56 Quotes by Jocelyn Bell Burnell

People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.

Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.

Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.

When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.

If it wasn't for the stars, we would not be here.

In the field of astronomy in the mid-'60s, quasars were very sexy objects - gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope.

Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.

I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases.

When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that.