Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this Christmas is a physicist. Her particular field of endeavor is

astronomy in which as a practicing Quaker her minute analysis of the infinite

encourages both her love of science and her belief in God. As a student in the 60s she made a

discovery which some said should have earned her a share in the Nobel Prize which

went to her supervisor. She's philosophical about this episode content to have won her place in the scientific

establishment as one of the handful of female professors of physics in this country. A passionate love

of her subject makes her an eager

communicator. Her work she says is like opening a sequence of doors. You lift

your eyes to a further horizon at each stage and it's staggering. It's beautiful. She is the

Open University professor of physics Jocelyn Bell Bernell. It's also vast

Jocelyn it seems to me the more you discover, the more you realize how vast the universe is,

is it very daunting working in such an infinite field?

It can be both daunting and dangerous working with these big things.

Daunting for the obvious reason the scale and how minute we are.

Dangerous because it can go to your head. You're working with this grand stuff and you find

something come across something and the danger is that you assume you're working with something cosmic when in fact what you're working with is a flaw in your equipment.

You do need to keep your feet on the ground.

Absolutely, but nevertheless it must make you feel all of the time it must remind you about

how small we are, how miniscule we are in the grand design of things.

Yes, it does. I have to say though when you work as a professional

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