5 ms·

"Later, Bell missed out when Hewish and his colleague Sir Martin Ryle were awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics." See also: https://www.theguardian.com/sci

by deng 9y ago

"Later, Bell missed out when Hewish and his colleague Sir Martin Ryle were awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics." See also: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/08/jocelyn-bell-burnell-100-women https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/08/jocelyn-bell...

mjburgess 9y ago
This is a favourite grievance to mention with Bell, but there was no expectation she should have won the prize. She did not discover pulsars. She was a lab assistant who, as she was writing the numbers down in the lab book, first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them. Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America. The prize was awarded to the head of the team as it was a project of his design and his organization. To have split 1/3 of the prize with whatever grad student happened to be keeping the books seems ridiculous.
- jakeogh 9y ago
  Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America." in the first case, other people might not (and had not) noticed. Equating "holy shit! these are multi-solar-mass nucleons rotating at a significant fraction of lightspeed" to the common experience of "land ho!" is absurd.
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something. We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense. Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed. In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results). Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.
    - creep 9y ago
      >Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?
- gmt2027 9y ago
  Except, Hewish did not initially accept Bell's results. He called it interference, claimed it was man made and not worth further attention. There were meetings to which she was not invited and it was a struggle to get him to accept their significance. Edit: Also comparing a Doctoral student who "helped build the telescope" to a cleaner is rather unfair. Francis Crick was a PhD student when they worked out the structure of DNA.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - melling 9y ago
    There was an overlooked woman on that too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
    - gmt2027 9y ago
      The prize was awarded in 1962, 4 years after she died of ovarian cancer. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
      - vanderZwan 9y ago
        I understand why they do that, since it's supposed to be an encouragement. But there are two aspects of the Nobel prize: reputation and prize money. If they would change the rules to make exceptions for shared discoveries, it won't dilute the reputation boost for the scientists in question in the slightest, and if they give the money to the surviving winners that problem is solved too.
      - melling 9y ago
        Yes, I know that it’s not awarded posthumously. My understanding is that she was not given credit in her lifetime so she would not have been awarded it anyway. Unless, someone had explained her contribution in those 4 years. “Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.”
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lemondrops 9y ago
  Analyzing data and deriving meaning from it is exactly what we, in science, mean by discovering something. Though from what I've gathered in recent discussions about Nobel prizes, it is rather common that the project leader is awarded the prize, regardless if his actions directly lead to the "discovery" or not.
- JorgeGT 9y ago
  > Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America. We know the guy by the way, one Rodrigo de Triana, natural of Lepe. NASA's DSCO satellite was originally named Triana after him.
  - dave_sullivan 9y ago
    And Columbus never did pay him... > On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.
    - JorgeGT 9y ago
      But we are talking about him half a millenium later, very few people alive today will get that.
- taneq 9y ago
  > Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Yes it is. Take Pluto, for example. Astronomers predicted Pluto mathematically from other planets' orbits decades before it was 'discovered': > Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranus's orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune. (Edit: changed quote to correct one.) > Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 [...] > On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto) Edit: He also has an asteroid and a Lunar crater named after him.
- wglb 9y ago
  So I got to be at dinner with Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr. who himself received the Nobel Prize. He mentioned Joclyn Bell and how, in his view, she was overlooked. That opinion carries some weight with me.
brandonmenc 9y ago
She herself says: "demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, 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. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Pri...

by deng 9y ago

mjburgess 9y ago

This is a favourite grievance to mention with Bell, but there was no expectation she should have won the prize. She did not discover pulsars. She was a lab assistant who, as she was writing the numbers down in the lab book, first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them. Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America. The prize was awarded to the head of the team as it was a project of his design and his organization. To have split 1/3 of the prize with whatever grad student happened to be keeping the books seems ridiculous.

jakeogh 9y ago
Wrong. Bell was first to make the connection. She discovered them. "first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them." is way different than "guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America." in the first case, other people might not (and had not) noticed. Equating "holy shit! these are multi-solar-mass nucleons rotating at a significant fraction of lightspeed" to the common experience of "land ho!" is absurd.
- mjburgess 9y ago
  Let me refine my comment, "discovery qua social recognition of discovery" does not mean being the first to see something. We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense. Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed. In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results). Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.
  - creep 9y ago
    >Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?
gmt2027 9y ago
Except, Hewish did not initially accept Bell's results. He called it interference, claimed it was man made and not worth further attention. There were meetings to which she was not invited and it was a struggle to get him to accept their significance. Edit: Also comparing a Doctoral student who "helped build the telescope" to a cleaner is rather unfair. Francis Crick was a PhD student when they worked out the structure of DNA.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- melling 9y ago
  There was an overlooked woman on that too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
  - gmt2027 9y ago
    The prize was awarded in 1962, 4 years after she died of ovarian cancer. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      I understand why they do that, since it's supposed to be an encouragement. But there are two aspects of the Nobel prize: reputation and prize money. If they would change the rules to make exceptions for shared discoveries, it won't dilute the reputation boost for the scientists in question in the slightest, and if they give the money to the surviving winners that problem is solved too.
    - melling 9y ago
      Yes, I know that it’s not awarded posthumously. My understanding is that she was not given credit in her lifetime so she would not have been awarded it anyway. Unless, someone had explained her contribution in those 4 years. “Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.”
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lemondrops 9y ago
Analyzing data and deriving meaning from it is exactly what we, in science, mean by discovering something. Though from what I've gathered in recent discussions about Nobel prizes, it is rather common that the project leader is awarded the prize, regardless if his actions directly lead to the "discovery" or not.
JorgeGT 9y ago
> Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America. We know the guy by the way, one Rodrigo de Triana, natural of Lepe. NASA's DSCO satellite was originally named Triana after him.
- dave_sullivan 9y ago
  And Columbus never did pay him... > On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.
  - JorgeGT 9y ago
    But we are talking about him half a millenium later, very few people alive today will get that.
taneq 9y ago
> Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Yes it is. Take Pluto, for example. Astronomers predicted Pluto mathematically from other planets' orbits decades before it was 'discovered': > Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranus's orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune. (Edit: changed quote to correct one.) > Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 [...] > On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto) Edit: He also has an asteroid and a Lunar crater named after him.
wglb 9y ago
So I got to be at dinner with Joe Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr. who himself received the Nobel Prize. He mentioned Joclyn Bell and how, in his view, she was overlooked. That opinion carries some weight with me.

brandonmenc 9y ago

She herself says: "demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, 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. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Pri...