S. Chandrasekhar: Man of Science Edited by Radhika Ramnath, HarperCollins, Rs 499

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to sum up his life thus: “I left India and went to England in 1930. I returned to India in 1936 and married a girl who had been waiting for six years, came to Chicago, and lived happily thereafter.” Behind that brevity lay a long journey, spread over both time and space. In his life spanning 85 years, Chandrasekhar was exposed to three different sociological and scientific milieus in as many subcontinents. Colonial India, the country of his birth, could hardly provide him with the academic opportunities he longed for; England, his first foray into the West, spurned the budding physicist’s brilliance; and the United States of America, his adopted home, saw the expert’s insights blossom and earn him many a laurel, including the Nobel Prize.

That eventful life enticed two authors — Kameshwar Wali and Arthur Miller — to write separate biographies of Chandrasekhar. They clashed, waging an ugly war of words in the pages of Physics Today, over the fallout of the most epochal event in Chandrasekhar’s life: Arthur Eddington’s pooh-poohing of the young Indian’s research on stellar evolution.

In August 1930, while on a voyage to Cambridge after he earned a scholarship to study there, the 19-year-old Chandrasekhar busied himself with the calculation of the fate of stars, mainly to keep his mind away from worrying about a terminally ill mother back home. The investigation led to a startling conclusion: there’s an upper bound — called, much later, the Chandrasekhar limit — on the mass of a star for it to become what’s known as a white dwarf when it burned up all its fuel. The conclusion, however, gave rise to a conundrum. What happened to more massive stars as they ran out of fuel? With no capacity to generate heat, hence no outward pressure to swell in size, would they keep on squeezing, and if so, for how long? Unable to resolve this issue, the entire community of British astrophysicists ignored Chandrasekhar’s work. Particularly humiliating was the rebuff of Eddington, whom the young Chandrasekhar had regarded as his hero. At the meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society where he presented his paper on white dwarfs, the patron saint of British astrophysics ridiculed the concept of a continually collapsing star as nothing less than “stellar buffoonery”. A blow as crushing as this could ruin any other researcher’s career, but Chandrasekhar was made of sterner stuff. He simply pursued his goals on the other side of the Atlantic.

The rest may be history, but its chroniclers cannot escape the inevitable question: how did Chandrasekhar handle the humiliation? Wali, who talked at length with him, claimed that he had accepted it gracefully; Miller, who wrote the biography after his death, highlighted the deep wounds that he harboured all his life. More than claiming their own versions to be the ‘fact’, what the two authors argued over was a subtler issue. Should a biographer believe all that his subject tells him?

Radhika Ramnath’s book is not a biography. It is a collection of essays by, and on, Chandrasekhar, published to mark his birth centenary. Most of the pieces are reprints, except for the reminiscences of his nephews and nieces. They recollect their days spent with their illustrious uncle, whose fame was something they had grown up with, hardly realizing exactly what he had achieved in science. Going through these reminiscences, one finds it difficult to gauge Chandrasekhar’s actual reaction vis-à-vis the Eddington episode. Ramnath, who is the daughter of Chandrasekhar’s younger brother as well as the compiler of the essays, writes: “He said that... if his work had got recognition at that early stage, he might have become arrogant and might not have ended up pursuing science the way he did all his life.” But reacting to the delirious phone call of his sister’s daughter, Sudha Ramesh, after he got the Nobel Prize, Chandrasekhar said, “It doesn’t seem to make a difference to me. Perhaps it may have been different when I was younger.”

Given its contents, the book’s subtitle seems somewhat misleading; it contains rather little by way of science. Perhaps ‘man of arts’ would have been a more apposite subtitle. In the recollections of Chandrasekhar’s close relatives what emerges most prominently is his aesthetic sensibility. The discussions he had had with them are replete with references to his obsessive love for music and literature, both classical and modern. The books he read, or mailed them to read after he found them irresistible, comprise a veritable list of the best books ever written. No wonder he was chosen, when he was not even 35, for a celebrated public lecture at Chicago University, a rare honour bestowed earlier on such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright, Arnold Schoenberg and Marc Chagall. No wonder also that having been invited to inaugurate the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, he spoke on “The Series of Paintings of Claude Monet and the Landscape of General Relativity”. It is difficult to think how many among Chandrasekhar’s peers could straddle the two cultures famously enunciated by C.P. Snow so effortlessly. It would not have been surprising if arts, instead of science, had been his calling.

Chandrasekhar’s last project in life, which took up almost a decade, was to produce an annotated version of Isaac Newton’s magnum opus, Principia for the Common Reader. He used to say that he would probably be remembered more for this work than for his other scientific contributions. Strange indeed, a Nobel winner valuing popularization of a master’s work more than his own painstaking discoveries! It may be the artistic streak in his psyche that made him do so. In his inaugural address at the golden jubilee of the Indian Academy of Sciences, he compared the pursuit of science to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. Conquering the Everest might be rewarded with a dazzling view of the Himalayan snow stretching to infinity, but since few mortals could realize that dream, Chadrasekhar said, “There is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over the Kanchenjunga.” He held Newton to be the greatest of all scientists, Einstein included. And like a creative artist, he considered being beholden to the master’s work more important than pondering over his own.