EMPIRE OF THE STARS--S.CHANDRASEKHAR

Empire Of The Stars by Arthur Miller;Published by Houghton Miflin; Pages 364; Price U.S $26/-
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The author of the book under review is a Professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College, London. He has lectured and written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth century science and technology, cognitive science, scientific creativity and the relationship between arts and science. His books include “Insights of Genius” and “Einstein, Picasso”, which is hailed as an intellectual thriller.
In “Empire of the Stars”, Arthur I. Miller, recreates a distasteful phase in the fledgling days of astrophysics, and the dominating actors in the sordid drama. The quest for black holes was put behind by thirty years because of a personality clash which caused havoc to the career of a brilliant Indian scientist—Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
“Chandra” as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was called was, born in Lahore in 1910. He enrolled himself, at 19, with a scholarship, as a graduate student at Trinity College, Cambridge. Nephew of the Nobel Prize winner C.V.Raman , Chandra belonged to an intellectual aristocracy. He received a fine education at Presidency College, Madras, and graduated with acclaim, publishing papers in leading journals, and impressing eminent visiting scientists from Europe. Chandra could properly have aspired to a spectacular career — physics was in an exhilarating and revolutionary phase in the early 1930s, and Cambridge was at the Mecca of scientists.
Before touching Cambridge , Chandra had mastered the seminal work of Arthur Eddington , “The Internal Constitution of the Stars’. Eddington was a kind of Father-figure in theoretical astronomy and when Chandra enrolled at Trinity, he was a Fellow. The two established seemingly cordial relations. Chandra’s exceptional talent was plain to all. Chandra had his “Big Idea” — that, if Einstein were correct, stars would end their lives in such bizarre, mysterious ways but this idea remained dormant for three years. Eddington was possibly the only one to have realised the greatness of his Idea and worth but his reaction was inexplicably obtuse.
Chandra summoned the courage to present his radical thoughts at the January 1935 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. These monthly occasions, attended by all the academic dignitaries, were the prime arena for discussing new astronomical discoveries. Eddington arranged to speak immediately afterwards. On January 30, 1935 Chandra gave a 30-minute lecture, ostensibly on white dwarf stars. His talk included the suggestion that stars of a certain mass, when they burned out, might collapse forever—their gravitation so great that not even light could escape it. When Chandra finished his talk, Eddington rose and demolished the notion. “I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!” Sir Arthur Eddington the founder of modern astrophysics, and the man best situated to grasp Chandra’s theory, declared that if physics could posit such an incredible notion, then physics was wrong. His counter arguments may have seemed thin, but his authority carried weight with many there. Eddington himself posed the notion of something akin to a black hole in 1926, in his book “The Internal Constitution of Stars”.

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For the next nine years Eddington poured ridicule on Chandra and the concept of singularities (where all the matter in a giant collapsed star concentrates at an infinitely shrinking point).Half a century had to elapse before Chandra won the Nobel his work deserved. However, the two men remained professionally cordial: Chandra wrote to his older colleague regularly, and Eddington supported the Indian astrophysicist’s nomination to the Royal Society in 1944.
The Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge since 1913, and the director the Cambridge Observatory, Eddington had explained Einstein’s relativity to the English scientific community and to the public in general texts still read today. In 1920 he guessed correctly that stars give off light energy because they burn hydrogen, and he first proposed the balance theory of stellar size: that stars stabilize at their given size for most of their lifetimes at the point where the inward pressure of gravity balances the outward pressure of gases and radiation. He also headed the team that observed light bending around the Sun during an eclipse—the first experimental proof of Einstein’s theory.
Chandra was intellectually active till he turned 84 but his scientific genius bloomed on his journey by ship to England. While his ship steamed through the Arabian Sea he pondered an arcane problem: what happens to stars when they use up all their nuclear fuel? It was thought that a “dead” star turned into a so-called “white dwarf” — a dense cinder that could no longer shine. Chandra mastered the theory underlying these concepts, and discovered an enigma. White dwarf stars much heavier than the sun couldn’t exist. So what happened to them? According to Einstein’s relativity, their gravity would pull them ever inwards, making a “hole” in space. This fate should have overtaken millions of stars in our galaxy — space should be “punctured” by huge numbers of black holes.
It must be noted that Eddington’s ridicule did not utterly destroy Chandra’s career: not a few of Chandra’s peers, especially in other countries, acknowledged and even accepted his theories within a few years of the debacle at the Royal Astronomical Society, although almost none of them in England was willing to stand up to Eddington on the matter.
Miller notes the ironies of the background of the two adversaries —the “humble Indian” scientist came from a family of highly-educated men and women of science and letters (his mother translated Ibsen into Tamil; an uncle won the Nobel in 1930), while the haughty Cambridge don was born a Quaker and raised by a single mother following his father’s death when the boy was only two.
Miller’s book is the biography of an idea rather than of a man ; for the layman who wishes to know the elements of the basics of stellar evolution this is a valuable introduction. Miller takes the reader on a remarkable journey exploring the breakthroughs of various scientists such as Ralph Fowler, Henry Norris Russell, Edward Milne, Niels Bohr, Sir James Jeans, George Gamow, Lev Landau, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller. A very valuable part of this volume is the glossary of scientists and of terms of physics and astronomy .
Perhaps the saddest aspect of the story is not Chandra’s humiliation but of Eddington becoming isolated from his colleagues , and dying in 1944 of a large stomach tumor that went too long undetected because of his preoccupations and a delay in medical examination .
Chandra left England in 1936 for the University of Chicago, which remained his base until his death at 84. He worked incessantly; he was famous for his stamina in immensely detailed algebraic calculations. He also produced a series of impressive treatises. For decades he avoided the subject that had led him into such traumatic controversy. But when he was in his sixties, he deployed his formidable talents again on the study of black holes. The resultant book, “The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes”, published when he was 72, was the one he found most taxing and challenging to write. It is by any standards a monumental achievement: 650 pages of dense mathematics. Indeed, in one chapter he adds a daunting footnote, saying that to understand how one statement leads to the next, the reader may need to carry out calculations taking “10, or even 50 pages”. Such was the aura surrounding Chandra and his subject that this recondite text notched up sales of several thousand. Such sales are not, of course, in the same league as Stephen Hawking’s, but Chandra’s formidable text probably surpassed “A Brief History of Time’ in its ratio of buyers to actual readers.
The greatness of Chandra lay in the fact that he bore no grudge against Eddingtion, who had blocked his Nobel by fifty years. When Eddington died in 1944 Chandra delivered a memorial speech at the University of Chicago. In it he said: “I believe that anyone who has known Eddington will agree that he was a man of the highest integrity and character”. In 1982, Cambridge University invited Chandra to deliver a series of lectures on the occasion of Eddington’s centenary. He titled it: “Eddington: The Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of His Time”. For Chandra his disappointment of the past was over a long, long time ago.
This is a well-researched chronicle of how powerful intellects confronted some of the most fascinating challenges in the world of science — and how they confronted each other as well. This is a brilliant book about a brilliant Indian scientist which no intelligent person can miss. A tale of trauma and tragedy tautly told. Absolutely a riveting piece of work—of stellar quality.

P.P.Ramachandran,
B-2-64, Snehadhara,
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Irla, Vile Parle,(West),
Mumbai, 400056.
6-03-2009