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Probing the mysteries of neutron stars with a surprising earthly analog
- suzzer99 3y agoI love that we're still finding new stuff about the universe all the time. I've watched every episode of How the Universe Works multiple times. I get super excited for a new season to find out all the new things scientists have learned.
- rnk 3y agoWhen I retire from being a software engineer I somehow want to be involved in this kid of thing. A lot of this is big data processing, finding signals, in large amounts of information. The gravitational wave is another case.
- axus 3y agoFollowing the links led me to this charming page on NASA about Jocelyn Bell Burnell who helped some others win a Nobel prize: https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/bell.html https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_leve...
- fbdab103 3y agoThe article highlighted a pretty ugly historical fact: that the first person to observe a neutron star did not receive credit for the discovery by the Nobel committee. >Controversially, Bell did not receive recognition in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years[9] and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 96 feet (29 m) of paper data per night. Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made. She spoke of meetings held by Hewish and Ryle to which she was not invited. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Prize_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Pri...
- klabb3 3y agoRelated: Stigler's law of eponymy […] states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. […] Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
- lostlogin 3y agoAre there ever moves to correct things like this? A posthumous award to the woman is fairly meaningless for her but may have a positive effect for relatives or kids learning of such discoveries.