INTRODUCTION

The skies have always fascinated mankind. Man has derived many
things by looking at the skies .He has built a treasure house of ideas from the
skies. One of the most prominent objects in the night sky are the stars. They
stand out due to their sheer number. Philosophers from the ancient times had
predicted that there was no way to learn about stars from earth, they were
thought to be god’s creation that could never be understood.

Mankind has always looked upon to do the impossible, the

observations of Tycho Brahe, Kepler coupled with the mathematics of
Newton paved the way for the understanding the stars. Newton for the first
time allowed us to predict the path of celestial bodies. All this began in the
16th century, the rest is history.

After this breakthrough there was steady development in physics the

next revolution was started in the 19th century by a clerk Albert Einstein .He
changed the view of the universe by fixing constraints on the maximum
speed of an object in this universe. He went a step ahead of Newton and
using radically new non-Euclidean geometry (developed by Riemann and
taught to Einstein by Lorenz) to describe our world. He also introduced time
as a dimension along with the other three dimensions. This theory gave birth
to the other wonder of physics quantum mechanics. Even though Einstein
opposed its ideas it was powerful enough to explain the small (stars) and the
very big (stars).

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 These theories revolutionized our understanding of the celestial bodies
to a greater extent. We could learn about the stars, we could build
instruments to measure a particular property and from this derive more
information about the celestial bodies. The theories first predicted all
properties of the celestial bodies and the experiments confirmed it later. We
had the power to know the past, present and future of the heavens. On of
such fascinating heavenly bodies are pulsars. They like all great discoveries
and inventions were discovered by accident and by the keen observation of
the experimenter. Here in the next few pages we present this fascinating
story about PULSARS beginning from their discovery by S. Jocelyn Bell
Burnell.

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