Little Green Men, the story of Jocelyn Bell - temple society australia

Little Green Men, the story of Jocelyn Bell
In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish of the University
of Cambridge, UK dubbed the first discovered pulsar LGM-1 for
"little green men" because the regular oscillations of its signal
suggested a possible intelligent origin. Its designation was later
changed to CP 1919, and is now known as PSR B1919+21.
The radio signal was detected in a UK observatory by Jocelyn Bell.
The signal had a 1.3373 second period and 0.04 second pulsewidth. It
originated at celestial coordinates 19:19 right ascension, 21 degrees
declination. It was detected by individual observation of miles of
graphical data traces. Due to its almost perfect regularity, it was at
first assumed to be spurious noise. A nearby electric fence was even suspected to generate the regular pulses;
but this hypothesis was eliminated. After that, the discoverers proposed the alternative explanation that the
signal might be a beacon or a communication from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization and named it
LGM-1, the first signal received from the ?Little Green Men”.
Little green men’ is the stereotypical portrayal of extraterrestrials as little
humanoid-like creatures with green skin and/or antennae on their heads. The term is also
sometimes used to describe gremlins, mythical creatures known for causing problems in
airplanes and mechanical devices. During the flying saucer "sightings" in the 1950s, the
term little green men came into popular usage in reference to aliens. In one classic case,
the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting on August 21, 1955, two rural Kentucky men described
a supposed encounter with 3–4 foot (1 m) tall metallic-silver, somewhat
humanoid-looking aliens. Employing journalistic licence and deviating from the
witnesses' accounts, many newspaper articles used the term little green men in writing
up the story. However the first use of the specific phrase "little green man" in reference
to extraterrestrials dates to 1908 in the Daily Kennebec Journal,
the aliens being Martians. Green aliens soon came to commonly
portray extraterrestrials and adorned the covers of many of the
1920s to 1950s science fiction pulp magazines with pictures of
Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon battling green alien monsters. The
first documented print example specifically linking "little green
men" to extraterrestrial spaceships is in a newspaper column
satirizing the public panic following Orson Welles' famous War
of the Worlds Halloween broadcast of October 31, 1938. The
column by reporter Bill Barnard in the Corpus Christi Times the
next day begins, "Thirteen little green men from Mercury stepped
out of their space ship at Cliff Maus Field [the local airport] late
yesterday afternoon for a good-will visit to Corpus Christi" and
ends with, "Then the 13 little green men got in their space ship
and flew away." The familiarity with which the term was used suggests that this probably wasn't the first
instance where it was applied to extraterrestrials in spaceships. By 1965, a little green man had even appeared in
The Flintstones as a recurring character. The Great Gazoo (introduced in Episode 145) typified the
representation of a little green man with his short, green stature and helmet with antennae.
In the end the signal turned out to be radio emissions from the pulsar CP1919 (the first one recognized as
such). Bell noted that other scientists could have discovered pulsars before her, but their observations were
either ignored or disregarded. She noted that Sir Fred Hoyle identified this astronomical object as a neutron
star immediately upon their announcement.
The road to becoming one of the most renowned women in science has been a rocky one for Jocelyn. Susan
Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on July 15, 1943. Her father was an architect and an avid
reader. Through his books, Jocelyn was introduced to the world of astronomy. Her family and the staff of the
Armagh Observatory, which was near her home in Belfast, encouraged her interest in astronomy. Jocelyn
Bell's parents very strongly believed in educating women. In 1965, Jocelyn Bell earned a B.S. degree in physics
from the University of Glasgow. Later that same year she began work on her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. It
was while she was a graduate student at Cambridge, working under the direction of Antony Hewish, that
Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. Bell's first two years at Cambridge were spent assisting in the construction

of an 81.5-megahertz radio telescope that was to be used to track quasars. The telescope went into operation
in 1967. It was Jocelyn Bell's job to operate the telescope and to analyse over 120 metres of chart paper
produced by the telescope every four days. After several weeks of analysis, Bell noticed some unusual
markings on the chart paper. These markings were made by a radio source too fast and regular to be a quasar.
Although the source's signal took up only about 2.5 centimetres of the 121.8 metres of chart paper, Jocelyn
Bell recognized it as unusual and considered it important. She had detected the first evidence of a pulsar. In
February of 1968, news of the discovery made by Jocelyn Bell was published in the journal Nature. Further
studies by groups of astronomers around the world identified the signals as coming from rapidly rotating
neutron stars. These objects, first noticed by Jocelyn Bell, became known as pulsars. The term pulsar is an
abbreviation for pulsating radio star or rapidly pulsating radio sources. Jocelyn Bell received her Ph.D. in radio
astronomy from Cambridge University in 1968. She married during that same year and changed her name to
Burnell. Since leaving Cambridge in 1968, Dr. Bell Burnell has studied the sky in almost every region of the
electromagnetic spectrum. She has received many honours and awards for her contributions to science. (See
below) This is a woman who went on to become a professor of astrophysics and a leading scientist in her field.
This is a woman whose science tells her that extra-terrestrial life is out there somewhere yet retains a strong
religious faith. She was very open about her privileged childhood in Lurgan as the daughter of Quaker parents.
Jocelyn also talks openly about her difficult college years and the pressure she felt being the only female in a
class of 50 students, saying: "It was distinctly tough. I ended up in the final two years of my course as the only
female in the class, there were 49 men and me. There was a tradition among the students that when a female
walked into a lecture theatre all the guys stamped and whistled and called and banged the desk. And I faced that
for every class I walked into for my last two years." She also talks about her faith in God and also her belief in
extra-terrestrial life, saying: One of the tenants of Quakerism is that you should be open to new light, new
ideas. In both Quakerism and science you must be completely ready to revise what you hold to be the truth; you
always hold things provisionally, and you are always open to revising them. The universe is very big - there's
about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty
certain, will have planets, where there was life, is life or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
Professor Hewish, now in his 80s, reflects on that time and offers his view of Jocelyn's role in the discovery.
"You know, in the popular mind, she is the key person in the discovery of pulsars," he says. "I'm totally fed up
with this stupid business. I mean it's just totally wrong. If she's disgruntled about the Nobel, well, if I can make
an analogy, who discovered America? Was it Columbus or was it the lookout on top of the mast? Her
contribution was very useful, but I don't think you do get the Nobel prize for that". In the end it is history who
will decide whether Jocelyn should have shared in the Nobel.
In the Beautiful Minds documentary she talks about how in science, "nothing is static, nothing is final,
everything is held provisionally" and that "sometimes you have to abandon the picture". She demonstrates this
with planetary orbits. Kepler recognised that orbits were elliptical, not circles on circles on circles and he made
things simple again. She proposes that "our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier" and
the documentary ends with her telling us that we are all waiting for a new picture.
Although Joselyn didn't share the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics with Hewish for her discovery, she has been
honoured by many other organisations:
• The Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia
• J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize from the Center for Theoretical Studies in Miami
• Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1987)
• Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1989)
• Karl G. Jansky Lectureship of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory(1995)
• Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society (2000)
• Fellow of the Royal Society (March 2003)
• The Grote Reber Medal in 2011, International Radio Science Union in Istanbul
• In 2007 Honorary Doctorates by Harvard University and the University of Durham.
• In 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• In June 2007 she was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE)
• Dame Dr. Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS was president of the Institute of Physics from
October 2008 until October 2010, and is current interim president following the death of her successor,
Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. Dr. Iosif Shklovsky once greeted her with "Miss Bell, you have made the
greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century.”
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