Jocelyn Bell Burnell quotes

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an Irish astrophysicist best known for her discovery of pulsars as a postgraduate student. This breakthrough fundamentally changed the field of astronomy and led to major advancements in our understanding of the universe. She continues to inspire generations of scientists through her research and advocacy for diversity in science. Here are 17 of her quotes:

By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Scientists should never claim that something is absolutely true. You should never claim perfect, or total, or 100% because you never ever get there.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

If we assume we've arrived: we stop searching, we stop developing.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I switched on the high speed recorder and it came blip.... blip.... blip.... blip.... blip.... Clearly the same family, the same sort of stuff and that was great, that was really sweet. It finally scotched the little green men hypothesis cos it's highly unlikely there's two lots of little green men, opposite sides of the universe, both deciding to signal to a rather inconspicuous planet earth, at the same time, using a daft technique and a rather common place frequency. It has to be some new kind of star, not seen before, and that then cleared the way for us publishing, going public!

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Looking at the universe as a whole; cosmology, the birth, life and death of the whole universe, we used to have a nice simple model. Then we had to add things like dark energy, and our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The girls got sent to the domestic science room and the boys to the science lab. ... I protested - unsuccessfully.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

You can actually do extremely well out of not getting a Nobel prize.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma. There's an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that's very like what goes on in "the scientific method." You have a model, of a star, its an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you're expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell