Jocelyn Bell Burnell transformed astronomy #OTD in 1967 when she made the first observation of a pulsar.
She and advisor Antony Hewish initially dubbed the object LGM-1 (“Little Green Men”) for its regular signal, but soon identified it as a rotating, magnetized neutron star.
@mcnees I wish I could have met her. Wow. Joe Taylor, one of my engineering heroes, was triggered by her discovery, and ran with it. Joe won a Nobel Prize for his work. Bell is almost forgotten except to us few who know.
Fairness does not yet exist in the world. This is irritating to me. Not that this diminishes Joe Taylor's amazing work then and on through the Voyager project and revolutionary communication modes used by ham radio operators like me.
BUT, BUT, BUT, what about Jocelyn Bell? Nobody's heard of her. That's fucked up, and no getting around it.
And what about Emmy Noether???
And what about Cecilia Payne???
All I can say is I'm glad I was born a male. Pure luck, of course. Being male enabled me to proceed without any hindrance in my career.
Half of humanity is female and females are just as likely to be brilliant as males. We need to fix this and fix it now. NOW. With misogynism we are throwing away HALF of our intelligence. It's ridiculous, unconscionable, unforgiveable. And we can't afford it any longer. We NEED all of our intelligence to deal with the problems ahead.
So please, people knock this shit off. NOW. Just stop it. Please. Our survival depends on it.
@shuttersparks @mcnees I was fortunate & terrified to have her as my undergrad physics external examiner.
I was in awe and probably just babbled for the first few minutes, then we got chatting about plasmas in space and building radio telescopes, and I passed! :-)
@Dtl @mcnees Wow. Really. All I can say is I'm honored to speak with you, who met her in person.
And yes, I'm very fortunate to have met some greats in person and even worked with them closely, but there are more that I've never met.
For me, there's something special about meeting such a person eye-to-eye. Maybe silly on my part, but that's how I am.
@shuttersparks @mcnees she still pops up at events from time to time.
@Dtl @mcnees I should add, I suppose, that if we want to talk about misogyny, this is a fine place to start. There are many other places we could start, like Marie Curie. The topic is so enormous it doesn't matter where we start.
We can talk for quite a while about Jocelyn Bell. After Bell, there's a LONG list we can examine. It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
I'm a guy so I don't have to deal with this shit personally. What pisses me off is that we are, as I mentioned elsewhere, throwing away, discarding, 50 percent of our human intelligence on this asinine thing that some human males seem to think is important: misogyny.
Well, no, human females are NOT inferior to males in the arena that matters the most, which is intelligence. They're right in there with us. I know it. I've seen it. I've worked with females for 50 years in the fields of engineering, math, etc. And I'm tired of this shit. Done.
Anyway, sorry. Sorry for ranting. I'm just really pissed off. Not just because of the unfairness, but because what's coming for us with climate change is going to kill the vast majority of us, and my offspring, and we're throwing away half of our brains on a ridiculous predilection that a lot of human males seem to have.
Just knock it off. Stop it. Y'all look like idiots and future generations will not view this kindly. Get it?
