S. Chandrasekhar edited by Kameshwar Wali, Imperial College Press, 拢24,
ISBN 1860940382
PROGRESS in mathematics and theoretical physics is presumed to be the
preserve of the young. So a man who decides, after a dazzling career in several
fields of astrophysics, to take up research in general relativity at the age of
51, publishes an authoritative treatise on black holes at 72, and completes a
new interpretation of Newton鈥檚 Principia at 84, fully deserves to be
called a legend.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, universally known as Chandra, was one of the
leading astrophysicists of our century. He died in 1995. Kameshwar Wali, who
published a biography of Chandra in 1991, has now compiled a memorial volume of
35 essays from colleagues, friends and relatives. These reminiscences speak of a
private man of prodigious scientific powers鈥攈e shared the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1983鈥攚hose relentless passion for research seemed to stem from
a near-spiritual sense of obligation.
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In 1930, at the age of 20, Chandra left his native India to take up a
postgraduate studentship at the University of Cambridge. On the long sea voyage
to England he busied himself with calculations about the fate of stars as they
near the end of their lives. It was known that burnt-out stars would collapse to
form compact balls of cinders called white dwarfs. What Chandra found was that
no white dwarf could have a mass of more than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Any
star heavier than that would collapse even further under its own weight. This
limit鈥攖he Chandrasekhar limit鈥攊s now known to mark the boundary
beyond which a dying star slumps into a neutron star, an entity unsuspected at a
time when even the role of nuclear fusion in stars was undiscovered.
After a few years spent perfecting the calculations, he presented his
findings at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935. By all accounts
Chandra was stunned at his reception. His hero and mentor, Arthur Eddington,
publicly ridiculed his work as 鈥渟tellar buffoonery鈥�. Though Chandra later called
on other leading British astrophysicists for help, none would openly support
this young Indian against the establishment figure of Eddington. Many
contributors to S. Chandrasekhar identify the shock of that moment as
the defining point in Chandra鈥檚 career. He left England in 1937 to take up a
post at Yerkes Observatory, part of the University of Chicago, quietly writing
up his work on white dwarfs in a monograph on stellar structure, published in
1939.
From then on his modus operandi was to spend a decade or so in a chosen field
鈥渕owing down all the unsolved problems鈥� before publishing a definitive monograph
and moving on to something entirely new. Stellar dynamics, radiative transfer,
hydrodynamics, ellipsoidal bodies, black holes鈥攁ll got the Chandra
treatment.
There are many affectionate stories here, some told more than once. We read
of Chandra鈥檚 19 years as managing editor of the Astrophysical Journal,
which he single-handedly built into the world鈥檚 most prestigious journal for
astronomical research, and his quest to commission a bust of fellow legend
Srinivasa Ramanujan to present to the great mathematician鈥檚 widow.
Chandra鈥檚 widow, Lalitha, tells with pride how the president of the
University of Chicago overruled a senior academic who had refused to allow 鈥渢his
black scientist from India鈥� to lecture in the physics department. The door was
open for non-white faculty members.
University administrators of the 1990s would be aghast to hear of Chandra
driving hundreds of miles a week between Yerkes and Chicago to teach a class of
two students. Fortunately the entire class鈥攐therwise known as Tsung-Dao
Lee and Chen Ning Yang鈥攕hared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957.
Not a biography, this, but an album of verbal portraits of an austere, proud,
cultured and deeply humane astrophysicist.