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When Jocelyn Bell Burnell began her Ph.D. in physics at Cambridge University in 1965, she was convinced she was mistaken in admitting it. "I'm not clear enough for this place," she recalls at the time.
It did not help that she was one of only two women in her graduate program. And Cambridge was much richer than anywhere she had lived before. These two factors probably contributed to her impostor syndrome, she told The Washington Post: "Of course, we did not know that term at the time.
Bell Burnell's answer was to work as hard as possible. If they threw her anyway, she thought she would know she was not smart enough to be in Cambridge.
His diligence ended up paying off. Two years after his arrival in Cambridge, Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars – a revolutionary revelation that earned him the $ 3 million breakthrough special prize in fundamental physics, awarded earlier to Stephen Hawking, among others.
This is a recognition that many have thought for a long time. The supervising Bell Burnell male doctorate won a Nobel Prize for the same discovery – in 1974.
Like the stars of Hidden Figures and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell's personal story embodies the challenges women face in science. Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, she struggled to take science classes after the age of 12. "The idea was that boys would do science and girls would do cooking and needlework." "It was such a firm assumption that it was not even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter."
In her first year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in physics. The men whistled and heckled her every time she entered the conference room, she said.
"I learned not to blush," she said. "If you blushed, they just got stronger."
In Cambridge, sexism was a bit more subtle, she said. When Bell Burnell became engaged, it was automatically assumed that she would give up the program soon because it was still shameful for married women to work. "I have a little feeling that because I was quitting, it was probably no longer worth investing in me," she said.
Then, in 1967, Bell Burnell alerted his doctorate. the supervisor, Antony Hewish, at an "unclassifiable screen" reading the radio telescope she was in charge of monitoring. It was the kind of detail that others might have ignored or neglected.
"The source did not seem to have been created by the man – she was moving with the stars, at the same rate as the constellations," she told the Guardian in 2009. "We felt that the source was not the same. there were 200 light-years far beyond the sun. planets, but still in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
In joking, they labeled it LGM-1, which means "Little Green Men". When Bell Burnell returned to the observatory at 3 am on a cold December night, she had what she called a "Eureka!
"While browsing miles of maps, I discovered two other mysterious signals," she told The Guardian. "It occurred to me that I was discovering the first four examples of an unimaginable type of star – bizarre astral bodies that transmitted radio beams as they circled in space like the beam of a lighthouse. We called them pulsars.
The discovery of pulsars was "one of the biggest surprises in the history of astronomy, dramatically transforming science fiction's neutron stars into reality," the Breakthrough Prize Committee said Thursday. "Among the many subsequent consequences, it has led to several powerful tests of Einstein's theory of relativity and to a new understanding of the origin of the heavy elements of the universe."
When Bell Burnell and his supervisor published an article detailing their findings in 1968, they drew international attention. The media did not know what to do with a young female scientist who had made a major breakthrough, she told The Guardian.
"Photographers would say," Could you undo buttons on your jacket, please? " "She recalls. "The reporters asked how many boyfriends I had."
Then Hewish, his supervisor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 "for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars".
Neglected by the Nobel Committee did not surprise her, Bell Burnell told Science News in a recent interview. That was how things worked at the time: the teachers, not the students, had the credit.
"At this point, the image that people had of science was that of an elderly man, and he was always a man, with a fleet of young people working for him," he said. she declared. "And if the project went well, the man received praise. If the project went wrong, the man was blamed.
These days, his snobby is often cited as an example of how women's contributions to science are obliterated or neglected. But Bell Burnell, who currently teaches astronomy at Oxford University, says it does not bother him.
"I think I did very well not to receive a Nobel Prize," she told The Guardian on Thursday. "If you receive a Nobel Prize, you have this fantastic week and nobody gives you anything else. If you do not get a Nobel Prize, you get everything moving. Almost every year, there was some kind of party because I received another prize. It's a lot more fun.
As for the $ 3 million, Bell Burnell, whose faith is Quaker preaches to live simply, does not intend to keep them.
Instead, the money will go towards creating scholarships for people from under-represented backgrounds who want to study physics.
The funds will be administered by the Institute of Physics of the United Kingdom, and Bell Burnell hopes that the arrival of more people on the ground will lead to even more new discoveries.
"Maybe," she joked, "having people with the impostor syndrome is not a bad thing."
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