This week’s article in The Kerryman newspaper.
Michael Commane
The second guest on RTÉ’s Tommy Tiernan Show on Saturday March 29 was Lurgan woman Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I’d never heard of her before, but I can tell you this, I’m never going to forget her.
She is an astrophysicist, working in Oxford. She feels it’s easier on the ear if she introduces herself as an astronomer.
She began by detailing how our understanding of the universe has changed over the last 50 years.
She accepts the theory of the Big Bang. The whole of the universe was compressed into a tiny ball, starting from extreme unsteadiness and is constantly expanding.
The Milky Way is the name we give to our own galaxy and there are probably one hundred thousand million galaxies. Stars are grouped into galaxies and our galaxy probably contains one hundred thousand million stars.
Having said that she smiled and assured Tommy that we are not unique.
Jocelyn then went on to say that our sun is an average star, other suns have come and eventually burned themselves out. There are suns being formed all the time.
Do numbers like that mean anything? All they do for me is give me a fleeting idea of the vastness of the universe. And on that topic Tommy asked her was there anything outside our universe. To that question she had no answer.
When Ms Bell Burnell started her undergraduate studies in Glasgow in the 1960s academic sexism was rife. She was one of very few women studying physics and she recalled how when she walked into the lecture hall all the young men would stamp their feet, bang their desks and whistle at her. That’s how awful it was. She admits things are getting better all the time but there is still a shortage of women in the field.
In the politest of ways possible she hinted how she was passed over for a Nobel Prize because of her gender, laughing, explaining how that year it became known as the No Bell.
Her male supervisor won the prize on her discovery of radio pulsars in 1967, which are particular types of stars. But she did explain there is no Noble Prize for astronomy and that was the first year a physicist won it for their work in astronomy.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Quaker. She spoke how she believes in the Holy Spirit and that Quakers attend weekly meetings. Quakerism is a Christian denomination.
I was blown over by Ms Bell Burnell on the Tommy Tiernan Show. It forces me to continue to ask what’s it all about. God? I hope so, and believe too, but it does put into perspective that as a young man I was told if I ate meat on a Friday or did not go to Mass on a Sunday I was committing a mortal sin. Jocelyn reinforces my belief that we have to be extremely careful trying to say anything about God.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who was born in 1943, failed the Eleven-Plus exam. She gives great hope to all of us in so many ways. And she is the ultimate proof why there should be no mandatory retirement age.
The show is available on the RTÉ Player.
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