House Names

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, née Bell (1943- ), British radio astronomer, co-discoverer of the pulsar. Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, on July 15, 1943, and educated at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge, where she gained a doctorate in 1968. In 1967, while she was a research student of Antony Hewish, she noticed an unusual regularity in the records of signals picked up by the Cambridge radio telescope from astronomical sources. This led Hewish to postulate the existence of pulsating radio stars, subsequently known as pulsars. They are believed to be extremely dense, fast-spinning neutron stars. Bell Burnell was awarded the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, and was professor of physics at the Open University between 1991 and 2001. She was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. In 1999 Bell Burnell was made a CBE; in 2007 she was created a dame.

Rene Descartes was a French mathematician, scientist and philosopher who has been called the father of modern philosophy. He had a deep religious faith as a Catholic. At the age of 24 he had a dream, and felt the vocational call to seek to bring knowledge together in one system of thought. His system began by asking what could be known if all else were doubted - suggesting the famous 'I think therefore I am'. Actually, it is often forgotten that the next step for Descartes was to establish the near certainty of the existence of God - for only if God both exists and would not want us to be deceived by our experiences can we trust our senses and logical thought processes. God is, therefore, central to his whole philosophy. What he really wanted was to see his philosophy adopted as standard Catholic teaching. Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) are generally regarded as the key figures in the development of scientific methodology.

Both had systems in which God was important, and both seem more devout than the average for their era.

Louis J. Pasteur was a Catholic who was born and grew up in France. A well renowned scientist Louis was professor of physics at Dijon Lycee in 1848 and later became professor of chemistry at Strasbourg University. His main areas of interest included Physics and Bacteriology. He is best known for demonstrating how to prevent milk and wine from going sour, which came to be called pasteurization. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He became one of the founders of bacteriology. He also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the asymmetry of crystals.

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