The Man Who Sensed Infinity

Chandra had been born into a family that valued learning and had the means and vision to encourage him along. And Chandra gave early notice of his potential. By the age of 17, he had published pathbreaking papers in prestigious journals. Raman and Meghnad Saha were struck by his intellect. When physicists like Werner Heisenberg visited Madras, Chandra was asked to host them. So when in 1930 he set off for a scholarship to Trinity College in Cambridge, it was on a wave of hope and expectation that in those fertile decades for physics, science would yield some of its mysteries to him.

In an uncanny parallel to Raman’s moment of inspiration in the Mediterranean, Chandra too was passing time on a deckchair when clarity struck. Eddington’s stirring introduction to stars, he found, led to an amazing conclusion: that a burnt-up star much heavier than sun could collapse into nothingness.

It was at the time, he knew, a preposterous thought. Cambridge was initially somewhat forbidding. But over the next few years, as he interacted with the likes of Eddington, G.H. Hardy, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac, he found in his research enough encouragement that he could play as vital a role as any of them. Through it all that possibility of stars collapsing into nothingness kept his brain ticking.

On a cold winter evening on January 11, 1935, he was ready to present his findings at astrophysics’ grandest stage. The Royal Astronomical Society appeared to be seized of the momentous moment. Chandra was given half an hour to make his presentation, far more time than was normally allotted. His paper was to be followed by one by the great man himself, Eddington, whose book had so gripped Chandra back home in Mylapore. Chandra, then 24, must have been nervous but alert to the occasion. By all accounts, he made a convincing case.

Any satisfaction he may have extracted did not last. Eddington lost little time in getting to his point: “I do not know whether I shall escape from this meeting alive!” It was his flamboyant way of signalling wholesome rebuttal of Chandrasekhar. His attack was forceful as much as it was personal. At its end, the scientists assembled had tranferred their support from Chandra to Eddington. Chandra was to later recall their world to him: “Too bad.”

It shattered Chandra.
Miller says his book is the biography of an idea, of Chandra’s first intimations of black holes and upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf (the Chandrasekhar mass limit), and of its final acknowledgement by his peers when he received the Nobel Prize in 1983. But in that idea are wrapped so many theories and lives. It follows Chandra’s association with the leading physicists of the time. In doing so, it introduces the reader to the accretion of discoveries in that golden age of modern physics.

That stellar idea is also chased as an absence. Chandra in fact gave up on it and moved on to radiative transfer, hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability and equilibrium of ellipsoidal figures. His threads were picked up by others: the Los Alamos team and later Edward Teller’s thermonuclear project.

It is a measure of Chandra’s simmering hurt that he perceived the Nobel less as a acknowledgement of his genius that fractious January 1935 evening, and more as a negation of everything else he did later. It was perhaps really an expression of his phenomenal versatility. Their were no compartments in his life. All his life had been a struggle against compartmentalisation: whether as an Indian during British rule, a coloured man in America’s still colour-conscious academia, a student who wanted to swap discoveries with the greatest scientists of the day, or a scientist who connected “the Series Paintings of Claude Monet and the Landscape of General Relativity”.