Kameshwar Wali’s review of Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes exposes author Arthur I. Miller’s flawed sociohistorical analysis of the Eddington–Chandrasekhar controversy and of its impact on the development of stellar astrophysics.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s own perceptions of his life and times in Cambridge, UK, are quite different from what Miller would have us believe. I quote from two of Chandra’s letters to the Indian physicist Kariamanikkam Krishnan, who was the co-discoverer of the Raman effect and a close friend of Chandra’s. The first letter, dated 11 August 1934, was written a few days after Chandra received news of the unpleasant episode in which Chandrasekhara Raman and Krishnan were removed from their positions on the management committee of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science and a new management structure sans Raman was put in place. Raman had to resign from the membership of the institution with which he had been associated for more than a quarter century and where he had done his best work. In this letter Chandra says,
Oh! How I wish that you had come to Cambridge. The atmosphere here is so pure, so encouraging and so wholesome—and so free of personal animosities and jealousies. The sincere collaboration of the best minds, sacrificing personalities for the progress of science—it seems so impossible now that in India we would build a similar school—where the same spirit would prevail, even if a Rutherford, Eddington, Fowler or Dirac do not exist. You can never know how much I owe to the inspiration of your friendship, and even in Cambridge I miss you so much, and to me it is ever so intense a sorrow that one whom I respect and admire so much should now be in the whirl of such bitter winds.
A second letter was written on 20 March 1935, barely two months after what Miller has called Chandra’s “fatal collision” with Eddington. Chandra was spending some time in Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen. He genuinely wanted Krishnan to come to Cambridge and savor the Cambridge atmosphere. Chandra writes:
Is there any possibility of your coming to Europe sometime before the summer of 1936. I hope myself to return to India by about that time and imagine our travelling back together! Somehow I think that you will enjoy a small tour in Europe if you cannot afford the time to spend a longer time. As for me I am continuing in the same way more or less. I sent you last week my recent work on Stellar Structure. I should be glad to know what you think about it.
In Cambridge I get the utmost sympathy and encouragement for my work. Fowler, Eddington and Dirac are all extremely kind and encouraging and even spend quite considerable time to clear up some difficulties that I may come across. When I first came to Cambridge, I used to look forward to returning home, but now after nearly five years in Cambridge I feel so very unhappy that I should soon return.
Last term in Cambridge, I gave a course of about 20 lectures on “Special Problems in Astrophysics” and these and some of my later work all kept me so busy that I am glad to have come now to Copenhagen again. I came here on Sunday and expect to stay on till the middle of April when I will return to Cambridge.
A proper scientific understanding of the full implication of Chandra’s discovering the mass limit, and the consequent acceptance of the possibility that black holes existed, had to wait for many related things, among them the implications of supernova explosions, the theoretical studies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his students, the discovery and observation of mass loss in stars, the advent of x-ray astronomy, and the discovery of pulsars and their identification as rotating neutron stars. All these developments took time. Eddington did not delay anything by asserting that “there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”
I acknowledge with gratitude the permission granted by Vijay R. Thiruvady, grandson of K. S. Krishnan, to quote from his grandfather’s correspondence with Chandrasekhar.
