In the footsteps of Jocelyn Bell

By Brian Clegg

When I was in my last year at Cambridge, by which time my Natural Sciences degree had been refined down to experimental physics, I had to do a project. I had always been fascinated by radio astronomy, often passing Jodrell Bank on the way to a friend’s house when at school: with a fellow student I was offered the chance to try some basic radio astronomy. We weren’t given a handy, off-the-shelf, giant steerable dish, though. We had to start from scratch.

One huge advantage I had in teaming up with Dave Izod (apologies if I got the name wrong – it was a long time ago) was that he had the huge advantage of being a (then) rare undergraduate with a car. The Mullard radio astronomy observatory was over four miles from my college and I didn’t have a bike. 

One of the reasons the exercise was so satisfying was that it involved picking up a whole range of new skills. The starting point, for example, was using a theodolite to determine levels before partially constructing and deploying an antenna that bore more resemblance to a bed frame than the familiar dish shape. There was then a whole host of measurements to be made before data could be collected and some attempt made at interpreting it (with a large amount of help from a patient grad student).

We did finally manage to pick up some radio signals and have a guess at what they were (sorry, analyse them), but what this brought home was the sheer indirectness of radio astronomy – particularly at a time when the technology employed was often so basic. This was as compared with modern equipment’s ability to give you far more than just a list of numbers on a print out, which was all we got. I am totally in awe of Jocelyn Bell Burnell (at the time Jocelyn Bell) who had detected the first pulsars using equipment that was similarly basic (if much larger – see part of her ‘array’ illustrated above) less than 10 years before.

There is considerable controversy over Bell Burnell’s lack of a share in the Nobel Prize – she herself has always been surprisingly sanguine on the matter, saying that she didn’t think it was appropriate for research students to receive the Nobel ‘except in very exceptional cases’, which she didn’t believe hers to be. However, I am more inclined to follow the lead of one of my other Cambridge-based astronomical heroes, Fred Hoyle who thought this was, indeed, an exceptional case and that her omission was more a matter of sexism on the part of the Nobel committee than anything else.

Whatever was the reality, working briefly, if on a toy project, at the Mullard was an amazing experience and hugely increased my admiration for those who have brought us such discoveries. Modern science writing often gives us a bit more a feel of the realities of scientific work – but I think radio astronomy is one field where we are so aware of the dish antennae that it’s easy to forget what important work was done with a few wires, crude equipment, no computers and a lot of hard work.

Image: Part of the Cambridge Interplanetary Scintillation Array – courtesy of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.