Wali replies: Arthur Miller’s assertion that I had “very limited access” to Chandra’s letters, manuscripts, and other primary and secondary sources when I wrote my biography of him, 1 and that I elected to believe Chandra’s word is totally false. I have had full access to the Chandrasekhar archive since its inception in the late 1970s. Besides extensive conversations with Chandra, I interviewed more than 50 people, including his friends and relatives in India; his former students and associates at Yerkes Observatory and the University of Chicago; his Cambridge University contemporaries David Shoenberg, William Macrea, and Paul Dirac; and US physicists and astrophysicists Margaret Burbidge, Freeman Dyson, Martin Schwarzschild, Kip Thorne, and Victor Weisskopf. Audio-tape copies and transcripts of these interviews are in the Chandrasekhar archive.
Miller asserts that Chandra publicly “pretended” the Eddington episode was behind him, but that he could not shake it off. As Miller writes in his book:
His [Chandra’s] life was tinged with tragedy. … Chandra never really regained his confidence. … I wondered what other great discoveries he might have made, had his early life not been blighted by disappointment.
Those statements are a travesty of Chandra’s vast, almost unparalleled legacy of theoretical and mathematical physics. As Thorne has noted, for instance, “Nobody has done more than S. Chandrasekhar to bring general relativity to its ‘natural home,’ astronomy.” 2
Miller’s “complex” interpretation of Eddington’s sexual preferences leading to a “fragile psychological well-being” as an explanation for his behavior in scientific controversies is too simplistic, purely suppositional, and without evidentiary basis.
About the theory of white dwarf stars and the theory of black holes, Miller says a great deal more in his book than he presents in his letter.
Chandra’s mathematical verification of black holes and his four decade wait until the scientific community accepted it … Chandra’s great discovery concerned nothing less than the ultimate fate of the universe. Like Einstein, he had lifted a corner of a great veil, revealing a majestic yet terrifying picture of the fate of stars and of humanity.
I find it, as I said in my review, an overblown and inaccurate account of Chandra’s discovery.
Chandra did not have to fight for recognition of the fact that his physics was right and Eddington’s was wrong. Chandra’s work was vindicated fairly promptly—first, through acceptance by all serious theorists working in the field, and second, through observations that empirically established the range of masses of white dwarf stars.
The footnote in Fowler’s book that Miller refers to was in the general context of authority and prestige held by Eddington, which prevented people from coming out and openly saying he was wrong.
As for the Chandra–Eddington relationship subsequent to the incident, anyone who reads the letters in the archive will disagree with Miller that they lack warmth and affection. I recount one of Chandra’s own recollections as an example of their continued friendship in spite of the controversy:
When Chandra returned from India after getting married [in 1936], Eddington invited the couple for tea. When he learned that they were leaving for America soon, he asked Chandra to his rooms one morning. “Let us not talk science,” Chandra recalls him saying. “That is what we have done all along.” Eddington then talked about his early years, the poor circumstances he grew up under, his living alone, and the loneliness of an intellectual life. He then brought out a map of England on which he had pinned all the places to which he had bicycled and marked the routes he had taken. “You are the first person to see this map,” he said to Chandra. Chandra was obviously moved. “I sort of felt,” says Chandra, “that Eddington was trying to add to our professional relationship a personal dimension. The enormous respect I had for him made me feel grateful, grateful that I had such an opportunity to know him.” 3
Chandra did not seek a position in Cambridge, and to the best of my knowledge none were available. Through consultations with Eddington, Chandra decided to join Yerkes rather than Harvard University.
Miller’s last comment is most insulting to Chandra and to me. Miller implies that Chandra’s sole purpose in allowing me to write his biography was to put on record that he had finally set the Eddington episode behind him, and that I did just that.
Chandra had not forgotten what he had written in his diary two years earlier. He repeated it to me verbatim; that led to our intense discussion. His not finding the peace that could be expected after such enormous success had little or nothing to do with Eddington, but with the larger, more complex reality of how an individual creates the measure of his or her life.
