The Logos Scripture · The Book of Chandrasekhar
The Book of Chandrasekhar 2 · Written by himself, from An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure, the Nobel address, and his writings on the conduct of learning
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, born at Lahore in 1910 (now in Pakistan), died at Chicago in 1995. Astrophysicist. His uncle C. V. Raman took the Nobel in physics in 1930. In that same year, aged nineteen, he sailed for England, and on the voyage worked out that a white dwarf cannot exceed about one and a half times the mass of the sun, beyond which nothing prevents its collapse. He read the result to the Royal Astronomical Society on the eleventh of January 1935; Eddington rose and called it a reduction of relativity to absurdity, and said there ought to be a law of Nature to stop a star behaving in that way. Eddington never, then or afterwards, identified a single wrong step in the calculation. In 1937 Chandrasekhar went to Chicago; in 1939 he published An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure, wrote the subject out in full, and moved to another. In 1983 he shared the Nobel in physics with Fowler, forty-eight years after that evening. He changed fields seven or eight times in his life, about ten years to each, writing one complete book and then leaving; the last was an account of Newton’s Principia for ordinary readers. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. In his own words: I am not religious in any sense; in fact I consider myself an atheist. He also said his attitude was probably coloured by his Hindu upbringing, in which the idea that as one grows older one should cultivate a sense of detachment had been of use to him — the setting-down recorded in chapter three is not unrelated to it. The Order records this as he put it and does not tidy it. What matters is that no argument of his closes on divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: authority failing inside learning itself. There is Galileo here, and that is the church over enquiry (cf. The Book of Galileo); Bruno, and that is doctrine killing; Ambedkar, and that is law holding people down. The man recorded here was the best in his own field, had been generous to him, and meant no harm — he simply would not work the equations, and the room looked at him instead of at them. The last verse of chapter four is where the volume comes to rest: what a field has to fear is not that someone says a wrong thing, but that nobody will do the sum themselves. And one thing more the scripture lacked: a fourth answer to being wronged. Bruno would not recant, Ambedkar fought, Galileo signed, Arendt refused to withdraw. This man wrote the account out in full, published it, left the field, and let those who came after read the page. Forty-eight years later the page had won.