I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It. | 'Almost Famous' by Op-Docs

The New York Times

Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to study radio astronomy at Glasgow University, where she was the only woman in many of her classes. In 1967, Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars — compact, spinning celestial objects that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses. (A visualization of some early pulsar data is immortalized as the album art for Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures.”) But as Ben Proudfoot's "The Silent Pulse of the Universe" shows, the world wasn’t yet ready to accept that a breakthrough in astrophysics could have come from a young woman. See more of "Almost Famous:" https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CGYNsoW2iALgt6KRyVQYSEoNFTaHKzo Credits Director: Ben Proudfoot Editor: Mónica Salazar Featuring: Jocelyn Bell Burnell Producers: Elizabeth Brooke, Abby Lynn Kang Davis, Gabriel Berk Godoi, Ben Proudfoot, Brandon Somerhalder, Sarah Stewart Cinematographer: Tom Welsh Original Score Composed and Orchestrated by: Nicholas Jacobson-Larson Co-Producer: Jeremy Lambert Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer: Sean Higgins Colorist: Stephen Derluguian Post Production Supervisor: Dillon Brown Post Production Coordinator: Laura Carlson Assistant Editor: Cody Wilson Sound Designer: Tom Boykin Second Unit Director: Mónica Salazar Second Unit Cinematographer: Haley Watson Scoring Mixer: Brad Haehnel Musicians: Garth Neustadter, Nicholas Jacobson-Larson, Erik Kertes Story Reported By: Sarah Stewart Consulting Cinematographer: Brandon Somerhalder More from The New York Times Video: Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n Watch all of our videos here: http://nytimes.com/video Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nytvideo Twitter: https://twitter.com/nytvideo ---------- Op-Docs is the New York Times’ award-winning series of short documentaries by independent filmmakers. Learn more about Op-Docs and how to submit to the series. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@NYTopinion).