I've driven past this a bunch of times on my way to our labs in Cambridge (and ate at the three horseshoes) and always wondered what it was, the only thing I could glean from the main road was that the site was big.
Thank you!
A field full of bits of old wire and an abandoned garden shed: it doesn't look like the place where Nobel prize-wining research was conducted, pushing the frontier of radio astronomy. But it was. This is the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, at Lords Bridge – site of a disused railway station just outside Cambridge – which …
The article states that Hewish's first name was Antony, but Ms Bell is just Bell. Bit disrespectful?
At the time Mr. Burnell wasn't around.
Perhaps oddly, Hewish has argued that science and religion are complementary whereas Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is a Quaker (and their views tend to be very similar, as with Eddington). Pascal said "Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie", but real astrophysicists seem to have a much more positive attitude to the universe.
She was even on Stargazing Live on BBC2 a few months ago (at least some of the bits that weren't devoted to Tim Peake and the ISS). A very engaging and eloquent lady, came across very well.
I seem to recall they were talking her up as being Nobel Prize Winning too. Maybe factually incorrect, but as others have noted it's an injustice.
Very nice write-up. It is indeed a shame that sites like this are not preserved. Two of my kids had the opportunity to visit an observatory recently. Since they have been very excited about astronomy and the names of the constellations. Especially the formations they got to look at (Orion's Nebula and Betelgeuse) through the massive telescope. Up and down the country we have all this wonderful history of technological innovation and scientific achievement. Maybe if they were used as part of education we could inspire the next generation of scientific explorers! Open it up to tourism and inspire the older ones as well (quick sweep for bombs at that site first though :P)
Anyway, I'm off looking for a decent telescope....
I always wondered why the fish that I ate as a trawlerman tasted 'mustardy',I thought that it was 'North Sea Sauce'.
Seriously, it is wrong that Jocelyn BELL was not accorded equal recognition for the discovery.
However, as she would probably acknowledge,even though I suspect that it affected her emotionally,the 'reward' is in the discovery itself.
Likewise the recent gravitational wave discovery involving two black holes,it's the 'discovery' not the 'reward's' that really matter.
The Nobel Peace prize system has been corrupted by politicians of late & has become tainted.
The Nobel Peace prize system has been corrupted by politicians of late & has become tainted.
Not really.
The one which is very laden is the Nobel Peace Prize (mainly due to bad decisions by the commitee) and possibly the Nobel-Inspired Prize in Economics (trick cyclists prize, more like)
For the Nobel prizes in science, it's still rather clean, though of course given that same egos of scientists reach several solar masses, politicking, grassrooting, smear campaigns, camping in front of the lobby and "it can be only me" cargo-cult creations can all be found. It's the way of humanity...
... as I lived in one of the nearby villages so would drive past these chaps most days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryle_Telescope
Occasionally at night you'd hear the groaning/scraping sounds as they dragged themselves up and down the old rail lines adjusting themselves.
Seems like they've now been co-opted into a more stationary configuration these days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcminute_Microkelvin_Imager
I had just started my BA senior year radio-astronomy project and remember walking into to an impromptu demonstration of the pulsar with Jocelyn Bell and Tony Hewish playing a bleeping sound over a loudspeaker, interspersed with excited explanations....heady stuff!
I spent several months going back and forth to Lord's Bridge,, gathering data using some dipoles spread over two metal frames. Two of us created sort of an equivalent of the railroad antennae in the field next to the One-Mile setup, carrying the frames back and forth manually and using a theodolite to position them.
Having learnt FORTRAN and written a huge program to process the results, we had a bit of spare time and sat down with Steven Hawking to figure out all sorts of corrections, including Einstein's relativistic adjustments.
Looking back, it was one heck of a great time!
Now this is why public funding and public fundedness is or should be a dead dodo, a parrot that ain't a parrot no more, and a trex fossil of gargantuan portions and proportions no?
It just kills the passion, motivation and aspiration replacing it with necromantic book(slogging) keeping and should be committed committee inspired design.
Or is it just me?
The article stated:
"And some believe [...] spacecraft could navigate using pulsars as a kind of compass or GPS. [...] Whether this is feasible is another matter."
On 3rd Feb 2016, New Scientist explained that yes, it's certainly a viable idea (published in NS print edition dated 6/2/2016):
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075670-galactic-gps-how-dead-stars-will-guide-us-in-deep-space/
"In 2013, Werner Becker at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich, Germany, calculated that pulsar navigation could be accurate to the nearest 5 kilometres (Acta Futura, vol 7, p 11). Others suggest it could be even more precise. “We feel that on a deep-space mission, we could maybe get down to a 1 km solution and maybe a bit better,” says Keith Gendreau, also at the Goddard Space Flight Center."
Both Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft carry a plaque indicating the position of the Sun in relation to pulsars, so the first people to use pulsar navigation may not be people at all...
When you're looking at a bunch of around 100 neutrons, the scale is such that gravitational effects are irrelevant.
When you're dealing with a star-size mass, gravitational effects are not irrelevant.
Very roughly, that's why neutron stars can exist while at the same time atomic nuclei with too many neutrons don't last very long.