2023-07-15 09:13:35
Many years after her discovery of the century, the wise old woman has tried to balance Blaise Pascal’s concern about the silence of the infinite against its antithesis in the poet Robert Frost, who once wrote that cosmic emptiness is not all that impressive compared to the voids of one left alone Soul. The wise old astronomer, who gives equal weight to both considerations, grew up in Ireland in a farmhouse called “Solitude”.
In reality, this was a wild, busy place: siblings and animals made for a varied socialization, and so Jocelyn Bell was prepared for social struggles when she had to join other girls at school for the right to physics lessons, which were thought to such a thing is not for girls. Her father showed her a planetarium that he had built as an architect, but you don’t necessarily need a telescope to find your way around in space.
As a student in 1967, while looking through meter-thick paper recordings of interstellar radio signals, Jocelyn Bell came across signs that she found “a bit of scruff”. There seemed to be signals of incredibly precise regularity. Behind this was not the hustle and bustle of little green men, but the truth of Einstein’s theory of the deformability of space-time through mass.
She discovered “Pulsars”
When stars collapse under their own weight into rotating clumps of neutrons, they wrap space-time around them and emit light, X-rays and even radio waves as clocks of the universe, for example the discovery of extrasolar planets or, particularly spectacularly this year, the improvement of ours gravitational wave oriented picture of intergalactic processes allow.
The name given to the things is “pulsating source of radio emission”, or “Pulsar” for short, which sounds Kabbalistic (roughly like “Sohar”), but had the tangible consequence that the identification of the phenomenon in 1974 was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics for an astronomical achievement. However, it was not given to the woman responsible for it, who was now called Jocelyn Bell Burnell, but to her supervisor Antony Hewish (together with colleague Martin Ryle, who received an award for radio technology).
None other than Fred Hoyle, one of the greatest and most original astronomers of all time, expressed great dissatisfaction with the award committee’s ignoring of the pulsar discoverer, comparing the merit of her work to that of Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity. Bell Burnell herself took a relaxed view of the matter, but based on her experience she drew the conclusion to support women wherever she could, also by passing on large prizes.
What science can’t afford
Today people often talk about what the marginalized get from access to research and technology; conversely, however, it is also worth noting that in every demographic segment there is always a small number of those who are interested not only in those parts of reality that can be eaten, inhabited, cuddled or monetized, but in reality as such. Science cannot afford to be without even one such person.
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Ten years ago, Jocelyn Bell Burnell gave a great testament to her intellectual integrity when, in a lecture on the reconciliation of knowledge and belief, she failed to see the heart of the problem where it is often sought, which is reconciliation Bronze Age myth patterns on which important religions of salvation are built, with the insights of research.
In truth, the matter is about norms: Should one only act according to what one knows for sure, or in a society that is highly divided by the division of labor and held together by the mosaic of countless expertises that no one can master alone, do we not sometimes have to believe what one hears and read (Corona! Climate!)?
According to Bell Burnell, the balance of faith and knowledge is less about terms like “God” or “angel” and more about what “hope” means: If I behave as if a crisis can be overcome, nobody will be able to laugh at me, if everyone is dead soon instead. But if everything turns out well, I shouldn’t stand in the way of the solution with sinister, supposedly enlightened fundamental pessimism. Better to work towards the good, no matter how cold and empty the room I’m trying to be in. This Saturday, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who thinks and lives like this, turns eighty.
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