50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#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...
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#3Anyone 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?
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#4If anyone is interested in checking out a fun radio astronomy/data analysis course that touches on pulsars and other phenomena, I can highly recommend the University of Sydney's Coursera course Data Driven Astronomy [0].
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#5Interview with her on the BBC Radio 4 show "The Life Scientific" here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016812j
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#6"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 deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America.
The prize was awarded to the head of the team as it was a project of his design and his organization. To have split 1/3 of the prize with whatever grad student happened to be keeping the books seems ridiculous.
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#7Anyone 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 is a long-exposure shot although the sky does really look like that if it's dark enough - just not quite that colourful. Here's an attempt by a photographer to recreate the effect:
The band in the photo is the milky way.
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#8As if these things could be more interesting, some exhibit 'glitches' which appear to be quantization of angular momentum on an N solar-mass scale.
http://www.unn.edu.ng/publications/files/images/EYA,%20INNOC...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOkjLtCCozM
About as far as away as one can imagine, a similar thing appears to happen with very low accelerations with some of our satellites. My search-fo failed on that so far.
Bonus scale crazyness for all the battery 2.0 articles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4JrbpBvWc
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#9"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…
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 common experience of "land ho!" is absurd.
Re: 50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
#10"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…
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 structure of DNA.