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50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

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Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#31

Post by dave_sullivan »

JorgeGT wrote: post #22
mjburgess wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a favourite grievance to mention with Bell, but there was no expectation she should have won the prize. She did not discover pulsars. She was a lab assistant who, as she was writing the numbers down in the lab book, first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them. Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Or else the guy cleaning the ship's de…

> Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America. We know the guy by the way, one Rodrigo de Triana, natural of Lepe. NASA's DSCO satellite was originally named Triana after him.

And Columbus never did pay him...

> On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#32

Post by creep »

mjburgess wrote: post #19
jakeogh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America." in the first case, other people might not (and had not) noticed. Equating "holy shit! these are multi-solar-mass nucleons rotating at a significant fraction of lightspeed" to the commo…

Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something. We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense. Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed. In the narrow…

>Which grad student had the logbook was potluck.

I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#33

Post by tantalor »

melling wrote: post #17
gmt2027 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, Hewish did not initially accept Bell's results. He called it interference, claimed it was man made and not worth further attention. There were meetings to which she was not invited and it was a struggle to get him to accept their significance. Edit: Also comparing a Doctoral student who "helped build the telescope" to a cleaner is rather unfair. Francis Crick was a PhD student when they worked out the structu…

There was an overlooked woman on that too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Another comes to mind: Lise Meitner, who developed theory of nuclear fission.

And there are more: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-wome...

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#34

Post by RedOrGreen »

I'm too close to this topic for a chatty comment, but I'll just point to this IAU meeting: "Pulsar Astrophysics: The Next 50 years"[1]. It was held this September at Jodrell Bank, which has always had deep involvement with pulsar astronomy. Jocelyn Bell delivered the opening talk, and she got a sustained standing ovation. It was just a wonderful moment.

(And yeah, she wasn't a mere grad student - after her initial discovery and after it was dismissed by everyone around her, to borrow a phrase, she persisted.)

[1] http://pulsarastronomy.net/iaus337/

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#35

Post by eric_h »

Angostura wrote: post #29
mac01021 wrote: post #3

Anyone know about taking astronomical photographs? There's one such photo at the top of this article. 1. The night's sky never actually looks like that. Is it simply that the exposure was long so that the brightness of each object is enhanced? How long would the exposure have to be? 2. What is that pinkish nebula-like band/arc that the photo is centered around?

That's the milky way, though I'm sure that's not visible from anywhere in earth like that. Whenever I've seen it, it has been a band across the sky, not an arc. Perhaps a composite using a wide-angle lens? One of the other replies to your comments talks about false colour photography, however this one, I think is probably true colour with long exposure. The problem you have is that for very dim objects the colour-sen…

> Whenever I've seen it, it has been a band across the sky, not an arc

That photo is most certainly a composite of some sort. It was also taken in the Southern Hemisphere (Australia).

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#36

Post by wglb »

mjburgess wrote: post #6
deng wrote: post #2

"Later, Bell missed out when Hewish and his colleague Sir Martin Ryle were awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics." See also: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/08/jocelyn-bell...

This is a favourite grievance to mention with Bell, but there was no expectation she should have won the prize. She did not discover pulsars. She was a lab assistant who, as she was writing the numbers down in the lab book, first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them. Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Or else the guy cleaning the ship's de…

So I got to be at dinner with Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr. who himself received the Nobel Prize. He mentioned Joclyn Bell and how, in his view, she was overlooked. That opinion carries some weight with me.

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#37

Post by wglb »

jcims wrote: post #14

In case anyone hasn't heard the periodicity of pulsar signals, here are a few examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb0P6x_xDEU Very difficult to imagine something of n solar masses rotating that quickly, or how long they will continue to rotate at an appreciable percentage of their current speed. I wish someone would put together an updated version of this with higher quality audio.

Joe Taylor played a tape just like this one at the dinner I attended.

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#38

Post by brandonmenc »

deng wrote: post #2

"Later, Bell missed out when Hewish and his colleague Sir Martin Ryle were awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics." See also: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/08/jocelyn-bell...

She herself says:

"demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Pri...

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#39

Post by dhimes »

tantalor wrote: post #33
melling wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an overlooked woman on that too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Another comes to mind: Lise Meitner, who developed theory of nuclear fission. And there are more: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-wome...

And Emmy Noether is another one who had to fight for her due recognition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars

#40

Post by jcims »

RedOrGreen wrote: post #34

I'm too close to this topic for a chatty comment, but I'll just point to this IAU meeting: "Pulsar Astrophysics: The Next 50 years"[1]. It was held this September at Jodrell Bank, which has always had deep involvement with pulsar astronomy. Jocelyn Bell delivered the opening talk, and she got a sustained standing ovation. It was just a wonderful moment. (And yeah, she wasn't a mere grad student - after her initial di…

Not the same talk, but she's a treat to listen to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42cvUqmEg2c
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