Background and Family Life
Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where her father was an architect at the Armagh Planetarium. She was encouraged to read and drawn to books on astronomy. She lived in Lurgan as a child and attended Lurgan College where she was one of the first girls there who was permitted to study science. Previously, the girls' curriculum had included such subjects as cross-stitching and cooking.
At age eleven, she failed the 11+ exam and her parents sent her to the Mount School, York, a Quaker girls' boarding school. There she was impressed by a physics teacher, Mr. Tillott, who taught her:
You don't have to learn lots and lots ... of facts; you just learn a few key things, and ... then you can apply and build and develop from those ... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was.Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four 3-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham, in which her career and contributions to astronomy were explored.
Read more about this topic: Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background, family and/or life:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)