There’s some evidence that if you’re recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they’d had more diversity, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
As observatory architect, my dad was partly concerned with the maintenance of them all. I used to go with him on site visits quite often, from age 7 or 8. I have memories of crawling through the rafters of the old building, trying to find where the leak in the roof was. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
I think a spell abroad for anybody is incredibly useful. It gives you a great sense of perspective, and you see other ways of doing things. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
I positively encourage time abroad to anybody. It’s worth taking the time to suss out which countries in the world are well funded for your subject and look for opportunities there. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
In the field of astronomy in the mid-’60s, quasars were very sexy objects – gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K. Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, ‘There goes some of the primordial universe.’ Jocelyn Bell Burnell Read Quote
