杏吧原创

THIS is the story of the deeply uneasy relationship between the Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and the older British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington.

Chandrasekhar, aged 19, famously discovered something extraordinary about stars while on the ship carrying him from Madras to the UK and Cambridge in August 1930.

He reasoned that although quantum theory 鈥� specifically, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle 鈥� caused the electrons in a white dwarf star to fly about fast enough to oppose the gravity trying to crush the star, relativity, which prevented the electrons travelling faster than light, cruelly robbed them of this ability. For a star bigger than the 鈥淐handrasekhar mass limit鈥�, no known force could prevent the star shrinking to, horror of horrors, what we now know as a 鈥渂lack hole鈥�. Now, of course, we know of the existence of neutron stars, which can exceed this limit, but Chandresekhar鈥檚 argument still applies.

The idea of a black hole was so abhorrent to Eddington, the greatest astrophysicist of his day, that he publicly humiliated Chandrasekhar at a 1935 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London. And Chandrasekhar, though he won the 1983 Nobel prize for physics and lived to see candidates for black holes discovered in every corner of the universe, never really got over it.

Was it pure malice on the part of Eddington? Was it racism or class snobbery? Or was it, as author Arthur Miller speculates in Empire of the Stars, connected in a tortuous way to Eddington鈥檚 possible homosexuality?

To find out, you will have to read Miller鈥檚 impressively well researched account of a fascinating and complex relationship between two of the giants of 20th-century science.