Book Reviewed: Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar by Kameshwar C. Wali

The life of a brilliant astrophysicist This is an outstanding book about the life and work of Nobel Laureate S. Chandrasekhar (Chandra) who won Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work on white dwarfs and stellar black holes. His calculations showed that stars which collapse into white dwarfs, in some cases become stellar black holes. This mathematical work was done in 1930 during his voyage from India to England to study at Cambridge University. This new discovery brought him into conflict with Sir Arthur Eddington, a giant in astrophysics during this time. Eddington ridiculed his ideas with scientifically inaccurate explanations until his death in 1944. Chandra sailed into an intellectual and emotional abyss for four decades. It is the moving tale of one man's struggle against the scientific establishment that shows prejudices among even very rational minds. This book articulates in detail as how the leading physicist at Cambridge University got so mean to a young graduate student from India. This was a time when no one knew about the energy production mechanisms in stars. But Chandra’s theory was simple and made sense to many physicists at that time but refused to override Eddington’s contentions. The Pauli Exclusion Principle teaches us that two electrons cannot remain in the same quantum state, i.e., two electrons with same spin cannot remain in same atomic orbital. This is due to an emergent quantum degeneracy pressure (QDP) that lead to further compression of matter into much smaller volumes of space and collapse into its own atomic nucleus. Pauli Exclusion Principle illustrates this barrier to a total collapse of an atom. Similarly, the gravitational collapse of large dying stars leads to white dwarfs, and if the mass of white dwarf is above 1.44 solar mass, now called the Chandrasekhar limit, the white dwarf continue to collapse on its own core to becomes a neutron star or stellar black hole. In one of his letter to his father, Chandra writes that Eddington thinks that Pauli Exclusion Principle is wrong! How could that be? The book gives a glimpse of racial prejudices Chandra experienced in British India, Europe, and the United States, they are brief accounts of some disturbing incidents. Like most Indians, he focused on his professional commitment and ignored the social distractions. He was an ideal example of a true fighter for his beliefs in science. The author is a compatriot of Chandra, a fellow physicist and a close friend who worked at the Syracuse University and his narratives come from his heart. He illustrates the story with numerous rare pictures of Chandrasekhar in the company of leading physicists and astronomers of his time, many of them are the founding members of quantum physics. These images illustrate the important points in history to connect with actual events and how it may have flowed in the life of Chandrasekhar. This highly acclaimed nook speaks volumes about the work of the author that describes the life one of the earliest proponents of cataclysmic events in the life of a star.