British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3M award for pulsar work
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The last paragraph of the article seems to give a brief insight into her position now on why she was excluded.
“The money will be handed to the Institute of Physics to fund PhD studentships for people underrepresented in physics. “A lot of the pulsar story happened because I was a minority person and a PhD student,” she said. “Increasing the diversity in physics could lead to all sorts of good things”
She slighly expands on that in the BBC coverage.
“The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago.
"I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at Cambridge. I was both female but also from the north-west of the country and I think everybody else around me was southern English," she said.
"So I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things and that is often a very productive thing. In general, a lot of breakthroughs come from left field."”
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/scienc...
Giving all the winnings to the cause is impressive.
It was somewhat sad that the bbc interview this morning was insistent on making the story about balancing the scales over not being awarded the nobel.
She was pretty passionate about pushing the story toward her latter point about the benefits of diversity in any field. Her clarity of vision on this was wonderful.
I feel the media have rather got lost/muddled on her point, which is a shame.
Also, she's from Norn Iron which I didn't realize and am really rather pleased to see.
Lastly, I'd love to get Hewish's take on this:
"The discovery was so dramatic it was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974. But while Hewish was named as a winner, Bell Burnell was not."
What a mensch. This fine fellow sounds like a real David Drumlin.
The guys's a legitimate Nobel winner on his own, and let's not tar his name with the Nobel committee's mistake in skipping over Bell.
Ryle's participation in the prize was for aperture synthesis interferometry while Hewish's was for the discovery of pulsars. From [0]:
> The Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 was awarded jointly to Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars."
Aperture synthesis is useful for achieving higher angular resolutions than would otherwise be possible. But pulsars are unresolved and so angular resolution isn't as important for their study (the localization of pulsars can be done very precisely from the modeling of the arrival times of individual pulses). Collecting area (overall sensitivity of the telescope) is the driving consideration for pulsar science.
In any case, it would be worth hearing from Anthony Hewish on this matter as I'm inclined to find Sir Fred Hoyle's criticism of the decision quite damning for Hewish.
I'm curious what she means by that. Did she have a particular world view not shared by the other students that helped with this discovery? The article mentions her experiencing the 'imposter syndrome' which caused her to work harder to standout than she would have usually, otherwise she might be exposed as a fraud who doesn't belong (even though she was clearly capable enough to have been at Harvard). But wouldn't a modern inclusive environment have eliminated that feeling?... So I'm curious if there was something else about her own personal experience helped her with that discovery, beyond working harder.
I went to Cambridge (disastrously) from Dublin about 20 years ago, and I for one definitely experienced implicit bias, culture differences that had to be learnt, different presumed levels of academic preparation, etc. Maybe things have improved a bit now. The typical Cambridge student comes from a very privileged, homogenous British background.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-p...
(t-shirt with said graph and underneath it "What is this? I've seen it on tumblr")
"Having also ruled out broadcasts from “little green men”, Bell Burnell gathered more observations until eventually she found three more repeating pulses of radio waves emanating from different spots in the galaxy."
I remember reading somewhere that Dr Bell was labelling the traces on the pen-chart recording that showed the signal 'lgm'.
Really good outcome.
The best outcome would have been the confirmation of real lgm. That news will blow away everything else every done in astronomy and physics combined. Every time a new instrument comes online (LIGO) I cross my fingers, and then am disappointed as the known universe becomes a little more empty.
But Shannon... information theory is an Important Tool in physics. It led Stephen Hawking to predict Hawking Radiation, which was important for understanding black holes. And it has a lot of other uses in physics as well. He'd be eligible, I think. But it's still a marginal case; information theory, itself, isn't physics. It's still math.
For good or for bad, electrical engineering work has won Nobel prizes: Transistors, integrated circuits, etc. These were inventions and did not provide insights into physics.
Heaviside reformulated Maxwells work in electodynamics into the form it has been used ever since, and had major role in developing vector analysis which is like indispensable in Physics now.
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408191
Of course, not everyone agrees.
Well, neu ist German for new
[1] https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1037634162138800134
... Almost every year there’s been some sort of party because I’ve got another award. That’s much more fun.”
So any idea how not to win the Nobel prize? :)
There have been so many great potential laureates who have gone unrecognized by society at large because entropy caught up to them before the Nobel committee got around to them.
Those who immediately come to mind: Debbie Jin and Ron Drever.
He also correctly identified (theoretically) the method by which site-directed mutagenesis would be done, published that, noting that it required advancements in oligonucleotide synthesis, then actually did the experiments in collaboration with Michael Smith, who won the nobel prize. He wasn't awarded the prize himself because it was split with Kary Mullis (who invented PCR). Possibly he was skipped over because Mullis and Smith were well known in the chemistry circles and Hutchison was more of a microbiologist, and the prize was a chemistry prize, not a physiology prize.
Justice comes creeping around, at last. Glad she's alive to enjoy it.
(Recently I read somewhere that justice may be on its way for Henrietta Leavitt ... for discovering, in the early 1900s, a way to measure the distance to stars.)