Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My father was an architect.
Science is a quest for understanding.
If it wasn't for the stars, we would not be here.
I'm the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.
There is stardust in your veins. We are literally, ultimately children of the stars.
I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I'm Scots-Irish, therefore.
Women of my generation who've stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.
People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.
Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.
When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.
I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases.
My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.
We all have fundamental beliefs of one sort or another, and it is very threatening if somebody is saying they're wrong.
That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.
The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.
I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'
We still don't know what about 96 per cent of the universe is made of. It is dark matter and dark energy, but we have no idea what it is.
I think a spell abroad for anybody is incredibly useful. It gives you a great sense of perspective, and you see other ways of doing things.
I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often, jobs weren't open to me.
I've enjoyed being a single person, particularly because I'm travelling a lot. It would be hard to maintain a relationship - so I've really not tried.
I know from another pulsar astronomer who won the Nobel that you get no peace. You're asked about every subject under the sun. It quite wrecks your life.
When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that.
In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
I am very conscious that, having worked part time, having had a rather disrupted career, my research record is a good deal patchier than any man's of a comparable age.
It's now widely recognised that a diverse research group is usually stronger, more creative, and more robust and flexible. Such a group usually copes better in a downturn.
Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.
The Sun's magnetic field reverses every 11 years. There have been a quarter of a million reversals since our predecessor, Homo Habilis, emerged, and they haven't killed us yet.
I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.
Once a star dies, it's gone forever. There are no new stars to take its place. Eventually, there will be no stars, and the universe will turn black. That really will be the end.
If you'd got a very conservative Republican in power, they might not be happy about some of the scientific research going on, because it conflicts with their fundamental beliefs.
Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries - the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don't think those countries have better brains.
I positively encourage time abroad to anybody. It's worth taking the time to suss out which countries in the world are well funded for your subject and look for opportunities there.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
People are suspicious of science. They see it as being responsible for problems like the degradation of our climate. There is also a strand in society that says physics is terribly hard.
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, 'There goes some of the primordial universe.'
My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.
I'm one of the few women in science. I have pioneered that. One of the things I worry about is what that pioneering has done to me. I have had to fight quite hard most of the way through life.
Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve... it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project.
You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.
Solar storms cause power outages. They pose a hazard to satellites. They might interfere with your GPS or send your compass a couple of degrees off course. But I don't think solar storms are a life-threatening event.
When I got engaged to be married, it was assumed that I would quit science and be a housewife. It was considered shameful if a married woman had to work - it implied that her husband couldn't earn enough to keep her.
One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I'm sure some people think it was a flash in the pan.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Pulsars are in an ideal part of the universe to test Einstein's theory of relativity - so far, it's holding up well. They may even one day act as navigational beacons for spacecraft. I'll never tire of them; they really are the most extraordinary objects.
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.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
As observatory architect, my dad was partly concerned with the maintenance of them all. I used to go with him on site visits quite often, from age 7 or 8. I have memories of crawling through the rafters of the old building, trying to find where the leak in the roof was.
We didn't get television until quite late, the late fifties, but we had radio, and I can remember listening to the Korean War news on the radio with my family and sensing the anxiety of the adults although not understanding it myself, not understanding exactly what was going on.
There are some countries where there is not an issue with women in physics. Malaysia, for example, has physics departments where 60 per cent of undergraduates are female, and France and Italy are strong, too. It is not about ability but more about what the culture says is appropriate.