• Augustine Pamplany CST

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who made immense contribution to the landmark discovery of the radio pulsars in 1967. She was only a postgraduate student during this discovery. Despite being the first person to discover pulsars, the Nobel Prize for this discovery went to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle in 1974. Though her omission was severely criticized by renowned scientists, Bell Burnell ignored the controversy, saying, “I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.” Bell Burnell had been the President of the Royal Astronomical Society and Institute of Physics in London. A special report on Bell Burnell by New York Times on July 27, 2021 observed her as a person “who made an astounding discovery. But as a young woman in science, her role was overlooked.”
She won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018. Probably her experiences of rejection led her to use the £2.3 million prize money to establish the “Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund” for female, minority, and refugee students for researches in physics.
She is a strong believer and a practicing Quaker. In 2013, she wrote the book, A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist also be Religious? In this book she remarks that though there is a wealth of opportunities for the scientific development for scientists, there is a scarcity of opportunities for them to develop theologically. She writes, “My astronomy and my Quakerism have grown up together and are comfortable bedfellows. But note which bedfellow has done the accommodating! My scientific understanding emerges unscathed by contact with Quakerism. My Quaker bedfellow has bent to fit in with what I have learnt as an astronomer.”
She regards faith as a matter of heart: “I ‘know’ there is a God, a living, loving God who works through people, prompting, nudging. A God of inspiration, of creativity; a God we can sense in the silence of a gathered Quaker meeting. One who holds a mirror up to us so that we can see our behaviour, keep our standards.”
She rejects the atheistic trends to regard God and spirituality as neurological illusions: “There is a suggestion that religion is a human construct, that it is all in the brain, that neuroscience will, in a few years, explaining it all. Neuroscience is certainly riding high at the moment, has plenty of confidence and is making all sorts of claims. I doubt if they can all be true, but we will have to wait and see which are and which are not! Sometimes I have had promptings to speak which spoke to needs that I did not know existed, things that even my subconscious could not have been aware of, so I am not sure that religion is just a human construct. On balance I am inclined to believe in an external God.”