A 24-year-old PhD student spent two years sledgehammering poles into a field outside Cambridge to build a radio telescope, then had to read what it printed out. It produced about 100 feet of chart paper a day. She went through it by hand, looking for patterns in ink. In November 1967 she found what she called a bit of scruff. A quarter of an inch of squiggle on a roll of paper, in a signal she described as one part in ten million. Her supervisor said it was interference. She kept going anyway, partly because she was convinced she was not good enough to be there and would be found out. So she checked everything. The scruff came back, on schedule, pulsing every 1.337 seconds from a fixed point in the sky. Then she found three more. Jocelyn Bell Burnell had discovered pulsars, the collapsed cores of dead stars, spinning fast enough to sweep a beam of radio waves past the earth like a lighthouse. Nothing known could produce a signal that regular, and for a while they seriously wondered about aliens. The 1974 Nobel Prize went to her supervisor. She was not on it. She has been asked about it for fifty years and has never once been bitter in public, saying students were simply not recognised in those days. In 2018 she was given a special prize worth about 2.3 million pounds for the discovery. She gave every penny of it away, to fund physics PhDs for people who do not usually get them. cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysof…