basis. Head to QuakerPodcast.com and click on Support to learn more. 

Quick note: we’ll be taking a couple of weeks off to work on new stories and then we’ll be back in your feed. And now for your moment of Quakers Zen.

Grace Gonglewski: William Taber, 1992: I once thought worship was something I do, but for many years now it has seemed as if worship is actually a state of consciousness which I enter, so that I am immersed into a living, invisible stream of reality which has always been present throughout all history..

Georgia: Sign up for daily or weekly Quaker wisdom to accompany you on your spiritual path. Just go to DailyQuaker.com. That’s DailyQuaker.com.

Reported by Naveed Moeed.

Edited by Georgia Sparling.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

Mixed and mastered by Studio D.

Photo of Jocelyn Bell Burnell by Naveed Moeed. Other images by FreePik, Pexels, and Raw Pixel

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