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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Mentors, Pulsars & Prizes ​(#214)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made an astounding discovery. On 28 November 1967, she detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. But as a young woman in science, her role was overlooked. Today's discussion is with one of the foremost astronomers of our time in a deep and revealing interview that shares a more personal side of her than ever before. In addition to describing her experimental research, we describe the surprising initial reaction to what was initially thought to be aliens, or Little Green Men. Since then we reveal what we've learned about fascinating pulsars as well as what that may reveal about life in the universe. We also chat about her religion (Quaker) and mine (Jewish) and how her view of God has evolved. We discuss her book "A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist also be Religious? ", the Multiverse and Quakers: influence of mentors like Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel Prize and answer audience questions. Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the £2.3 million prize money to establish the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, to help female, minority and refugee students become physics researchers. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics. Bell on God "Recognising that there was not going to be any proof of the existence of God, I decided many years ago to adopt as a ‘working hypothesis’ the assumption that there was a God, a God that I will describe below, and to see how I got on with this picture of God. Perhaps evidence would accumulate that would lead me to decide that the hypothesis was wrong, that there was no God, or that God was very different from what I had imagined. Or perhaps evidence would accumulate that made it unquestionably clear that there was a God, maybe even evidence that God was much as I had envisaged." Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music: Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

They're certainly stretching our physics understanding in many ways.

0:07.0

First of all, they are very dense objects.

0:10.0

There's a solar mass of material in a ball that's 10 kilometers radius.

0:15.0

So the density is phenomenal and the physics is staggering.

0:19.0

I think it took a bit of persistence to, of all find the things. You know I had miles of paper chart literally and this first signal was occupying about a quarter inch.

0:31.0

So it's a very tiny part of the full thing persistent

0:35.2

careful work.

0:39.2

Hello and welcome to another fascinating episode of the Into the Impossible

0:45.6

Podcast featuring yours truly Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished

0:49.2

Professor of Physics at the University of California San Diego and I bring to you interviews with luminaries,

0:54.9

brilliant brains, magnificent minds from a constellation of creative, curious geniuses.

1:02.4

And I'm so blessed today to have on the podcast none other than Dame Jocelyn Bell Bernell,

1:07.0

who is a hero to millions around the world.

1:10.0

She's one of the few people living today that's discovered a new class of astronomical objects.

1:14.9

In this case, she discovered pulsars.

1:17.0

But these pulsars weren't initially recognized for what they are.

1:20.6

They were thought to be little green men, signatures of an alien

1:24.4

extra-travastrial intelligent species perhaps. In fact, she gave them the initials

1:29.6

LGM to denote the fact that these could be possible signatures because they are so

1:34.9

periodic, so regular, so repetitive, repetitive, that they seem to be the byproduct of

1:41.1

technology. After all, the best timekeeping devices that we have on earth are made by human beings with intelligence

1:46.4

So in this case she was maybe a little bit dismayed to not find discovery or evidence for an extraterrestrial civilization, but instead

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