A Quote by Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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.
Our royalty statement has been minimal and menial. Really. We don't collect more than a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. We get maybe the seventh of 1 percent.
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.
It seems that every practitioner of physics has had to wonder at some point why mathematics and physics have come to be so closely entwined. Opinions vary on the answer. ..Bertrand Russell acknowledged..'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little.' ..Mathematics may be indispensable to physics, but it obviously does not constitute physics.
If college cut-offs are above 90 per cent in a particular class, then where would mediocre students with 60 per cent or 70 per cent go? Students who secure 60-70 per cent marks are also intelligent, but they could not get admission in courses of their choice for scoring lower marks than the toppers.
Average tariffs between rich countries are only 3 per cent. But developing countries face tariffs of more than 300 per cent in the EU for meat and more than 200 per cent in the US for fruit and nuts. These need to come down dramatically.
If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made.
In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.
The first thing to realize about physics ... is its extraordinary indirectness.... For physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.... Theoretical physics runs merrily along with these unreal abstractions, but its conclusions are checked, at every possible point, by experiments.
Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.
I discovered I'm 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I'm also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.
There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there more than 30 per cent of girls in France - I don't know about England - that are much, much overweight. And it is much more dangerous and very bad for the health.
People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics, I think, are more indicative of problems with some things going on at the frontier of physics than ideas that are gonna last.
The thing about physicists is that they tend to think that everything is physics. I don't. That's not what music is to me. You can explain aspects of it in physical terms, including the physics of anatomy: how our bodies move, the torsional moment of inertia, the way you move your body to a beat, the inherent periodicities of the heartbeat, the gait. That's physics, too, I guess - maybe they'd call it biophysics.
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 per cent of our time.... The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20% of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 per cent more than now.
When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.
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