Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [89]
What was behind Eddington’s vicious denial of Chandra’s work? The black hole theory was certainly problematic for Eddington; Chandra’s calculations on the fate of white dwarf stars produced numbers that undermined Eddington’s ongoing efforts to create a grand unified theory that described everything from atoms to stars. But that alone was not enough to provoke the kinds of merciless attack Eddington meted upon Chandra.
Miller hints at a homoerotic component to Eddington’s behaviour; rumours abounded that Eddington was homosexual, and thus psychologically compromised in a society where he would be ostracised – and possibly prosecuted – if this came out. If he was already under huge emotional strain, Miller suggests, perhaps Chandra’s derailing of Eddington’s attempts at producing a grand unified theory would have been more than he could bear. It’s an engaging idea, but, as Miller admits, Eddington didn’t have that much to lose, career-wise, by accepting Chandra’s idea. He had even stumbled across the idea that a heavy star would eventually disappear to ‘nowhere’ himself, and had dismissed it as simply nonsensical.
The real reason for Eddington’s venomous hostility to Chandra’s work is probably more prosaic. Eddington presided over the British astronomy establishment, and saw Chandra as an arriviste from the colonies. It seems to be a simple case of insider versus outsider; racism, in effect – the privileged Englishman blocking the dark-skinned Indian from gaining admission to the club. Chandra was, most likely, a victim of the Raj mentality. The British Empire was still a major force in the world when Chandra arrived from Madras. With his dark skin and idiosyncratic English, no one at Cambridge would have looked upon him as ‘one of them’. He encountered overt racism at Cambridge, and no British university offered him a permanent position, even though many such positions were open.
In the face of such bleak prospects, Chandra made a difficult decision. Rather than fight, he ran. Eddington and the rest of the English astrophysicists successfully drove him away from their territory. He went to work in the United States, and in a different field of astronomy: he became what Miller terms a ‘reluctant astrophysicist’. Theoretical physics was an avenue that Eddington had closed off for him. As he said to Lalitha, ‘it is because of Eddington that I became the sort of scientist changing field periodically from one to another. I had to change my field after the controversy.’
The Nobel Prize announcement came nearly half a century later. ‘It’s about time,’ Lalitha declared, but Chandra was ambivalent about the award, and declined an invitation to a party in his honour.
For most of us, goings-on in outer space are not of huge interest. If asked to describe what is out there, just beyond the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, we might come up with descriptions of calm emptiness, blackness and silence. Small wonder, then, that scientists pretty much ignored the Earth’s immediate environment for centuries. In the days before Sputnik and the space race, it was considered dull and empty. Meteors would whizz through the heavens, and the spectacular northern lights would brighten the Arctic skies every now and then. But there was little else for scientists to get excited about. And then along came the Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén.
Alfvén lived a quiet domestic life. His wife, Kirsten, died after they had been happily married for sixty-seven years and had raised five children. He loved to study Eastern philosophy and, towards the end of his life, to wait on the beach at sunset watching for the green flash of refracted light as the Sun disappeared beneath the horizon.
Perhaps it was this quiet