from Hacker News

She Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It

by mmhsieh on 8/8/21, 6:27 PM with 2 comments

• by kmarc on 8/8/21, 8:02 PM

  The editing at 12:37 is just perfect.

  This kind of content is I like NY Times for.

• by MikeUt on 8/8/21, 8:26 PM

  Surely "she" should be changed to "they"? It was Hewish who designed the radio telescope that allowed the fine time-resolution needed to detect pulsars, they investigated the signals together, Bell herself uses "we" when talking about the discovery [1], supports the decision of the Nobel committee [2], and the existence and characteristics of pulsars were all proposed before their discovery, by other scientists [3]. The documentary of course omits this, and even includes her false claim that "back then, nobody knew what a pulsar was, until I found the first two". The great journalists at the Times did not bother to give a quick glance at wikipedia to check their story.

  Sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery

  [1] At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization"

  [2] Bell claims no bitterness upon this point, supporting the decision of the Nobel prize committee.

  [3] The existence of neutron stars was first proposed by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934, when they argued that a small, dense star consisting primarily of neutrons would result from a supernova. Based on the idea of magnetic flux conservation from magnetic main sequence stars, Lodewijk Woltjer proposed in 1964 that such neutron stars might contain magnetic fields as large as 1014 to 1016 G. In 1967, shortly before the discovery of pulsars, Franco Pacini suggested that a rotating neutron star with a magnetic field would emit radiation, and even noted that such energy could be pumped into a supernova remnant around a neutron star, such as the Crab Nebula.