JOCELYN BELL BURNELL

I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.

People from different backgrounds approach a subject in different ways and ask different questions.

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.

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.

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.

That is one of the things that has come out of the discovery of pulsars - more knowledge about the space between the stars.

If it wasn't for the stars, we would not be here.

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 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.

Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.

In the field of astronomy in the mid-'60s, quasars were very sexy objects - gigantic, star-like masses about which little was known. I was a graduate research student at Cambridge working towards my Ph.D. and chose quasars as the subject for my thesis. Part of my project involved surveying the sky for them using a radio telescope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.

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.

I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'

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.