WHAT’S THE STORY?

ONE of the world’s best astrophysicists, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, has been awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the world’s oldest scientific prize, finally recognising her work on the discovery of pulsars more than 50 years ago. She is only the second woman to win the highly prestigious award given by the Royal Society, for “outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science”. Dorothy Hodgkin in 1976 was the only other woman to win it.

First awarded in 1731, the Copley Medal outdates the Nobel Prize by 170 years. Notable winners include Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Peter Higgs, and Stephen Hawking.

The actual medal is of silver gilt, is awarded annually, alternating between the physical and biological sciences (odd and even years respectively), and is accompanied by a gift of £25,000 which Dame Jocelyn will receive shortly and which she has said she will add to the Institute of Physics’ Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, providing grants to graduate students from under-represented groups in physics.

WHO IS DAME JOCELYN?

BORN in Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1943, Dame Jocelyn was the daughter of an architect father who designed the Armagh Planetarium. It was her visits to this building that inspired her love of astronomy. After attending Lurgan College and later the Mount School in York, she began her studies for a BSc at the University of Glasgow before she completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1969.

According to her Royal Society listing “she was responsible for the discovery of pulsars while a radio astronomy graduate student in Cambridge and has subsequently worked in gamma ray, X-ray, infrared and millimetre wavelength astronomy. She currently holds a Professorial Fellowship in Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and is a Visiting Academic in the University’s Department of Physics”.

She was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and President of the Institute of Physics from 2008 until 2010. In 2013 she was listed in the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List of the 100 most influential women in the UK and in 2015 she received the Prudential Women of the Year Award for Lifetime Achievement.

In 2018 she set up the Institute of Physics’ Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund with the £2.3m she won by being awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the world’s richest academic prize.

A lifelong Quaker, she was made a Dame in 2007.

WHAT ARE HER SCOTTISH CONNECTIONS?

THERE have been several, not least the fact that she graduated from Glasgow University with Honours in Physics in 1965. The same university gave her an honorary doctorate in 1997. Dame Jocelyn was the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (as well as of the Institute of Physics). She is currently Chancellor of the University of Dundee.

WHY DID SHE NOT GET THE NOBEL PRIZE?

SEXISM, to be honest. There is no doubt that as a research student, Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars, but credit went to two of her professors, Antony Hewish (below) and Martin Ryle, who were two of the five authors of the paper which announced the discovery. Hewish and Ryle won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974.

The National:

Famed astronomer Fred Hoyle was one of the first to condemn the omission of Bell Burnell. She herself commented later: “First, 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?”

The Copley Medal is not a Nobel Prize but as with her Damehood, it goes a long way to righting a grievous wrong.