BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Lauren LeVernier, Desert Island Discs is taking its usual Easter break for the next few

weeks, so to keep you going until we're back on air, we'll be showcasing a few programs

from our back catalogue. As usual, as this is a podcast, the music has been shortened

for rights reasons. This week, the castaway is Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who

was interviewed by Sue Lolley at Christmas 2000.

Music Music

My castaway this Christmas is a physicist. Her particular field of endeavour is astronomy,

in which, as a practicing quaker, her minute analysis of the infinite encourages both her

love of science and her belief in God. As a student in the 60s, she made a discovery

which some said should have earned her a share in the Nobel Prize, which went to her supervisor.

She's philosophical about this episode, content to have won her place in the scientific establishment

as one of the handful of female professors of physics in this country. A passionate love

of her subject makes her an eager communicator. Her work, she says, is like opening a sequence

of doors. You lift your eyes to a further horizon at each stage and it's staggering. It's

beautiful. She is the open university professor of physics, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. It's also

vast, Jocelyn. It seems to me the more you discover, the more you realise how vast the

universe is. Is it very daunting working in such an infinite field?

It can be both daunting and dangerous working with these big, big things, daunting for the

obvious reason the scale and how minute we are. Dangerous because it can go to your head.

You're working with this grand stuff and you find something come across something and

the danger is that you assume you're working with something cosmic. When in fact what you're

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