In September 2018, the astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell won a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics worth 3 million US dollars, about £2.3 million, for her part in discovering pulsars. She gave all of it away. The money went to a fund run by the Institute of Physics that helps people from groups under-represented in physics, including women, ethnic minority students and refugees, to study for a PhD and become researchers.
Her reason was simple. "I don't want or need the money myself," she told BBC News. The story behind that decision goes back half a century, to a strange signal in a Cambridge field and a Nobel Prize that went to others.
The discovery: a tiny, regular signal in 1967
Jocelyn Bell was born in 1943 in Lurgan, County Armagh, in Northern Ireland. As a postgraduate student at Cambridge in the late 1960s, she helped build a large radio telescope designed by her supervisor, Antony Hewish, to study how radio sources twinkle. She then ran it and analysed its output, which came out as long rolls of paper chart that had to be checked by eye.
On 28 November 1967 she noticed a faint, repeating signal: a pulse roughly every 1.3 seconds, too regular to be ordinary interference. For a while the team half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for "Little Green Men". She soon found a second source in another part of the sky, which made an alien transmitter very unlikely. The object is now known as PSR B1919+21, the first pulsar ever identified.
Pulsars turned out to be neutron stars: the collapsed cores of massive stars, as heavy as the Sun but only about the size of a city. They spin rapidly and send out beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. Like a lighthouse, the beam sweeps past Earth once per rotation, and we see it as a pulse.
The 1974 Nobel Prize and the question of credit
In 1974 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Antony Hewish, for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars, and to Martin Ryle for his work in radio astronomy. Bell Burnell was not included, although she was the one who first spotted and pursued the signal.
The omission became one of the best-known examples of a junior researcher, and a woman, being left out of scientific credit. Several prominent astronomers criticised it at the time. Bell Burnell herself has usually been gracious about it. In 1977 she argued that prizes for students could demean the Nobel, and she has also acknowledged that being a graduate student and a woman lowered her standing. Many historians see the case as a lesson in how science distributes credit within teams.
The 2018 Breakthrough Prize and why she gave it away
The Breakthrough Prizes, funded by tech investors, are among the largest awards in science. Bell Burnell's special prize honoured her fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars and a lifetime of leadership in the scientific community. She said she was speechless when she heard.
She decided to put the whole sum into scholarships. In interviews she linked the idea to her own experience. She has said she felt like an outsider at Cambridge, a young woman from Northern Ireland among confident, mostly male colleagues, and suspected she did not belong. That fear made her extremely careful and thorough with the data, which is how she caught a signal small enough for others to dismiss. In her words: "I found pulsars because I was a minority person and feeling a bit overawed at Cambridge."
British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins £2.3m award for pulsar work.
— Stemettes 💙 ★ # + (@Stemettes) September 6, 2018
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell @OxfordSparks will donate the money to help students underrepresented in physics https://t.co/lAdT3H6bxB#WomenInSTEM#STEM pic.twitter.com/NzlGHSxfAP
She has also spoken about "unconscious bias" that still affects who gets hired and promoted in physics. Funding is one practical lever: a scholarship can keep a talented student in research when cost, family pressure or a lack of role models might otherwise push them out.
The Bell Burnell scholarship fund today
The Institute of Physics administers the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund. It supports full-time and part-time graduates working towards a doctorate in physics who come from groups currently under-represented in the field. A selection panel reviews applications each year and interviews candidates. In 2024 the fund named eight new awardees.
If you are thinking of applying, check the Institute of Physics page for the current round. Eligibility rules, deadlines and the kind of support offered can change between years, and the fund publishes its own guidance.
Impostor feelings: myth and reality
Bell Burnell is often cited in discussions of "impostor syndrome", the persistent sense that you do not deserve your success and will be found out. The idea was first described by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. It is not a medical diagnosis, and it is common among high achievers, especially those who are new or in a minority in their field.
Her story is sometimes told as if self-doubt were a secret weapon. That is not quite the lesson. Her care with the data was a strength, but the feeling of not belonging was a burden that many talented people never overcome. The point of her fund is to remove some of those barriers, not to celebrate them.
A career that went far beyond one discovery
Bell Burnell went on to a long career in astrophysics and science leadership. She was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, the first female president of the Institute of Physics (2008 to 2010) and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2014 to 2018). She was made a Dame in 2007, helped launch the Athena Swan programme to improve conditions for women in academia, and in 2021 received the Royal Society's Copley Medal, becoming only the second woman to win it after Dorothy Hodgkin.
Pulsars themselves became one of astronomy's most useful tools. A binary pulsar provided early evidence for gravitational waves and earned Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor the 1993 Nobel Prize. The first planets ever confirmed outside the solar system were found orbiting a pulsar in 1992, and today networks of pulsars act as cosmic clocks in the search for gravitational waves.
Just when the world is getting you down, you get to hear today's news about Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. A great scientist. A great human being. pic.twitter.com/fwaAgiQbC4
— Philip Ardagh (@PhilipArdagh) September 6, 2018
Sources: Wikipedia: Jocelyn Bell Burnell; Wikipedia: Pulsar; Institute of Physics: Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund; Breakthrough Prize announcement; Global Citizen, reporting interviews with BBC News and The Guardian.
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