The hole truth behind the real star-wars cast
Who proposed the existence of black holes? I suspect the majority of people would guess Albert Einstein, and the rest would probably plump for Stephen Hawking. In fact, the credit goes to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known universally as Chandra. He is one of the forgotten heroes of 20th century science, but London-based historian of science Arthur I. Miller’s excellent book, “Empire of the Stars,” should go some way to giving him the attention he deserves.
Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore in 1910, when the British Raj still ruled India. Although he grew up among intellectual nobility (his uncle C.V. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize in physics), he still faced prejudice, as demonstrated by one particular journey. His father worked for the railway, so Chandra was always allowed to travel first class, much to the chagrin of an English couple who shared his carriage on a trip to Madras. They began complaining and asked that the young Indian gentleman be moved to a different carriage, although they expressed relief that Chandra at least was wearing Western clothes. This prompted Chandra to leave, but only so he could change and return in his traditional attire. He defiantly stood his ground; eventually the English couple was moved to a different carriage.
As a teenager, Chandra demonstrated an exceptional talent for science and mathematics, which earned him a graduate student scholarship to Cambridge University. At 19, he set sail for England, and it was while crossing the Arabian Sea that he had the greatest realization of his life. Conventional scientific wisdom suggested that stars eventually ran out of fuel and ended their lives as so-called white dwarfs, nothing more than cosmic cinders. However, Chandra speculated that giant stars, due to their intense gravitation, would pull themselves inward and initiate a catastrophic collapse. The result would be a stellar state so dense and compact that not even light could escape the gravitational field. In other words, Chandra was hypothesizing the existence of black holes.
Several years later, in 1935, Chandra was ready to present his idea to the world. He spoke in front of a distinguished audience at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, and upon completing his lecture he must have been confident that he had earned their respect and admiration. His optimism was short-lived; the next speaker condemned him and his notion of black holes to the wilderness.
Chandra’s critic was Sir Arthur Eddington. He despised the concept of black holes and proceeded to ridicule his Cambridge colleague. It was a humiliating episode that left the young researcher emotionally scarred. This bitter battle is the subject of Miller’s opening chapter, and, indeed, it provides the focus for the rest of the book, which describes the events leading up to the dramatic conflict at the Royal Astronomical Society and the subsequent research that eventually proved that Chandra was correct.
Miller looks at the scientific culture that existed in Britain in the 1930s and shows how personalities and personal conflict directed the history of science. He demonstrates that science is indeed a political game in which an elder statesman can quash the ideas of a young upstart, even if the maverick theory is correct. Eddington was a highly respected scientist, the acknowledged father of astrophysics, and had been honored with a knighthood, so it is not so surprising that the establishment backed him and ignored the arguments of an upstart from the other side of the world.
However, this story also demonstrates that such injustices cannot hold sway indefinitely, because the ultimate arbiter of truth is not one individual but rather reality. If observations and experiments show that a scientific idea tallies with reality, then even the most powerful and influential critics have to admit defeat.
It is a complex tale, but Miller succeeds in taking the reader through the various advances in theoretical physics over several decades that helped pave the way for the acceptance of black holes. Proving that black holes existed required not only theoretical breakthroughs, but also spectacular observations of the heavens and a deeper understanding of nuclear physics, which emerged in the course of the Manhattan Project to produce the U.S. atom bomb.
However, by this time Chandra’s pioneering work of the 1930s had been largely forgotten, and other scientists, such as Lev Landau, had independently posited the idea of black holes. Not surprisingly, Chandra became annoyed when the “Chandrasekhar limit,” (stars whose mass is smaller than this limit remain boring white dwarfs), became commonly known as the “Landau limit.” Fortunately, this error was corrected, and a search on Google (a quick and easy way to run a popularity contest) shows a few hundred references to the Landau limit and more than 10,000 to the Chandrasekhar limit.
Justice was finally done in 1983, almost half a century after the infamous Royal Astronomical Society meeting, when Chandra received the Nobel Prize for physics. When a colleague rang to inform the longtime University of Chicago physicist of the good news, it was his Lalitha who answered. Her reply was simple: “It’s about time.” *
