Who's Remote Beginning? Pulsars come in many different kinds. Pulsars are actually a family with different subgroups and magnetars appear to be one of the subgroups of pulsars. But they differ from most pulsars in two respects. First of all, they don't do radio pulses. They are silent usually in the radio. They are strong in the X-ray. The other reason they are different is that they have exceptionally large magnetic fields. The typical pulsar has magnetic fields of about a hundred million Tesla. It's huge. But the magnetars are even bigger still, thousand times bigger than the typical pulsar. So very, very strong magnetic fields. And it's probably the magnetic fields that are responsible ultimately for the emission of X-rays. The radio telescope that I built as a graduate student covered two hectares. And it seemed very big when you were building it yourself. When the square kilometer array comes along, we will be able to see much, much more. In particular, we should be able to see all the active pulsars in the galaxy. At the moment with the biggest telescopes we have, we can see the pulsars in the nearer half of our galaxy, but not the more distant ones. But with square kilometer array, we should see all the pulsars in the galaxy. And I guess also some pulsars in external galaxies. And we will have a much better sample of pulsars. So we will be better able to understand how they evolve and how the sub-families, sub-groups are related to each other. So that would be very exciting. And we'd probably also find some special examples like a pulsar in a binary with a black hole. We find pulsars in binaries with other neutron stars, pulsars in binaries with white dwarfs, pulsars in binaries with some main sequence stars, but not pulsar black hole. And we'd love to have some of those because it would be so extreme in terms of gravitational gravity and would be very good check of Einstein's relativity. I started collecting poetry with astronomical themes. After I heard this poem, it's by a British poet called Elizabeth Jennings. She is interested in the idea that because the stars and galaxies are so distant, it takes light and radio waves a long time to get from there to here. And she's writing a poem around that point and it's called Delay. The radiance of the star that leans on me was shining years ago. The light that now glitters up there, my eyes may never see. And so the time lag teases me with how love that loves now may not reach me until its first desire is spent. The star's impulse must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful. And love arrived may find us somewhere else. And going on from that short poem, I have been collecting many, many poems and there is a lot of poetry with astronomy and space as its theme. One of my interests has been the number of women in physics and in astrophysics because for a lot of my life I have been the most senior woman in whichever place I have worked. And indeed when I became a professor of physics, about 20 years ago, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in Britain. We went from one to two. Now in Britain there are about 600 professors of physics and maybe 50 of those are women. It's still a small number but it is a little bit bigger than it was. There are good numbers of women doing astronomy as students but more of them leave than of the men. So when you get to the senior positions there are fewer women. And one of the other things I have done is look at the data from around the world. The number of women in membership of the International Astronomical Union, the IAU. The distribution across the countries is fascinating. Now the figures overall will be low because to be a member of the International Astronomical Union, first of all you have to be fairly senior, you have to be tenured and also you have to be nominated by your country. And that normally means a group of men are doing the nominating. So the numbers of women are perhaps a little suppressed for those reasons. I nearly did not get to be an astronomer. First of all I failed a very important exam in Britain at age 11 which suggested that I was not academic. But my parents thought differently and I got the chance to have more academic schooling. First of all in Northern Ireland where I lived at that time and then later at boarding school. And I can remember my first week in this more advanced schooling. On the wedding's day morning of the first week a message went around the first year class. This afternoon the boys are to go to that place and the girls are to go to that place. The boys were sent to the science laboratory and the girls to the home science room. We were expected to learn needlework and cookery and so on. And my parents were very cross when they heard that and they made a fuss. And the next time the science class met there were three girls and all the boys. And we had to sit right at the front under the teacher's nose. And that first term we did physics and astronomy and I came top of the class in the exam at the end of term. I would like to think the school learned a lesson but I doubt it. And then I went away to boarding school in England. This was to the Quaker School which is a part of the Christian church. And the Quaker movement has always been, has always seen it as very important to educate the women as well as educating the men. And I benefited from that and I got great encouragement. There are a shortage of people studying physics in Britain. We would like more school children to do physics. And we find in Britain that astronomy and particle physics like they do in Geneva at CERN. These are very attractive to teenagers. But I think we have made one mistake. We talk to the school pupils and the school teachers. We do not talk to the parents. So the child goes home after school and says I want to be a scientist. I want to do astronomy. And the parent says no you don't. Why do you want to do that? Do business studies and get a good job. We forget to convince the parents also. And that I think is a bad mistake.