PROGRESS in mathematics and theoretical physics is presumed to be the
preserve of the young. So a man who decides, after a dazzling career in several
fields of astrophysics, to take up research in general relativity at the age of
51, publishes an authoritative treatise on black holes at 72, and completes a
new interpretation of Newton’s Principia at 84, fully deserves to be
called a legend.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, universally known as Chandra, was one of the
leading astrophysicists of our century. He died in 1995. Kameshwar Wali, who
published a biography of Chandra in 1991, has now compiled a memorial volume of
35 essays from colleagues, friends and relatives. These reminiscences speak of a
private man of prodigious scientific powers—he shared the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1983—whose relentless passion for research seemed to stem from
a near-spiritual sense of obligation.

In 1930, at the age of 20, Chandra left his native India to take up a
postgraduate studentship at the University of Cambridge. On the long sea voyage
to England he busied himself with calculations about the fate of stars as they
near the end of their lives. It was known that burnt-out stars would collapse to
form compact balls of cinders called white dwarfs. What Chandra found was that
no white dwarf could have a mass of more than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Any
star heavier than that would collapse even further under its own weight. This
limit—the Chandrasekhar limit—is now known to mark the boundary
beyond which a dying star slumps into a neutron star, an entity unsuspected at a
time when even the role of nuclear fusion in stars was undiscovered.

After a few years spent perfecting the calculations, he presented his
findings at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935. By all accounts
Chandra was stunned at his reception. His hero and mentor, Arthur Eddington,
publicly ridiculed his work as “stellar buffoonery”. Though Chandra later called
on other leading British astrophysicists for help, none would openly support
this young Indian against the establishment figure of Eddington. Many
contributors to S. Chandrasekhar identify the shock of that moment as
the defining point in Chandra’s career. He left England in 1937 to take up a
post at Yerkes Observatory, part of the University of Chicago, quietly writing
up his work on white dwarfs in a monograph on stellar structure, published in
1939.

From then on his modus operandi was to spend a decade or so in a chosen field
“mowing down all the unsolved problems” before publishing a definitive monograph
and moving on to something entirely new. Stellar dynamics, radiative transfer,
hydrodynamics, ellipsoidal bodies, black holes—all got the Chandra
treatment.

There are many affectionate stories here, some told more than once. We read
of Chandra’s 19 years as managing editor of the Astrophysical Journal,
which he single-handedly built into the world’s most prestigious journal for
astronomical research, and his quest to commission a bust of fellow legend
Srinivasa Ramanujan to present to the great mathematician’s widow.

Chandra’s widow, Lalitha, tells with pride how the president of the
University of Chicago overruled a senior academic who had refused to allow “this
black scientist from India” to lecture in the physics department. The door was
open for non-white faculty members.

University administrators of the 1990s would be aghast to hear of Chandra
driving hundreds of miles a week between Yerkes and Chicago to teach a class of
two students. Fortunately the entire class—otherwise known as Tsung-Dao
Lee and Chen Ning Yang—shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957.

Not a biography, this, but an album of verbal portraits of an austere, proud,
cultured and deeply humane astrophysicist.

The Meaning of Star Trek by Thomas Richards, Doubleday, $19.95, ISBN
0385484372, The Metaphysics of Star Trek by Richard Hanley, Basic Books,
$18, ISBN 0465091245 and Beyond Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, Basic
Books, $21, ISBN 046500637X

SHORTLY after Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon in 1969, the BBC started
screening the first Star Trek television series. Already abandoned as a
flop by the US networks, it seemed thin stuff in the light of the Apollo
programme. I mean, an alien with pointy ears, a ship’s engineer with a bogus
Scottish accent? “This isn’t as good as the real thing,” I thought at the time.
But the real thing ran out of money and political will three years later,
Armstrong hung up his space helmet, and exploration of the final frontier was
left to an ever-youthful Captain James T. Kirk in endless and increasingly
popular reruns of the five-year mission of the USS Enterprise.

The first of eight movies appeared in 1979, and by 1987 Star Trek
was back in production with The Next Generation, followed by Deep
Space Nine and Voyager. The fact that these spin-offs are still
recognisably Star Trek despite their different casts, characters and
locations (I’m not sure about the plots) suggests that there is something
interesting going on here; it’s Star Trek, Jim, but not as we know it…

So what does make this TV programme so compelling? In The Meaning of Star
Trek, Thomas Richards, a former associate professor of English at Harvard,
tries to find some answers by subjecting the series to exhaustive literary
analysis, not episode by episode but as a coherent vision of the Galaxy in the
twenty-fourth century.

Most of his examples come from The Next Generation, which Richards
regards as the definitive series, unfettered by the compromises Gene Roddenberry
had to make to get his 1966 creation on to the American networks. Even then, he
argues, The Next Generation did not fully mature until its third
season.

It is often said that the attraction of Star Trek is its optimism
and its faith in a technological future, but Richards argues that the appeal is
deeper rooted. The Star Trek universe, he says, is the most elaborate
ever seen in science fiction, and becomes progressively more so as the stories
unfold. Its complex webs of allusions to previous episodes and characters are
spun out against the detailed and believable geopolitics of a Galaxy carved up
between the United Federation of Planets and its less benign neighbours; a space
Iliad rather than a space Odyssey.

Many plot lines derive from the tension between the Federation’s Prime
Directive, which forbids interference with other societies, and the Enterprise’s
declared mission to “seek out new life and new civilisations”.

Another notable feature is the representation of character, often a weak
point in science fiction. Captain Jean-Luc Picard must surely be the most
carefully drawn spacefarer of all time, and Richards devotes much attention to
his development through the seven years of The Next Generation. As for
the stories, “Star Trek ransacks the entire tradition of Western storytelling.”
It’s no coincidence that Kirk and Picard resemble Shakespearean characters.

Of course, what madeStar Trek stand out when it first appeared were
the often cerebral storylines, very different from the usual monsters and mayhem
of 1960s space fiction drama. The writers seemed to enjoy ideas and putting
their characters into ethically challenging situations. You could write a book
about the philosophy of Star Trek, and indeed that’s what Richard
Hanley, a philosopher at Monash University, has done.

In The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Hanley uses Star Trek
stories to illustrate classical philosophical themes. Many of them raise
questions about personal identity. For example, how would the Enterprise crew
recognise extraterrestrial intelligence when they found it? How should we assess
the moral worth of alien creatures, not to speak of the self-aware computers and
androids that appear in the series? Lieutenant-Commander Data, the android in
The Next Generation, is undoubtedly a machine but is he also a person?
What about the numerous “energy beings” that appear in all the series or the
holographic doctor in Voyager? What happens to personal identity when,
as frequently occurs in Star Trek plots, minds and bodies are swapped
or duplicated? Should McCoy really be worried about having his molecules
“beamed” around the Universe, and what precisely happens in those grotesque
transporter accidents?

Time travel—which has always seemed to me an unnecessary device in a
setting already teeming with possibilities—is invoked many times by
Star Trek writers. Hanley examines the classic paradoxes with skill and
clarity and manages to make sense of most (but not all) of the time-travel
episodes in the series.

The book, like that of Richards, is heavy with reference to specific
episodes, but it is more free-standing. You don’t need to be familiar with the
Star Trek stories to learn something from this enjoyable philosophical
romp.

If you can’t believe the plots, don’t care for philosophy, what about the
physics? Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, made
something of a stir with The Physics of Star Trek a couple of years
back (see “Illogical Captain” New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 20 April 1996, p24). There
he tackled all those nerdish questions that niggling science-types had been
asking for three decades, like how does the “warp drive” get around special
relativity to propel the Enterprise faster than the speed of light? Where do
they get the antimatter for those engines? How does the transporter (devised by
Roddenberry to save money in the special effects department and speed up the
plots) beam people from place to place? And what about those phasers, tractor
beams, cloaking devices and all the rest? The result was an entertaining
exploration of science that not only gave (a little) credence to the Star
Trek gizmos, but taught some physics to many who would not otherwise have
come across it.

Now Krauss is back with Beyond Star Trek which, as the name
suggests, has a wider remit. At first glance, it seems to be the physics of
other science fiction films. The book starts off with an analysis of the physics
of Independence Day—the arrival of the mother ship would raise
tides enough to drown us all before the aliens got zapping, if we were not first
fried by the 10 solar luminosities of radiation from the brakes.

Krauss then goes on to tackle the dynamics of supposed UFOs, but from then on
he leaves science fiction behind. Although the text is scattered with reference
to characters and episodes from Star Trek, the X-Files,
Star Wars and so on, this is essentially an assortment of essays on topics
in physics and astronomy, and the link with science fiction films is
tenuous.

Once you accept that this book really has nothing to do with Star
Trek (or any other film) you can enjoy it on its own terms. Krauss ranges
over the problem of interstellar travel (basically we can’t afford it—this
is, after all, a book of the 1990s), but nonetheless looks at possible
propulsion systems including some novel twists on warp drives. He discusses the
evidence for extrasolar planets and the likelihood of extraterrestrial life and
spells out various ways the world might end. He speculates about extrasensory
perception and time travel, and there are two chapters about developments in
quantum mechanics.

This is the least focused of the three books, and perhaps it is unfair to
compare it too closely with the others or with its predecessor. Krauss warns his
readers that this is not a sequel to The Physics of Star Trek (or the
Wrath of Krauss as he calls it), and he is right. This is an accessible
book about big ideas in physics and astronomy that should appeal to sentient
beings in all four quadrants of the Galaxy. Engage.

Sagan was always more than an astronomer, and most of the book deals with themes such as extraterrestrial life, internationalism, the dangers of militarism and nuclear conflict, the ethics of abortion, and more. The style is uneven-some chapters are more akin to early Asimov than mature Sagan-but the middle chapters on ozone depletion and global warming make a strong plea for concerted world action to protect the planet.

At the end of the 20th century, the world is not as Sagan would have wished. We do not respect scientific curiosity, liberal values are in retreat and the environmental movement is faltering. Yet he held firm to the conviction that there is a way out of this mess to which science holds the key.

Billions and Billions closes with a short but poignant account of Sagan’s battle with the rare blood disease that took his life. His widow, Anne Druyan, writes a moving epilogue.

This book is not one of Sagan’s best: there is none of the grandeur of The Demon-Haunted World, his epic assault on premillennial irrationality. But no matter. In his life’s work, Sagan’s bequest is a legacy of reason, optimism and compassion to a world left darker by his passing.

Yet ever since Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Cambridge, was ticked off in top newspapers for speculating about
the “mind of God”, a change of mood has been under way. Leading scientists
appear on television to talk about their beliefs. Paul Davies, professor of
theoretical physics at the University of Adelaide, has won a major theological
prize for his writings about physics and religion. It has become respectable for
scientists to talk openly about God. What’s going on?

Russell Stannard, a professor of physics at the Open University, recently
presented Science and Wonders, a BBC radio series about the
relationship between science and religion. Stannard is ideally suited to the
job, as he is not only a physicist but also a Church of England lay reader.

To Stannard, the issue is not why scientists are talking about God, but why
so many of them have dismissed religion out of hand. When scientists and
theologians get together—as they increasingly do—they find much
common ground. Evolution? Fine. Big bang? No problem. So whatever happened to
Adam and Eve? “What you get in Genesis are examples of myth,” Stannard explains,
“a fictional storyline which acts as a vehicle for the real information you are
trying to get across. I think it’s terribly important that people should
understand that. You can then embrace the findings of science—evolution by
natural selection, the big bang theory—and what they are telling us about
ourselves, and at the same time embrace these deep, timeless spiritual truths
which are the experience of past generations.”

Stannard, who has just completed a run of three contributions to BBC Radio
4’s Thought for the Day slot, believes mutual understanding is not
helped by loose talk about “theories of everything” among some of his
colleagues. “All we are talking about is a theory of all physics and not of what
the man in the street would regard as `everything’. Science tackles questions
about how the world operates, how the world has developed. But then there are
the questions about why things are the way they are. Why are we here, is there a
purpose to life? Now that is a totally different set of questions which science
is not equipped to answer. Some people say science can’t answer those questions
therefore they are meaningless. I don’t think they are right. I think that these
are very meaningful questions. It’s a matter of how we interpret our lives, and
that is where you start thinking in terms of God.”

Far from seeing science as a threat, he says, many theologians now take a
lively interest in its findings, especially the intriguing discovery that the
laws of nature appear to be finely tuned to permit the emergence of life. “For
example, if the gravitational constant were slightly different, we would not be
here. If neutrinos had been slightly more slippery and so had not blasted the
stardust out of supernova explosions, we would not be here. There’s a whole
string of `coincidences’ which seem to have given rise to us. Either the
Universe is a put-up job and was designed by God, or we just happen to be in a
freak universe which satisfies these conditions by chance.”

In the past few years the University of Cambridge has established Britain’s
first lectureship in science and theology. Courses and research centres in the
subject are appearing in the US. “There’s even a Who’s Who in Theology and
Science, which contains the names of more than a thousand of us working in
this area; it is one of the fastest-growing academic disciplines.”

But who speaks for religion? Stannard’s liberal interpretation of the
scriptures is as old as the Bible, but is not shared by all those who would
speak for God. Professors of physics and professors of theology may see eye to
eye, but how much of that insight finds its way to the man or woman in the
pew?

“I don’t think the church has gone very far in addressing this problem,”
Stannard admits, “but it’s important not to underestimate people.” He was once
due to give a sermon in which he explained that many of the miracle stories in
the Bible were written not as factual reports but as allegories conveying
spiritual insights. “Fifty people turned up instead of the usual dozen. Some of
them told me afterwards they were relieved to hear their own doubts and concerns
being discussed in a sensible way. I know of many clergy who think as I do about
miracles, who would never dream of speaking that way from the pulpit for fear of
upsetting their congregation.

“But ultimately religion isn’t a matter of academic debate, it’s a matter of
how you live your life. And in that respect I am no different from any other
Christian. There are times when congregations say that my sermons are thinly
disguised physics lessons, but I think they’re only pulling my leg.”

A theme is the cautious attitude to new technology in a field that would seem ripe for it. The working currency in many air-traffic control centres is still the “flight progress strip” – a slip of paper representing an aircraft handed between controllers like a relay baton. One reason for this conservatism is that controllers are responsible in law for their actions, and distrust a machine whose legal status is hazy.

Another, more interesting, reason relates to the subtle processes by which controllers maintain a detailed mental model of the airspace. A controller may take up to twenty minutes to build up a picture of the traffic, which becomes the basis for planning and decision-making.

A live issue is how, and whether, the controller’s picture may be maintained if much of the data-gathering and decision-making functions are handed over to computers. Controllers report that even modest forms of computer assistance reduce their active engagement and diminish the detail of their picture.

This is a scholarly book, fully referenced, and not a light read. But anyone with a practical interest in air-traffic control will benefit from Hopkin’s humane and penetrating insights.

This is not a distinction that has always been made and this collection of scholarly essays, stemming from a workshop at Princeton University between 1991 and 1992, explores how the concept of precision emerged and came to be valued in Western culture.

In the 18th century, for example, the leaders of prerevolutionary France believed that the population of their country was falling rapidly. It is not clear how they formed this view, but it was widely felt that the ancient world had been teeming with many more people than now existed. As a large population was taken to be a sign of good government (not to speak of its potential for taxation), the accurate determination of population became a matter of concern in administrative circles.

In the absence of a disciplined bureaucracy, a national census was out of the question. Instead, the government resorted to calculation. Some indicator of population, such as the number of “hearths” derived from tax records or the number of births listed in parish registers, would be scaled by a “universal multiplier” to arrive at the total population. Although by modern thinking this method could be no more precise than the multiplier itself, which had been estimated by methods ranging from guesswork to local censuses, population figures arrived at in this way were held to be very nearly exact. The population of France was 20 905 413, according to one calculation. Andrea Rusnock shows how, thanks largely to Pierre Laplace’s work later in the century, this naive view evolved into a more sophisticated understanding that the accuracy of the result was limited, no matter how precisely the calculation was done. Thanks to Laplace, we now speak of the probability of the result being the truth, the uncertainty expressed by limits of confidence.

Other essays cover the introduction of the metric system in France, Antoine Lavoisier’s quantitative determination of the composition of water, and the development by German mathematicians of the theory of errors. Simon Schaffer writes about the fraught struggle lasting thirty years to establish whether a certain combination of electromagnetic constants was indeed identical in value to the speed of light, as predicted by James Clerk Maxwell.

Other contributors discuss the assessment of risk in the life insurance business, Hermann Helmholtz’s use of graphical recording in the study of nerve impulses, the dominance of Henry Rowland’s diffraction gratings, and the arrival of calculating aids such as tables and machines. The essays are summarised in occasional commentaries by the editor, Norton M. Wise.

What is clear from this book is that the perceived value of precision lies as much with how it is attained, and by whom, as with the degree of precision itself. Graeme Gooday writes about the fierce resistance of the British physics establishment to the introduction of ammeters and voltmeters in the 1880s. With the burgeoning of the electricity industry, engineers needed a simple, reliable and, above all, fast way of measuring electric currents and potentials. The methods of the physics laboratory, requiring delicate apparatus, controlled environments, careful calibrations and lengthy calculations, were not suitable for the rough world of the industrial engineer. William Ayrton and John Perry, engineers at Finsbury Technical College in London, devised new, robust and portable instruments which they named the “ammeter” and the “voltmeter”. What really seems to have appalled the physicists is that these meters were “direct reading”, that is they had scales marked in amperes and volts.

Gooday relates the outrage that greeted Ayrton’s claim that with their meters the specific heat capacity of water could be determined – in a mere 10 minutes – with a precision that had taken others years. It was not just a matter of a newcomer muscling in on guarded territory, but a genuine clash of values. Physicists had traditionally valued self-reliance in experimental work, priding themselves in their mastery of their apparatus. Their somewhat idealistic principle held that the only quantities that could be measured directly were mass, length and time. Everything else, including electrical variables, had to be derived from these “absolute” quantities by the ingenuity and skill of the experimenter; they certainly could not be read off a dial. To the Victorian physicists the “barbarously” named ammeter and voltmeter were instruments of indolence and so a threat to the moral development of their students. And the rest of the story, as any visit to a physics laboratory will show, is history.

John Couch Adams, a Cornishman studying astronomy at Cambridge, was 26 when he predicted the existence of a new planet that became known as Neptune. He showed that puzzling discrepancies in the motions of Uranus, then the outermost known planet, were caused by the gravitational attraction of a more distant, unseen planet. He also calculated where in the sky the new planet would be found. Meanwhile, unknown to Adams, a French mathematician, Urbain Leverrier, was working on the same problem.

Adams, a shy man, twice called unannounced at the Greenwich Observatory, in September and October 1845, with the hope of discussing his work with the Astronomer Royal, George Airy. Finding Airy away each time, Adams finally left a message containing his predictions for the new planet. Airy wrote back with some queries but Adams never replied.

Airy pursued the matter no further until June 1846 when Leverrier published his predictions, which were very similar to those of Adams. But in contrast to Adams, Leverrier replied promptly to Airy’s queries and Airy was convinced enough to ask Cambridge Observatory to undertake a search. The search began on 29 July but, by a twist of fate, Neptune was seen but not recognised on two occasions in August. The Berlin Observatory “discovered” the planet on 18 September.

The episode led to a mighty row in the British astronomical establishment, with Airy (unfairly it appears) being accused of ignoring Adams’s work and thereby losing a major discovery to the French and Germans. The acrimonious correspondence is quoted here at some length. A century and a half later, it is clear that Adams and Leverrier deserve an equal share of the scientific credit. The rest of Adams’s Cambridge career, documented in the bulk of this book with extensive extracts from diaries and letters, is distinguished but hardly as exciting as his work on Neptune. For the rest of his life, Adams regretted the day when he failed to reply to a letter from the Astronomer Royal. Moral – always answer your mail.