Meet Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the woman who discovered pulsars.
By Andrew Blackwell Supervising Editor, Op-Docs |
Documentary filmmakers search for inspiration in all sorts of places. In headlines of bygone front pages, in the corners of underappreciated subcultures and in troves of their own home movies, they're looking for stories that will connect with people — and say something meaningful. |
When the filmmaker Ben Proudfoot and my Op-Docs colleague Lindsay Crouse dreamed up our Almost Famous anthology of short films, they hit on a remarkably fruitful method for finding stories. Instead of focusing on the headlines of yesteryear, they looked … just to the side. |
Next to the story of the Project Mercury astronauts, there's an extraordinary tale of a Black test pilot who never made it to space. In 1960s Liverpool, underneath the screams of untold thousands of Beatles fans, there are four young women whose reaction to Beatlemania was to form their own band. |
But these aren't sour-grapes histories. The people in Proudfoot's films leap off the screen with energy and humor. They argue not that life robbed them of their chance for success, but that success — and life — turned out to be something more complex and bittersweet than they expected. |
This week, we published a new chapter of Almost Famous. In "The Silent Pulse of the Universe," the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell tells the extraordinary story of how, as a young Ph.D. student, she discovered pulsars. Exotic star remnants that spin like cosmic lighthouses, pulsars have been called "the universe's gift to physics" for the ways they allow astronomers to test the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And their discovery soon resulted in a Nobel Prize for the Cambridge scientists who led the research — but not for Burnell. |
The omission led the great astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle to object that Burnell had been robbed of her deserved recognition — but Burnell herself maintains that missing out on a Nobel citation didn't bother her. What did bother her, however, was the intense sexism she faced in her career, in both the scientific world and the press. Reporters covering the discovery of pulsars cast Burnell as little more than an attractive young girl who had helped with the research, and even asked her for her bust and hip measurements. |
But the meaning of Burnell's career comes not from the resistance she faced as a young woman in science, but from her undiminished passion for discovery, and how she used her renown (when it came) to help demolish hurdles for those who followed. That's the true story of this film, and of our series: not of chances missed, but of deeper opportunities fulfilled. |
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