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WTMA Lectureship speaker’s book available online

March 25, 2015

The Porter Henderson Library highlights an eBook by Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Oxford professor of Astrophysics Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is scheduled to speak on campus as part of the WTMA Distinguished Lectureship in Science.  She was instrumental in first observing and analyzing pulsars as a graduate student in 1967. However, she was controversially not recognized for this discovery in the 1974 Nobel Prize, which went to her graduate advisor and to another faculty member.

The Library purchased a short eBook consisting of a lecture given to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia, A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious?.   Chapters three and four of this eBook introduce readers to the development of the solar system and the entire universe in a short 18 pages.  If one is also interested in her spiritual /religious beliefs regarding the compatibility of religion and science, the remaining chapters may also be of interest.  The eBook may be accessed by ASU students, faculty, and staff on or off campus at the link above, and from inside the University Library by other interested persons.

Dr. Bell Burnell will speak on “Why (and how) Pluto is No More a Planet” at 2 p.m. and then “The Last and the Next 100 Years in Astronomy” at 8 p.m. March 31 in the University Center’s C.J. Davidson Conference Center. Both lectures are open free to the public.