TikTok video of Lurgan-born Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell on The Tommy Tiernan Show on RTE goes viral, revealing Nobel injustice
The Co Armagh woman responsible for the ground-breaking astronomy discovery of pulsars, and then denied a Nobel prize, has told her story in an online video that has reached more than 300,000 views.
Lurgan-born Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover the stellar phenomenon of rapidly pulsating neutrino stars that emit regular pulses of radio waves and electromagnetic radiation at up to thousands of times per second.
However, her discovery in 1967 was not acclaimed by the highest of global awards, with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 given to her thesis supervisor and the head of department.
In an interview with Tommy Tiernan on RTE, which was posted recently to the TV channel’s TikTok account, Dame Jocelyn remained magnanimous about being denied the Nobel prize, much to Tiernan’s surprise.
"So, the Nobel Prize went to my thesis supervisor, so it became known as the No-Bell prize,” she explained.
Clearly taken aback, Tiernan reacted saying: “I am shocked by that story”.
However, Dame Jocelyn said she was content that the Nobel physics prize was awarded in 1974 for an astronomical discovery for the first time.
Despite the apparent injustice she said: “You mustn’t get bitter, bitterness is a waste of energy.”
Tiernan said she should tell more people about it, and suggested it could be made into a movie. Asking Dame Jocelyn who would play her part she joked: “As long as it isn’t someone too sexy”.
Dame Jocelyn was a research student in Cambridge studying for a doctorate when she made the discovery, as she scanned “miles” of printed out astronomical observations. Her finding of a “little bit of scuff” was dismissed at first by her supervisor.
Because of the regularity of the pulses she labelled them at first as LGM - Little Green Men.
Their regularity, as she explained to Tiernan, means they are cosmic clocks, and can be used in key astronomical observations, such as ripples of space and time.
Despite the Nobel snub, Dame Jocelyn has been lauded by the scientific community and beyond. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of pulsars.
The $3m dollars award (£2.3m) she gave in its entirety to fund “women, under-represented ethnic minorities and refugee students to become physics researchers”.
Reflecting on the attitude to her discovery during a 2020 lecture at Harvard, Dame Jocelynn said the media coverage was the most “disgusting” of formats seeing her supervisor was asked about the astrophysics yet she was asked about boyfriends, her vital statistics, her hair colour and asked to undo buttons on her blouse.
However, since then Dame Jocelyn has received numerous honours, been appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to astronomy, elevated to Dame Commander and Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy.
The 300,000-plus people who viewed her interview with Tommy Tiernan might conclude that despite her snub by the Nobel committee she didn’t do too bad for a woman from Lurgan who failed her 11 plus.