Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The girls got sent to the domestic science room and the boys to the science lab. ... I protested — unsuccessfully.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Scientists should never claim that something is absolutely true. You should never claim perfect, or total, or 100% because you never ever get there.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background. Science has been named, developed, interpreted by white males for decades and women view the conventional wisdom from a slightly different angle — and that sometimes means they can clearly point to flaws in the logic, gaps in the argument, they can give a different perspective of what science is.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

By the end of my PhD I could swing a sledgehammer.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Science is a quest for understanding. A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe, or we are in danger of each believing, that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls. I think a search for understanding is much more serviceable to humankind, and is a sufficiently ambitious goal of itself.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Women of my generation who've stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

You can actually do extremely well out of not getting a Nobel prize, and I have had so many prizes, and so many honours, and so many awards, that actually, I think I've had far more fun than if I'd got a Nobel Prize - which is a bit flash in the pan: You get it, you have a fun week, and it's all over, and nobody gives you anything else after that, cos they feel they can't match it.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

If we assume we've arrived: we stop searching, we stop developing.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Looking at the universe as a whole; cosmology, the birth, life and death of the whole universe, we used to have a nice simple model. Then we had to add things like dark energy, and our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have this sense that we need to picture cosmology, the evolution of the universe in a whole new way. I'm probably not one that can achieve this new thinking but somebody will and I feel at the moment we're kind of waiting for it to happen. A bit like a pregnant pause. A bit like what happens when there's a snowfall, first snowfall of the year, when everything goes quiet and kind of waits. I feel we are in that kind of phase.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.

— Jocelyn Bell Burnell