A closer look
Being a grad student usually involves endless suffering, but Jocelyn Bell Burnell took it to a cosmic level. In 1967, she noticed weird 'scruff' on miles of chart recorder paper. Instead of ignoring it like a sensible, sleep-deprived student, she tracked it down and discovered pulsars—rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars. Her male supervisor happily accepted the 1974 Nobel Prize for her meticulous detective work, cementing physics as the ultimate group project where the guy who does nothing gets an A.
