Beautiful Minds: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have a new heroine. Her name is Jocelyn Bell Burnell and she is a very famous scientist. Not famous enough, obviously, for me to have heard of her, but then the only living scientists I have heard of are Stephen Hawking and Stephen Hawking, and as it happens Stephen Hawking (or a photograph of him, anyway) turned up in last night's fantastic TV documentary about Jocelyn Bell. Bell's work discovering the existence of pulsars paved the way for Hawkins's black hole theory to gain greater credence, basically. So Bell made Hawkins, AND SHE CAN BREAK HIM JUST AS EASILY. *DEMONIC LAUGHTER*. Oh sorry. Got distracted. It's sunny in my office, what can I say.

To return to the point, Bell was the subject of the first episode of the BBC4 series 'Beautiful Minds', profiling great scientists. As a Phd student in the 1960s, Bell first built and then scanned the results of Cambridge's Cavendish Lab's new radio telescope, a fantastically strange creation involving lost of poles in a field linked by miles and miles of wire. (It took Bell the first two years of her Phd just to assemble the thing.) The telescope produced 94 feet of readings a day, all of which had to be manually scanned by Bell, readings which were constantly being scuppered by interference from pirate radio stations, police radios and the like. But amongst all this, Bell noticed a quarter inch of slightly divergent results. She pushed and pushed for these results to be investigated, against her supervisor's insistence that it must just be more interference. Eventually she demonstrated that the "interference" was in fact a star that was sending out pulses of radiation. As her supervisor excluded her from meetings to discuss the implications - was the pulse a signal from space aliens, and what should be done about it if so? - she persisted in her work, discovered another pulsing star, and the rest is history, and physics, and Nobel prize glory! But not for her. Don't be ridiculous. It was her (male) supervisor - the one who didn't believe her findings - and her (male) head of department who were awarded the prize, something that Bell appears remarkably sanguine about.

Bell was a terrific interviewee, endearingly modest about her achievements and yet justly proud of what she had done. She was brilliantly articulate, and her face spoke as much as her words. Her eyes shone as she spoke of human beings as being made of the same stuff as the stars; her face fell into still-smarting hurt as she described her isolation as a physics undergraduate, the only girl on her course, greeted by whistles and catcalls as she walked into lectures; she was moved to tears as she remembered her school physics teacher's pride in her success. Contrast her appallingly smug supervisor, who lacked the grace to acknowledge Bell's contribution to the Nobel-prize winning work, saying that he was the captain of the ship and it didn't matter who the crew was. Bell's contemporaries remember it differently, saying that perhaps only one scientist in a hundred would have noticed and acted on the anomaly that Bell spotted.

It was a simply-made, absorbing documentary, punctuated with well-chosen archive clips of scientific films from the 1960s, and blissfully free of dramatic reconstruction. If you're in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer here.