Jul 19, 2026 · 4 min · 8 segments
**This week, we've got a special Trapped History short for you. It felt wrong to ask Jocelyn to nominate someone for the Hall of Fame (Vera Rubin, anyone?) and so today we've got some choice gems…
Oswin BakerHost
Jocelyn BellGuest
Carla O'ShaughnessyHostMost people of my generation, and I am excluding my colleagues here, will have first come across your work
not through science, not through the journal Nature or anything like that, but through the music and the albums of a band called Joy Division.
Their debut album, which was called Unknown Pleasures from 1979, it reproduces on the album cover, it reproduces a composite of your pulsar waves taken from an image in an astronomical encyclopedia.
To me, it looked like a series of mountain rangers And in fact, I had the poster of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures on my door, on my bedroom door as a school kid saying, oh, what's in here? It must be very exciting.
I mean, did that phase you at all? The idea of a sort of a post-punk band taking on some of the iconography of a pulsar?
No, I don't think I was particularly aware of it either because I wasn't into joy division inside that.
And does it mean anything to you now that it's sort of crossed a barrier into pop culture?
And funnily enough, we've got a few poets on this season of Trapped History.
But bringing us back full circle to Vera's work, you edited a collection titled Dark Matter, Poems of Space, a true collaboration between poets and scientists.
And one of the things I found most interesting is that you've said when you do poetry readings, you find a lot more women turn up than straight down the line science talks.
And that sounds quite sad, but it's also quite a cunning way of getting women and people who might otherwise be a bit scared of science to look at it.
And how do you think we can make science just that little bit less scary for non-scientists?
We are working on it, but I think there's still quite a long way to go, particularly with physics.
Biological sciences have a larger fraction of women than do the physical sciences.
Most people of my generation, and I am excluding my colleagues here, will have first come across your work
not through science, not through the journal Nature or anything like that, but through the music and the albums of a band called Joy Division.
Their debut album, which was called Unknown Pleasures from 1979, it reproduces on the album cover, it reproduces a composite of your pulsar waves taken from an image in an astronomical encyclopedia.
To me, it looked like a series of mountain rangers And in fact, I had the poster of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures on my door, on my bedroom door as a school kid saying, oh, what's in here? It must be very exciting.
I mean, did that phase you at all? The idea of a sort of a post-punk band taking on some of the iconography of a pulsar?
No, I don't think I was particularly aware of it either because I wasn't into joy division inside that.
And does it mean anything to you now that it's sort of crossed a barrier into pop culture?
And funnily enough, we've got a few poets on this season of Trapped History.
But bringing us back full circle to Vera's work, you edited a collection titled Dark Matter, Poems of Space, a true collaboration between poets and scientists.
And one of the things I found most interesting is that you've said when you do poetry readings, you find a lot more women turn up than straight down the line science talks.
And that sounds quite sad, but it's also quite a cunning way of getting women and people who might otherwise be a bit scared of science to look at it.
And how do you think we can make science just that little bit less scary for non-scientists?
We are working on it, but I think there's still quite a long way to go, particularly with physics.
Biological sciences have a larger fraction of women than do the physical sciences.
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