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Quite a bit of *quality work from a "girl".
Glad she finally got recognition, and what a great use of the prize.

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OK I will take a risk on this one. Every scientific breakthrough is supported by scientific personnel who run experiments and collect data. The head of the laboratory or institution gets to interpret the data and get the Nobel Prize. That is how teams work in science.

Its even in the video, getting the discovery discovered is a lot of tedious work, someone has to find the anomalous signal, that is great, someone else then gets to state a hypothesis about what it means, which when it proves to be right gives them the prize. Seems fair. Even if its just one on one student and professor, unless the student comes up with a fundamental concept, just noticing an anomaly does not make a Nobel Prize laureate of the student. Even if his line of search is originally against the opinion of the professor.

Now arguably in this case Ms. Bell made a bigger contribution than just collecting data and if you juxtapose that with how women were treated back then, its a nice story. But if she were a man in the same position there would be no Nobel Prize either. And possibly no compensating prize years later.

And yes she deserves her prize, I believe.

Kind of, but the head of department is morally and ethically obligated to make note of the subordinate who made the actual discovery or breakthrough and usually shares the prize at least if it doesn’t go directly to the discovery maker alone. This is especially true when the head misinterprets and discards the data and denies any discovery was made until the discoverer, on their own, forms a hypothesis, tests it, and repeats it, all without the head of department’s involvement.

In this case, one person made the discovery and the department head dismissed it, then that subordinate on her own continued her investigation and formed her own hypothesis, tested and verified it, and only then her department head became convinced, then took ALL credit for the discovery with no mention of her. That is NOT how scientific teams work.

This wasn’t just her discovery, she figured out what it was too…her hypothesis and her testing, her repeating the discovery, almost certainly her writing it up. If she were a man, she definitely would have gotten credit for both the discovery and the hypothesis, and for confirming her hypothesis. She might not have been given the “prize” individually, but she would have definitely gotten the credit and shared in the accolades. (I think a male in the same position would have shared the prize at a minimum, and had the department head claimed credit as they did here, would have publicly disgraced the department head by proving they not only had nothing to do with the discovery, they had dismissed it when shown and added nothing at all to the hypothesis or testing it, and they would have been drummed out of the scientific community for plagiarism and theft of intellectual property).

When he dismissed her findings completely, he removed himself from the discovery and she became group leader of her own separate project. She deserves both prizes, both monetary awards, a public apology from the man who stole her work without giving her credit, and a serious civil judgement against him for any bonus, advancement, raise, accolades, or paid engagements he received based on his lie that he discovered pulsars. That’s her money that he stole.

It would have been a rare occurence indeed for the head of a science project to share the accolades with a student. She was second on the original paper.

Also remember this is a Nobel prize for physics, so it is very much to be had for the scientist who starts the project, creates the equipment, sets goals, is reserved when the student finds something new but then listens to her, the hypothesis and confirmation part is important and was not ms. Bells work...

So yes, the astronomical observation and discovery of the first two pulsars is hers.

The Nobel prize for physics for the discovery of pulsars went to the two scientists that contributed the most to the confirmation of the rotating neutron star hypothesis. IMHO rightfully.

Could a student have been included, man or woman? Unlikely.

In 2018, she won $3 million special Breakthrough Prize, one of the most lucrative and prestigious awards in science.

@13:42 and she then donated it to the Institute of Physics to provide research studentships for people from minorities.
https://www.iop.org/about/support-grants/bell-burnell-fund

@vil: Well, it's actually Bell herself that has a similar opinion:

https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/astr2030_12/sn/Bell.html

It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!

When the paper was published the press descended, and when they discovered a woman was involved they descended even faster. I had my photograph taken standing on a bank, sitting on a bank, standing on a bank examining bogus records, sitting on a bank examining bogus records: one of them even had me running down the bank waving my arms in the air. Look happy dear, you've just made a Discovery! (Archimedes doesn't know what he missed!) Meanwhile the journalists were asking relevant questions like was I taller than or not quite as tall as Princess Margaret (we have quaint units of measurement in Britain) and how many boyfriends did I have at a time?