Question 1

Who was Jocelyn Bell Burnell?

Accepted Answer

The astrophysicist who **discovered pulsars** in 1967 as a graduate student, and who was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery — a case that became a reference point in debates about how scientific credit is allocated.

**What she found.** Working on a radio telescope she had helped build, analysing chart-recorder output by hand — around thirty metres of paper per day — she noticed a small anomalous signal she described as "a bit of scruff". It recurred, and rather than dismissing it she investigated, establishing that it pulsed with extraordinary regularity, roughly every 1.3 seconds.

**Why that was startling.** No known natural source produced such precise repetition. The signal was labelled **LGM-1**, for "Little Green Men", as a half-serious acknowledgement that an artificial origin could not immediately be excluded. Finding a **second** source in a different part of the sky settled it — two independent civilisations signalling simultaneously being implausible.

**What pulsars turned out to be.** Rapidly rotating **neutron stars**, the collapsed remnants of massive stars, emitting beams of radiation that sweep past Earth like a lighthouse. They confirmed that neutron stars exist, and have since become precision instruments — used to test general relativity, to detect gravitational waves, and as the most accurate natural clocks known.

**The Nobel Prize.** The 1974 award for the discovery went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle. **Bell Burnell was not included.** The omission was publicly criticised at the time, notably by Fred Hoyle, and has been debated since — with the defence that supervisors direct the research, and the objection that she detected, pursued and characterised the signal.

**Her own response** has been consistently gracious: she has said that students should not receive prizes except in exceptional cases, while also speaking candidly about the barriers women faced in the field.

**What she did afterwards** matters as much. She held senior positions across astronomy and was the first woman to lead several major scientific institutions. In 2018 she received a **three-million-dollar Breakthrough Prize** and donated the entire sum to fund physics studentships for women, ethnic minority and refugee students.

Question 2

Who was Katherine Johnson?

Accepted Answer

A mathematician at NASA whose calculations of orbital trajectories were central to the early American crewed spaceflight programme — and who worked for years in a segregated unit, doing work that was

Question 3

Who was Chien-Shiung Wu?

Accepted Answer

An experimental physicist whose 1956 experiment overturned a law of physics that had been assumed universal — and whose collaborators received the Nobel Prize for the theory her work confirmed, while

Question 4

Who was Lise Meitner?

Accepted Answer

The physicist who, with Otto Frisch, worked out the theoretical explanation for nuclear fission and gave it its name — and who was then excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery, in

Question 5

Did Benjamin Franklin fly a kite in a thunderstorm?

Accepted Answer

He said he did, but the account is thinner than its fame suggests, and historians have raised serious doubts. What the record contains. Franklin published a brief description of a proposed kite

Question 6

Was Rosalind Franklin's work stolen?

Accepted Answer

The truth is more complicated than either the heroic or the dismissive version, and the honest answer is that her data was used without her knowledge or consent — which is a serious matter regardless

Question 7

Did Marie Curie really carry radium around in her pocket?

Accepted Answer

Yes. By her own account she kept tubes of radium and polonium in her pocket and in her desk drawer, and enjoyed looking at them glowing faintly in the dark laboratory at night. The dangers of

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