There is stardust in your veins. We are literally, ultimately children of the stars.
The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, 'There goes some of the primordial universe.'
I may not have got the Nobel Prize, but I've won countless other awards, including 'Most Inspirational Living Woman Scientist.'
Throughout my working life, I've been either one of very few women or the most senior woman in the place.
In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
I'm the eldest of four children: a brother next after me and then two sisters.
We still don't know what about 96 per cent of the universe is made of. It is dark matter and dark energy, but we have no idea what it is.
We all have fundamental beliefs of one sort or another, and it is very threatening if somebody is saying they're wrong.
I know from another pulsar astronomer who won the Nobel that you get no peace. You're asked about every subject under the sun. It quite wrecks your life.
The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
When I started secondary school, it was assumed that the girls would do domestic science and the boys would do science, and I wasn't too happy with that.
Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.
Women of my generation who've stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.
It's now widely recognised that a diverse research group is usually stronger, more creative, and more robust and flexible. Such a group usually copes better in a downturn.
Solar storms cause power outages. They pose a hazard to satellites. They might interfere with your GPS or send your compass a couple of degrees off course. But I don't think solar storms are a life-threatening event.
