Jocelyn Bell BurnellJocelyn Bell Burnell is the astrophysicist who, this year, when she won the prestigious Breakthrough Prize for Science (worth $3 million), immediately gave it to a fund that helps disadvantaged science students while they’re writing their PhDs.
In 1999 I interviewed Jocelyn for my book Living in Godless Times – tales of spiritual travellers. I wanted to ask how her spiritual path (she’s a Quaker) fits with hard-nosed scientific experiment. I also wanted to know how she viewed being passed over for the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to her two male colleagues when she’d actually been the one to discover pulsars. On faith and science, her answer was simple. “Both science and faith start with a hypothesis, a model, a picture, which you revise by experiment in the case of science, by life experience in the case of faith. If it works, you go with it. If it doesn’t, you go back to the drawing board.” How inspiring is that? With complete clarity, she solves the problem between science and faith. And the Nobel? “It’s incredibly demanding to win that prize. I couldn’t have coped with it as a shy young woman in 1973. And, let’s face it, if you win the Nobel in your 20s, after that it’s downhill all the way! I’ve had much more fun by not having won it.” Jocelyn is gentle, humane, with a lovely twinkle in her eye. And – you’ll hardly believe this – she failed the 11-plus exam. Totally inspiring. |
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