Thursday Throughput: Substitute Teacher Jocelyn Bell Burnell Edition

Those of you old enough might remember what sometimes happened when your teacher was away from school or had to catch up on a lot of paperwork. In would be wheeled a cart with a VCR and a TV. And up would go a movie that would substitute for education that day. In my school, we called it the Automated Substitute Teacher.

Well, I recorded a video throughput for this week. But on watching it, I realized that, while I’ve mostly gotten over my cold of earlier this week, I’ve not gotten over it enough. My voice is shot and I spoke like someone literally on cold medication. So rather than subjecting you to my semi-coherent inaudible ramblings, here’s a substitute teacher: an hour long public lecture by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell on her discovery of Pulsars.

For those of you who don’t know, Bell Burnell is, in the words of Tony Stark, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend. She discovered pulsars — spinning flashing neutron stars — when she was a graduate student. The discovery won a Nobel Prize — for her advisor. Burnell has always been gracious about that the way she is gracious about everything.

She has spent the half-century since then advocating for science and for women in science, educating the public and making astronomy better. A few years ago, she won a massive prize for he life’s work. And Burnell — a deeply religious Quaker who believes in living modestly — donated all three million dollars of it to fund women, under-represented minorities and refugees trying to break into physics.

She is also a personal inspiration to me. In my first year of graduate school, she gave a public lecture on pulsars at UVa. The way she explained them to a general audience was so clear and engaging, I realized that this was how I wanted to give talks on astrophysics. I did get to very briefly meet her and she was (and is) a wonderful person who is still taking names at 78.

Enjoy the lecture. And hopefully it won’t be too huge a step down when I’m back in action next time.