Jocelyn Bell Burnell

A little while since I did a physics post, so here is one. Travelling to and from Leeds by train gave me the chance to do some reading. The month's edition of Physics World went with me for that purpose. It came along with an issue of Interactions which fulfils the role of a kind of newspaper for the Institute of Physics, highlighting its own work, where the magazine itself addresses news and ideas from across the whole world of physics itself.

It contains a full page profile of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who is the president of the Institute of Physics for the coming two years. She is the first female president of the Institute. Her career in physics had an unusual start in that her "big discovery" did not come after years of research and as part of a well developed research career. It came during her first venture into research, her PhD work. She was part of the team that discovered pulsars (a type of astronomical object whose emission of radiation varies in a regular cycle - they pulse), and this put her into the public eye. Her supervisor won a Nobel prize for this.

Jocelyn's career was not routine after that. She was married, and moved to follow her husband's job. So getting post-doctoral positions depended on (her own phrase) writing begging letters to universities. With her fame as a discoverer of pulsars, though, this meant "they were at least likely to read it and not bin it instantly, so I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened to me..".

Asked if her Quaker beliefs have affected her management style (she is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends) she agrees: "One of the Quaker ethics is that there is 'that of God in everyone', which to me means that within everyone there is something really good and positive, and my management style fits with that. I have a very collegiate style, trying to draw out from each member of the team what they can best contribute.

"The Quaker ethic also fits very well with being a research scientist, because in Quakerism there's no dogma or creed but you are meant to sit light to your beliefs and revise them if need be. And when you're being a research scientist you're working with a model or hypothesis that you're meant to sit light to and revise if need be. That's the British style of Quakerism and research science sits very comfortably with that."

I found this interesting as representing a dialogue, lived out in practical life, between a scientist's religious belief and their scientific work. There is much in it that a Catholic scientist could share, with the difference that the Catholic would have an underlying dogmatic/creedal foundation that the Quaker would not have. Seeing that there is something "of God" in everyone would be recognised by a Catholic as growing out of a belief in God as the creator of each individual person in the image and likeness of God, which might be injured by sin, but is not completely destroyed by sin. And it is interesting to see that then developed into the adoption of a management style.

Similarly, the idea of being "light to" your particular scientific theory (model or hypothesis) as you set out on research would be seen as an openness to the ever emerging possibilities of the creative wisdom of God in creation, a recognition and faith in the ultimately rational nature of creation and of our ability to discover that rationality. Indeed, I have posted in the past on St Robert Bellarmine's account of precisely this sort of outlook, in the context of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the Galileo affair. Robert Bellarmine's argument that science still had not at that time produced the definitive evidence to support a change of perspective on a particular Biblical text explicitly included a recognition that, when such evidence was forthcoming, a "re-think" of both the scientific model/hypothesis and of the understanding of the Biblical text would be in order. I think it is fair to say that he would have us also sit "light to" specific interpretations of Biblical texts that touch on matters of science in exactly the way that we do for the science itself.

The non-dogmatic Quaker approach does contain a couple of hidden hazards, in my humble opinion. There must be a certain, loosely defined as it may be, range of underpinning belief - eg in the existence of God - which is not averted to. And the non-dogmatic approach can be open to a practical agnosticism or indifference to truth. But, that having been said, there is certainly ground to be shared in dialogue, as exemplified by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

On the current controversies over religion and science, [Jocelyn Bell Burnell] observes wryly:"I think there's a lot of dogmatism around in the debate, which is probably why it gets so heated".