The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced on Tuesday 6 October. In the run-up to the announcement, Physics World editors have picked some of the people who they think have been overlooked for a prize in the past
I’ve met Jocelyn Bell Burnell twice.
The first was when I sat next to her at a dinner in London in 2007. The other occasion was last year when I interviewed her about her incredibly generous donation of $3m to set up the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund.
Run by the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, the fund supports PhD students from under-represented groups at universities in the UK and Ireland, with the first recipients having recently been announced.
On both occasions, I resisted the temptation to ask Bell Burnell why she feels she was never awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of pulsars.
Famously, her PhD supervisor Antony Hewish won the 1974 Nobel prize for the pulsar discovery – sharing it with his astrophysicist colleague Martin Ryle – while Bell Burnell was left empty-handed.
The omission might appear to be due to her gender. But speaking at the International Conference on Women in Physics in Birmingham, UK, in 2017, Bell Burnell attributed it to the fact that she was a PhD student at the time of the discovery in 1967 at the University of Cambridge.
Bell Burnell and five colleagues had built a radio telescope in a huge field outside the city, which she then operated and ran. Combing through the mountains of data, Bell Burnell saw regular peaks in luminosity that she and Hewish attributed to a pulsar – a rotating neutron star that emits a regular ticking signal of radio waves. Their paper announcing the finding was published in Nature in January 1968.
Still, as described in this feature by Sarah Tesh and Jess Wade from 2017, Bell Burnell doesn’t think such an injustice could happen again, pointing to the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics for binary pulsars. It went to Russell Alan Hulse, who was a student at the time of the discovery, along with his supervisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. “At least they don’t make the same mistake twice,” Bell Burnell told delegates at the Birmingham meeting.
Overlooked for the Nobel: the CERN physicists who discovered the Higgs boson
However, we won’t have to wait too long to find out the real reason for Bell Burnell’s omission. The Nobel archives always remain sealed for a period of 50 years after the award of a Nobel prize, which means that details of the 1974 prize will be available in just over three years’ time in January 2024. The archives contain not just data on who was nominated, by whom and when, but also information about the committee’s thinking.
I, for one, will be fascinated to find out what was going through the minds of that year’s Nobel Committee for Physics. We’ve recently learned a lot more about how they operate, but why they make their choices still remains a mystery. However, I’d lay a fair bet that, consciously or subconsciously, Bell Burnell’s gender played a role too in their deliberations.
