Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [88]
It is an honour that, according to his wife Lalitha, would not have impressed him. In his bittersweet book Empire of the Stars, Arthur Miller tells Chandra’s story. Towards the end, he recalls meeting Lalitha after Chandra’s death, and asking whether NASA’s act would have meant something to her husband. He would have dismissed it, she said, with a casual ‘So what?’ Chandra had spent decades wanting to be part of the establishment, and the door had remained firmly closed. And it had all gone wrong from the start.
The grand unveiling of Chandra’s discovery that dying stars could vanish from the cosmos was set to take place at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society on 11 January 1935. In the preceding months, Eddington had arranged for Chandra to have everything he needed for his work, including expensive calculating equipment. For weeks beforehand, Eddington had been visiting Chandra in his rooms at Cambridge, asking questions about the fate of the larger stars, how Chandra arrived at his conclusions, and what – exactly – he would present at the meeting. Chandra assumed that great importance was being attached to his presentation. And then, on 10 January, the secretary of the Society took Chandra aside and revealed that Eddington had put himself on the programme directly after Chandra’s talk. Eddington’s talk was to be called ‘Relativistic Degeneracy’, indicating that it had to do with Chandra’s theory. That was the moment when Chandra suspected that he had been naive about Eddington’s attentions. The events of the following day proved his suspicions to be well founded: Eddington’s visits had been motivated, in Miller’s words, by ‘sheer mean-spirited duplicity’. Eddington stood up after Chandra’s talk and told the assembly, ‘The paper which has just been presented is all wrong.’
Chandra sat, astonished, while Eddington tore into his work. Eddington couldn’t fault the mathematics, and he didn’t bother to try: he simply ridiculed the basis of the idea that a star could disappear. His critique of Chandra’s paper contained quips made at Chandra’s expense. Eddington dismissed the work as ‘stellar buffoonery’. He told the assembly, ‘I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star behaving in this absurd way.’ Chandra was humiliated; he later recalled laughter breaking out at many points during Eddington’s talk. Eddington, he said, ‘made me look like a fool’. At the end of the meeting, Chandra’s peers offered their commiserations. ‘The other astronomers were certain that my work was wrong because Eddington had said so,’ Chandra recalled.
Later in the year, at a conference in Paris, the humiliation was repeated. ‘Eddington gave an hour’s talk, criticising my work extensively and making it into a joke,’ Chandra said. He asked the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who was presiding over the session, for a chance to reply. ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ was Russell’s response. It looks like a spineless caving-in, but Russell was simply being loyal to his mentor.
In October 1977, the historian Spencer Weart sat down with Chandra and recorded an extensive interview. They discussed the history of astronomy and the way Chandra got his ideas. Most interesting, though, was Chandra’s appraisal of Eddington, and of Eddington’s status. ‘Oh, his position in astronomy was dominant,’ Chandra told Weart. ‘I don’t think there was any doubt in anybody’s mind that Eddington was always right.’ Chandra’s ordeal had made a small dent in Eddington’s reputation, though: some of their colleagues acknowledged – in confidence – that, on this occasion, Eddington was wrong. For weeks after the talk at the Royal Astronomical Society, Chandra’s colleagues would console him in private with a mumbled apology that conveyed their faith in the black hole idea. But they were covert confessions. ‘Of course all these people who supported me never came out publicly,’ Chandra said. ‘It was all private.’
The whole experience was to have a lasting effect: six years before he received notice of his Nobel Prize, Chandra confessed his lowered expectations