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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

There was an overlooked woman on that too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

The prize was awarded in 1962, 4 years after she died of ovarian cancer. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.

I understand why they do that, since it's supposed to be an encouragement. But there are two aspects of the Nobel prize: reputation and prize money.

If they would change the rules to make exceptions for shared discoveries, it won't dilute the reputation boost for the scientists in question in the slightest, and if they give the money to the surviving winners that problem is solved too.

Yes, I know that it’s not awarded posthumously.

My understanding is that she was not given credit in her lifetime so she would not have been awarded it anyway. Unless, someone had explained her contribution in those 4 years.

“Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.”

There's actually an apology from - Watson, I think - as an addendum in my old copy of The Double Helix bought in the 1980s.

Another comes to mind: Lise Meitner, who developed theory of nuclear fission.

And there are more: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-wome...

And Emmy Noether is another one who had to fight for her due recognition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

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.

Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something.

We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense.

Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed.

In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results).

Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.

>Which grad student had the logbook was potluck.

I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?

Analyzing data and deriving meaning from it is exactly what we, in science, mean by discovering something.

Though from what I've gathered in recent discussions about Nobel prizes, it is rather common that the project leader is awarded the prize, regardless if his actions directly lead to the "discovery" or not.

> Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America.

We know the guy by the way, one Rodrigo de Triana, natural of Lepe. NASA's DSCO satellite was originally named Triana after him.

And Columbus never did pay him...

> On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.

But we are talking about him half a millenium later, very few people alive today will get that.

> Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it.

Yes it is. Take Pluto, for example. Astronomers predicted Pluto mathematically from other planets' orbits decades before it was 'discovered':

> Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranus's orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune. (Edit: changed quote to correct one.)

> Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 [...]

> On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto)

Edit: He also has an asteroid and a Lunar crater named after him.

So I got to be at dinner with Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr. who himself received the Nobel Prize. He mentioned Joclyn Bell and how, in his view, she was overlooked. That opinion carries some weight with me.

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