Jocelyn Bell Burnell

“Once a star dies, it's gone forever. There are no new stars to take its place. Eventually, there will be no stars, and the universe will turn black. That really will be the end.”

“Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.”

“When I got engaged to be married, it was assumed that I would quit science and be a housewife. It was considered shameful if a married woman had to work - it implied that her husband couldn't earn enough to keep her.”

“I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often, jobs weren't open to me.”

“My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.”

“Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.”

“That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.”

“When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.”

“The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.”

“I'm one of the few women in science. I have pioneered that. One of the things I worry about is what that pioneering has done to me. I have had to fight quite hard most of the way through life.”

“I positively encourage time abroad to anybody. It's worth taking the time to suss out which countries in the world are well funded for your subject and look for opportunities there.”

“I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I'm Scots-Irish, therefore.”

“You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.”

“My father was an architect.”

“My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.”

“We all have fundamental beliefs of one sort or another, and it is very threatening if somebody is saying they're wrong.”

“Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve... it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project.”

“I'm the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.”

“I know from another pulsar astronomer who won the Nobel that you get no peace. You're asked about every subject under the sun. It quite wrecks your life.”

“The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.”