Jocelyn Bell Burnell

“There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they'd had more diversity, maybe it wouldn't have happened.”

“If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.”

“In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.”

“It's now widely recognised that a diverse research group is usually stronger, more creative, and more robust and flexible. Such a group usually copes better in a downturn.”

“As observatory architect, my dad was partly concerned with the maintenance of them all. I used to go with him on site visits quite often, from age 7 or 8. I have memories of crawling through the rafters of the old building, trying to find where the leak in the roof was.”

“I've enjoyed being a single person, particularly because I'm travelling a lot. It would be hard to maintain a relationship - so I've really not tried.”

“When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that.”

“One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I'm sure some people think it was a flash in the pan.”

“We live inside our universe and cannot get a bird's-eye view of it from outside. And we cannot even see all of our universe. Distant parts of it are expanding away from us so fast that they are invisible; they go faster than the speed of light. Having bigger telescopes to see fainter stars will not help us here: invisible is truly invisible.”

“Solar storms cause power outages. They pose a hazard to satellites. They might interfere with your GPS or send your compass a couple of degrees off course. But I don't think solar storms are a life-threatening event.”

“I didn't always have research jobs.”

“I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.”

“If you'd got a very conservative Republican in power, they might not be happy about some of the scientific research going on, because it conflicts with their fundamental beliefs.”

“Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.”

“We still don't know what about 96 per cent of the universe is made of. It is dark matter and dark energy, but we have no idea what it is.”

“People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.”