Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this Christmas is a physicist. Her particular field of endeavour is astronomy, in which as a practising Quaker her minute analysis of the Infinite encourages both her love of science and her belief in God.

Presenter0:43

As a student in the sixties she made a discovery which some said should have earned her a share in the Nobel Prize, which went to her supervisor. She's philosophical about this episode, content to have won her place in the scientific establishment as one of the handful of female professors of physics in this country.

Presenter1:01

A passionate love of her subject makes her an eager communicator. Her work, she says, is like opening a sequence of doors. You lift your eyes to a further horizon at each stage, and it's staggering, it's beautiful. She is the Open University Professor of Physics, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. It's also vast, Jocelyn. It seems to me the more you discover, the more you realise how vast the universe is. Is it is it very daunting working in such an infinite field?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:28

Yeah.

Presenter1:29

It could

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:29

It can be both daunting and dangerous working with these big, big things.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:35

Daunting for the obvious reason the scale and how minute we are.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:40

Dangerous because it can go to your head. You're working with this grand stuff.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:46

And you find something, come across something, and the danger is that you assume you're working with something cosmic, when in fact what you're working with is a flaw in your equipment.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell1:58

You do need to keep your feet

Presenter2:00

It on the ground. Absolutely, but but nevertheless, it must make you feel.

Presenter2:04

All of the time it must remind you about how small we are, how how how minuscule we are in the grand design of things.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:10

Yes, it does. I have to say, though, when you work as a professional astronomer or physicist, you write down these very large numbers as a power of ten, that's the technical phrase, and you don't actually think about it.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:26

It's really only when you're talking to a lay person.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:30

and you see their jaws drop.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:32

And you realize

Presenter2:34

afresh what you've just said. That's right. And you've you've drawn, I think, a a a jawdropping analogy of uh grains of sand in a cathedral to illustrate that that that vision of space, haven't you?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:46

Yes, this is one of the ones that I find most staggering. If you took a big cathedral like Saint Paul's or Westminster Abbey,

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell2:56

cleared everything out, put two or three grains of sand in that cathedral.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:00

Then the cathedral would be more densely packed with sand than space is with stars.

Presenter3:06

Oops. Because

Presenter3:07

Millions and millions of Mars, endless galaxies. We're part of one galaxy. How many galaxies are there?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:13

Yes, there's a very nice rule of thumb that I I like to quote, or a multiplication table.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:20

It's due to Arthur Stanley Eddington, who died about sixty years ago.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:25

But he said there are a hundred thousand million stars in a galaxy, and there are a hundred thousand million galaxies in the universe.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:35

Tell me about your first record.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell3:37

My first record is from the Missa Luba, an African mass, a Congolese mass in fact. It's like the night sky. It gives me tingles.

Speaker 13:51

Oh my god!

Presenter4:10

The Mungano National Choir singing the Sanctus from Guido Harzen's Missaluba. Can it really be true, Jocelyn, that you went into radio astronomy because it meant you didn't have to work by night? Yes, it's absolutely true.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell4:23

Yeah.

Presenter4:23

As a

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell4:23

The teenager I needed my bed.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell4:27

I still do, but I'm getting better at it.

Presenter4:30

So of course you measure therefore the the the radio waves by day, which is why you don't have to look at it in the night skies.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell4:35

That's right. In uh radio astronomy the sun does not dominate the sky the way it does in the visible or the optical.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell4:43

So radio astronomers are much less sensitive to day and night and they just operate twenty-four hours a day.

Presenter4:48

It does seem, though, that you you've lived your professional career, if you like, the wrong way round, because you made this amazing discovery right at the outset, didn't you? You were twenty-four years old, a student, and and it really was something that rocked the academic establishment on its heels. Let let's just see if we can understand exactly what it was. It was nineteen well it was mid sixties, wasn't it?

Speaker 14:59

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:10

Yes, middle to late sixties.

Presenter5:12

What were you doing?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:12

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:13

I was working for my higher degree.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:17

And my particular piece of research was to map the sky that was visible from Cambridge, and pick out some of the most distant objects in the universe.

Presenter5:27

But you say map it, map it in a very particular way.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:27

Perfect.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:30

Well, map it at radio wavelengths, make a radio map of the sky.

Presenter5:34

And that's

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:36

Constructing the equipment was hugely physical for the first couple of years that I was in Cambridge. It was mostly manual labour.

Presenter5:45

Brr.

Speaker 15:45

Mm.

Presenter5:45

But why? Because you were setting up lots and lots of cables and and and posts that you banged in with the sledgehammer in in the vast field. Yes, we were actually building our own home

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell5:55

made radio telescope. It looks like a giant hop field. It's about four acres of wooden posts.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:04

Although what actually counts from the scientific point of view is the copper wire that's strung along the top of the posts.

Presenter6:10

By nineteen sixty seven it was up and running. When did you begin to spot that there was something interesting going on?

Presenter6:16

There

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:16

Very soon afterwards, within the first month or so.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:20

There began to be a funny signal that I couldn't properly place.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:25

We were using paper chart, so there was miles and miles and miles of paper chart. With needle marks on it, we used it. Yes, with a pen, red pen, wiggling over this turquoise checked chart paper. It was uh very pretty.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:39

Also, we discovered that if you got sunlight on the pen trace, the pen trace faded, so you couldn't work outdoors. So what did you spot that was different?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:49

The signal that I was looking for was a particular kind of squiggle on the chart.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell6:55

Because we had this enormous radio telescope, we also picked up radio interference. Particular trouble with some pirate radio stations in those days, but also badly suppressed cars, sparking thermostats, these kinds of things, all gave radio interference.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:11

So there were squiggles due to radio interference.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:15

And there was another squiggle, quite a small one, that somehow didn't look

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:20

quite like the squiggles I was meant to be detecting.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:24

It it only occupied about quarter of an inch on this chart paper and

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:29

It was four hundred feet of chart paper for each scan of the sky, so it was a very, very small bit.

Presenter7:35

It was on

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:35

Unclassifiable. It was unclassifiable. That's right. It was a problem because it was unclassifiable.

Presenter7:41

And I think I'm right in saying, Auntie, that you you did consider it was possible it was some other form of life out there.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:47

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell7:48

It was such a curious signal that, to begin with, we were absolutely convinced there was something wrong with the equipment. And this was a very difficult time for me because, of course, I'd connected up all the wires. And I was desperately afraid I had got some wires crossed and I was about to be booted out of Cambridge. But we finally, after some tests, gave the equipment a clean bill of health and, so to speak, moved the problem one stage further away and thought about interference and it wasn't that and moved the problem one stage further away and

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:19

Well

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:20

If there are other civilizations out there.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:24

The radio astronomers are probably the people who first make contact with them. So you thought it could be little green men? So we.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:32

half in jest, half seriously.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:35

Wondered if this was Little Green Men. Yes. And?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:39

It wasn't.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:41

Did you have wanted to be? No, I was actually very relieved. For me the the really sweet moment was when I found the second of these things, whatever they were.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell8:53

And that killed the idea of it being little green men.

Presenter8:56

But I'm right in in thinking, aren't I, that there was a point at which someone said, Forget it, it's just, you know, it's just an aberration, it's a flare star, it's something that's died, it's gone you missed it, it was a bit odd, but it's gone now.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:07

You missed it. It was a bit odd, but it's

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:09

Yes, um this was particularly the case early in trying to pin down the first one.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:15

Because it went quiet for about a month and uh we thought it had been something ephemeral and we'd missed it. But you persisted. I persisted.

Presenter9:23

Is this a a Belle Burnell bit of Belle Burnell temperament?

Presenter9:29

I see.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:29

I think it may be. My school teachers were noting that I had more persistence than many of

Presenter9:29

The doggedness.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:35

other kids they taught. Let's pause there uh for your second record. Tell me about that. Second record is a piece of Mozart, a Mozart horn concerto, and I've picked this particular piece because it's conducted by Iona Brown.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:50

I came across Iona Brown quite early in my life.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:53

She and I were both at Southampton at the same time.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell9:57

And I became a fan and have followed her career.

Presenter10:59

Timothy Browne playing part of the second movement of Mozart's Horn Concerto, Number Two in E flat major, with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Iona Browne. So what was it you'd found, Jocelyn? How important was it in this this vast river of paper, these squiggles, this scruff? What was it?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell11:16

This quarter-inch of signal turned out to be.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell11:21

A radio signal from a new kind of star, not little green men or anything more mundane like that.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell11:28

This kind of star was quite undreamed of.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell11:32

It turns out that there are some very dense little stars out there in space. They're they're called neutron stars or pulsars. Pulsating stars. Pulsating radio stars, yes. They're like uh lighthouses out in space. They spin round and they sweep a beam of radio waves round the sky. You call them then, I think, a balish.

Presenter11:54

I think uh your very early description you recorded in your diary was that

Speaker 111:55

Discussion you recorded in your diary was that

Presenter11:58

And and that was quite prescient, wasn't it? Because, as I understand it, a use they could be put to is as a kind of interstellar navigational aid.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell12:05

That's right.

Presenter12:15

For travel.

Presenter12:16

Now you mention Tony Hewish, your supervisor on the project. It was he, of course, who got the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsating stars a few years later in nineteen seventy four. Did you feel miffed about not getting any credit for it yourself?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell12:30

No. Um, first of all, there is no Nobel Prize for Astronomy.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell12:36

And this was the very first time that the people that allocate the physics prize had decided that astronomers could be counted in.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell12:44

And I was very flattered that my stars were seen as the first astronomical physics prize.

Presenter12:51

Someone else's name attached. You say my stars. You say that's the story. I don't want to drive you into sort of being resentful about this, but I'm interested that you're not resentful, really. There were

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:01

Actually much more complicated things going on in my life then.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:06

By nineteen seventy four I had a small child.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:09

And I was struggling with can I bear to be at home all day? I am really missing the stimulus of intellectual life.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:18

But I've got a small baby for whom I have responsibilities.

Presenter13:21

So in a way you'd moved on. Did you not feel at all proprietorial after all after all that hard work with the sledgehammer? But also, it has to be said, the persistence that you showed, as we've said, going through those pieces of paper time and again.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:35

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:36

Yeah.

Presenter13:36

Things were

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:36

rather different in those days. Um

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:40

We still had a rather more hierarchical image of science as being done by a great man, and it nearly always was a man.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell13:47

with a load of minions under him who did what he told them to and didn't think. And we now have a much better understanding of science as a team activity. But had you at the age of

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:03

Like would

Presenter14:04

to be very different.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:05

Yes. Better?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:07

I think I would have had more recognition in the sense that glass ceilings would have been busted sooner.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:15

Record number three.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:17

Record number three is an academic one.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:21

It's Brahms' setting of the student song Gaudiamus Igitur.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell14:27

Which has all the energy of student life in it.

Presenter15:14

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboyne playing part of Brahm's Academic Festival Overture.

Presenter15:21

Jocelyn Belbenel, you seem to have been exorcised by gender from a very, very early age, I think. What what was the first manifestation of it?

Speaker 115:27

I think both

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell15:28

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell15:29

But

Presenter15:31

Oh, what a

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell15:31

About age 18 months. I was the eldest child in my family, the next child was a boy. We were living in Northern Ireland, but we had a lot of um Irish people around us. And the new baby and I would be taken out for a walk by the nanny, who would meet up with some other nannies who would say, Isn't it marvellous that Mrs Bell now has a son?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell15:57

In my hearing.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell15:59

Because in Irish society the men count and the women don't. This was what just about at the end of the war, I would think, was it? Yes, exactly. But your parents wouldn't have been of that mind, were they? No, no. Parents most definitely were not, and I think were quite horrified when they discovered what was going on.

Presenter16:09

No, no.

Presenter16:16

Because your father was a professional, he was an architect, wasn't he?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:18

Yes, and

Presenter16:19

And a brain of Britain finalist, I read.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:21

Yes, he had tremendous general knowledge and was the Northern Irish finalist for

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:27

Several years, I think. But did he encourage you in your love of science, in your interest in astronomy? I think he had an enormous influence.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:37

He was the architect for the Armagh Observatory.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:41

And occasionally I would go on site visits with him.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:44

mostly clambering up amongst the rafters looking at leaks in the roof.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell16:48

But when the staff there found I was interested in astronomy, they were very kind to me and gave me a lot of useful information.

Presenter16:56

You had a good education. You seem to have spent, though, a lot of the time pretending you weren't quite as bright as you were.

Presenter17:03

I

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:03

I found that it wasn't socially acceptable for a girl to be a gnaw.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:11

particularly in science, I think it has to be said.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:14

And so, through my teens, I developed techniques of.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:19

Disguising my knowledge? Posing statements actually as questions? In what way, how?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:26

Oh, do you see? And I would say something like.

Speaker 117:26

Oh, you see

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:32

Isn't it true that Jupiter's the biggest planet? Am I right? Very tentatively. But why? Why did you feel you had to do that?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:41

Because the social pressure in those days, um, particularly in mixed groups, was that the girl

Presenter17:48

Most were the

Presenter17:49

The inferior sex. It was hardly mixed, of course, by the time you got to University in Glasgow. I think you were the only physics stud female physics student, weren't you?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:57

Uh

Presenter17:57

In uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell17:58

About fifty people doing honours physics. Yes, I was the only female. How was that? It was traditional at that time that whenever a woman entered a lecture theatre, all the men stamped, thumped the benches, whistled, catcall.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:13

So for my final two years of university, every class I went into, I had to face that kind of barrage.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:20

Record number four.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:22

My fourth choice is a Scottish piece. I love Scottish country dancing.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:28

And I've picked a piece that I think might inspire me on a desert island.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:33

It's known as the Reel of the Fifty first Highland Division.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:36

and it was devised in prisoner of war camp

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:40

By officers and men of the Fifty First Highland Division.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell18:46

The idea of being isolated in some way and putting your energies into devising a Scottish country dance, I think would enhearten me hugely.

Presenter19:26

A reel of the Fifty first. Highland Division, played by the first Battalion of the Fifty first Highland Volunteers. So why, Jocelyn, when you'd won all the sexist battles, you'd beaten the boys, won the accolades, got the degree, made a discovery which, as we say, rocked the academic world on its heels, why did you then

Presenter19:44

Really give in and fulfil all those expectations that you'd so resented. Got married, had a baby, gave it all up.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell19:51

Mm I do wonder sometimes as well.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell19:54

There were tremendous social pressures on us.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell19:57

I remember noting at the time I I got engaged between discovering pulsars numbers two and three.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:03

And I noticed at the time that people were much more willing to congratulate me on my engagement.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:09

Then congratulate me on making a major astrophy

Presenter20:12

Physical discovery. Your problem was that having done that, got married, had the baby, given up the work, you're bored out of your mind, weren't you?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:20

Yeah.

Presenter20:20

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:20

Yes, I wasn't out of work very long. I certainly was bored out of my mind. I had about a year out of work at that stage and then went back part-time, which seemed to be the best compromise between my needs and society's needs.

Presenter20:35

And but what you ended up doing, if I understand it right, is following your husband in his job. He was a local government officer, and wherever he was posted you went and

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:39

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:40

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:44

Wrote a begging letter to the local astronomical place. Yes.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:48

I felt immensely frustrated.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:51

and at times very depressed because

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell20:54

We'd move to a new area, I'd get a job, it was probably a lonely job, but I'd work myself up the organization.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:00

Then he'd change his job and, you know, back to square one.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:04

On the plus side, I have a much broader experience of astronomy and a much broader experience of life than most of my male colleagues. Quantum mechanics and everything else that you went into. I started teaching for the Open University, and that was tremendous.

Presenter21:22

And then

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:22

And then

Presenter21:22

Just over ten years ago now, I think your your marriage ended and

Presenter21:26

Putting aside the fact that that divorce is a miserable business and one wouldn't wish it on anyone, there was, it seems to me, again because of the story of your life you're telling a positive side to it for you because all of a sudden you could go where you wanted to go, when you wanted to go.

Speaker 121:30

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:41

Yes. I suddenly had mobility.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:44

And it's lack of mobility that many women suffer from. You know, you're a sitting duck.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:49

Suddenly finding yourself single, you're free.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell21:52

I was free to go and spend 18 months in the United States just recently, and that's actually a very heady experience.

Presenter22:00

He got liberated, aged what, nearly fifty. Yes.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:03

Yeah.

Presenter22:05

Record number five.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:06

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:07

Record number five is probably.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:10

One of the records I'm most fond of, and again, I've chosen it with a desert island in mind.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:17

It's from Verdi's Nabucco and it's the chorus of the Hebrew slaves.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:22

And these are the Hebrews in exile in slavery.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:27

And homesick.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell22:29

And you can hear their homesickness coming over them and then they recover a bit and then another wave comes over them and then they perk up a bit and so on. It's so true to life, it's great.

Speaker 123:21

Send me a

Presenter23:38

Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verde's Nabucco, performed by the Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala Milan, conducted by Riccardo Mutti.

Presenter23:45

You're um a Quaker, Jocelyn. Have been all of your life, which means that you know about silence, you know how to use it to great effect. Do you mind?

Presenter23:56

Do you mind describing what your worship means to you, how it works for you as you sit in your silent meetings?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:01

Do you sit in your silent room?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:03

Yeah, well the Quaker meeting is unstructured.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:07

With each person.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:09

worshipping, trying to sense the presence of God.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:13

And

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:14

Some time.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:16

during the hour silence. There will probably be one or two spoken contributions. Saying what kind of thing? Sometimes it stems from an experience during the week.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:27

Or it might be a piece of philosophy, tremendous range

Presenter24:31

But you've talked, I know, about having some slightly strange experiences during these Quaker meetings that you've

Presenter24:38

sometimes almost had a spooky ex

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:48

The incident that occurs to me most recently actually occurred in the United States.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell24:54

and somebody that I did not know was sitting just across from me, and spoke about some of the questions of life.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:05

And at the beginning of the meeting I had been reading a piece that I'm very fond of from Rilke.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:11

About don't push too hard for the answers, but live the questions.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:17

and it seemed right to read this piece out loud, so I did.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:22

I'd come across it at a funeral service in Milton Keynes for

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:28

A Catholic nun who had died, and it was read, At her request, she'd died of cancer.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:33

And I discovered that this unknown woman was also dying of cancer, and it was just what she needed to hear.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:43

X record

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:45

I didn't used to have any particular need for music.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:51

Until about ten or fifteen years ago.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:54

When I went to the Soviet Union, as it then was,

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell25:58

on a visit to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:02

I come from a Quaker tradition which is very, very simple, very, very plain meeting rooms, and went into this Russian Orthodox environment which is incredibly beautiful gorgeous icons, gold and things.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:17

And I was quite overcome by this, really.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:22

And when I came back realised I was hooked on choral music.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:26

And that's led me into other areas of classical music as well.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:32

So Rachmaninoff's Vespers are to remind me of that experience in the Soviet Union.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:38

and hearing hours and hours and hours of Russian Orthodox liturgy.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell26:43

Glorious.

Speaker 127:03

Oh, swordy bought out.

Presenter27:30

Bless the Lord, O my soul from Rachmaninoff's Vespers with the corridor singers conducted by Matthew Best.

Presenter27:37

The fundamental question, of course, Jocelyn, for any scientist who believes in God, is how can you reconcile the two? When you accept and would tell anyone that ultimately there is a rational scientific explanation for how and why things come to be, how can you therefore believe in a supernatural force? Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell27:56

Yeah.

Presenter27:56

I

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell27:56

Do find that

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell27:59

Both sit comfortably, provided I am not required to carry with me all the baggage that sometimes is attached to the Christian God.

Presenter28:09

So you haven't got to be literal about it, is that what you mean?

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:12

Okay.

Presenter28:14

That God created the universe.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:17

Yes, I do believe in a God, I do sense the presence of God, but I don't require God to be the Creator.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:25

Nor do I require God to be in control of the world.

Presenter28:28

But there are scientists, as we know, and much respected ones, very well known ones, who spend a lot of time making the point that there's no room for God in in a rational uh universe.

Speaker 128:36

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:36

In the rapid

Presenter28:38

Um I've heard you criticise them before now for being so vociferous about that.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:45

Yes, there there are scientists who are thoroughly anti-God.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell28:50

But equally I I feel that there are scientists who try too hard to reconcile science and religion. So I I think there are pitfalls both ways. And of course I believe I'm work walking the perfect tightrope.

Presenter29:03

That's cool.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:06

Let's hear your seventh record.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:08

The seventh record is by Bernstein.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:12

I've great respect for Bernstein.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:14

But I'm limited in the number of records I can take with me, so this one's doing double duty.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:20

It's Bernstein's serenade, but the soloist is Hilary Hahn.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:25

She's a very young American. I heard her play live.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:30

And she was amazing, and I wrote in my diary, This nineteen-year-old will go places.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:37

Subsequently discovered that she's actually already gone places, thank you very much.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell29:41

So this is Hilary Hahn playing the Bernstein serenade.

Presenter30:44

Hilary Hahn playing part of the fourth movement of Bernstein's Serenade for Solo, Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Zinnman. So, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, um have you got another Nobel Prize winning idea, theory up your sleeve? Uh no, I think that's unlikely. But but an astronomical or several astronomical puzzles you'd quite like to solve.

Presenter31:07

Uh

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:07

I've got some puzzles I'd love to solve. Um I'm currently chasing a particular pair of stars in the constellation of Cygnus, which seems to break all the rules in a most entertaining manner.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:19

I'd like to crack it before I retire, but um

Presenter31:22

Mm. It might win.

Presenter31:24

But sitting on your desert island you'd have the time and the space to crack it.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:27

I doubt it, I do my science in um community.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:34

I'm not sure I would function as a scientist on a desert island.

Presenter31:38

That's a great shame,'cause I I just had the impression it might be ideal for you, the the silence and the space and the skies, that it was right up

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:45

Used to be

Presenter31:46

Yeah.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell31:46

Well, there are lots of other um strands to my personality which I I think would thrive quite well on a desert island. Particularly if I find myself there after a very hectic spell, I think.

Presenter31:57

I would welcome it. Okay, well, we won't send you for Christmas. We'll shipwreck you in early January. Thank you.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:01

Thank you. Yes.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:02

Tell me about your last record.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:04

The last record is John Taverner.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:08

And

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:09

His music

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:11

I find quite touching, it gets somewhere deep within one.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell32:17

And I think that would be good to have on a desert island.

Presenter33:13

Stephen Issilis playing with great peace and serenity from John Tavener's Eternal Memory with the Moscow Virtuosi conducted by Vladimir Spivakoff. If you could only take one of those eight records, Jocelyn, which one would you take?

Presenter33:27

Desperately difficult ch

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:28

But

Presenter33:29

Voice

Presenter33:30

But I think I'd go for the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. And then your book. You've got, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. What else? Yes. I'd like to have Dostoyevsky's.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:40

Brothers Karamazov.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:43

I believe it's a book.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:45

That has many layers of meaning in it, many levels. I've meant to read it for years, never have.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:51

I think this is the opportunity to read it and re-read it. And your luxury.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell33:56

I've always wanted to improve my drawing and sketching skills, so I'd like a book on how to sketch and a generous supply of paper and sketching materials. Fine some

Presenter34:08

No charcoal round the island, I guess.

Presenter34:11

Justin Belbernell, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs and happy Christmas. Thank you.

Speaker 234:24

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.