56 Quotes by Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.

People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.

I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I'm Scots-Irish, therefore.

I'm the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.

My father was an architect.

I didn't always have research jobs.

We live inside our universe and cannot get a bird's-eye view of it from outside. And we cannot even see all of our universe. Distant parts of it are expanding away from us so fast that they are invisible; they go faster than the speed of light. Having bigger telescopes to see fainter stars will not help us here: invisible is truly invisible.

Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.

I am very conscious that, having worked part time, having had a rather disrupted career, my research record is a good deal patchier than any man's of a comparable age.