Jocelyn Bell Burnell is best known for having discovered of pulsars, (along with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish) back in 1967. There can't be many humans alive who have discovered something quite so strange and unexpected. To quote from a Wikipedia definition of a pulsar:
Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The observed periods of their pulses range from 1.4 milliseconds to 8.5 seconds.[my italics] The radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing towards the Earth. This is called the lighthouse effect and gives rise to the pulsed nature that gives pulsars their name. Because neutron stars are very dense objects, the rotation period and thus the interval between observed pulses is very regular. For some pulsars, the regularity of pulsation is as precise as an atomic clock.
An entire collapsed star spinning around in seconds, or even milliseconds? Who would have thought it before one was actually discovered? J B S Haldane was right:
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
It must be a great feeling to have your achievements recognised with an honorary degree, but to just be the first human to discover something wholly new and novel has to be off the scale - that must be about as good as it gets, ever.
Here are some pulsars doing their thing:
And the unoriginal but obligatory burst of Vangelis doing his electronic thing back in the '70's:
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