Jocelyn Bell Burnell

“The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there wa...”

“When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.”

“I think a spell abroad for anybody is incredibly useful. It gives you a great sense of perspective, and you see other ways of doing things.”

“Solar storms cause power outages. They pose a hazard to satellites. They might interfere with your GPS or send your compass a couple of degrees off course. But I don't think solar storms are...”

“One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I'm sure some people th...”

“The Sun's magnetic field reverses every 11 years. There have been a quarter of a million reversals since our predecessor, Homo Habilis, emerged, and they haven't killed us yet.”

“When I got engaged to be married, it was assumed that I would quit science and be a housewife. It was considered shameful if a married woman had to work - it implied that her husband couldn'...”

“I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'”

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

“You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it...”

“I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly....”

“There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that...”

“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 ne...”

“In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.”

“If you'd got a very conservative Republican in power, they might not be happy about some of the scientific research going on, because it conflicts with their fundamental beliefs.”

“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.”

“There is stardust in your veins. We are literally, ultimately children of the stars.”

“My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.”

“My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.”