Rashed's View

This is a copy of Professor Subramanyan Chandrashekhar’s Obituary that I wrote for the Bangladesh Observer on August 21, 1995.

Subramanyan Chandrashekhar, one of the greatest astrophysicist of our time, passed away on Monday 21^st August [1995] due to heart failure, at the University of Chicago Hospital. This comes not only as a loss to science but, unbeknownst to them, to the whole of mankind.

Born in Lahore in 1910, he was the son of an Indian Civil servant. His uncle, Sir C.V. Raman (1888 – 1970) was a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his 1928 experiments on the scattering of light from molecules of matter and the discovery of the Raman Effect. Like his uncle, he studied Physics at the Presidency College in Madras. While still a teenage student, he met Arnold Sommerfeld (1868 – 1951), a great German physicist, who was visiting India to give lectures. Chandra, as he was popularly known to colleagues and friends, went to see Sommerfeld at his hotel. After talking for a while, Sommerfeld gave him his book on the new physics (quantum mechanics) that had recently been discovered in Europe, and a paper which gave an example of Fermi-Dirac statistics, the new statistics that electrons were found to obey.

After graduation in 1930, Chandra was awarded a scholarship to do a doctorate in Physics at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He left his ill mother whom he was never to see again, to make his trip to England by ship. It was a three week voyage for the 19 year old student. He as bored and the only entertainment he had was the book and paper that Sommerfeld had given him. As an application of the Fermi-Dirac statistics, Chandra predicted the existence of white dwarf stars (stars that have collapsed to the size of the earth but still have a mass similar to that of the sun), and showed that these stars have to have a mass less than 1.4 times the mass of the sun. This limit is known as the Chandrashekhar limit.

After he reached Cambridge, Chandra put away his work on white dwarfs to concentrate on his doctoral thesis. Under the tutelage of Paul A.M. Dirac (1902 – 1984), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Chandra earned his doctorate in 1933, the same year that Dirac was awarded the Physics Nobel Prize.

Then he went to work on his old theory again and this time, to convince his old critics, he made a large number of numerical calculations to show that most of the white dwarfs that had been discovered until then satisfied the Chandrashekhar limit. At a meeting of the Royal Society, the 23 year old Dr. Chandrashekhar was humiliated and his white dwarf theory ridiculed by the then high priest of Astrophysics, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 – 1944), who was the director of the Cambridge Observatory and professor of Astronomy.

Chandra made an appear to Niels Bohr, who was the most prominent physicist of his time, next to Einstein. Bohr reassured the young astrophysicist in private that his theory was sound. But he declined to say the same in public because he did not want a confrontation with Eddington. Unable to convince anyone to publicly hold up the white dwarf theory, he decided to go on with his life at the Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, thus starting a 60 year long association with the University of Chicago.

At Chicago, Chandra worked with Enrico Fermi (1901 – 1954), the 1938 Physics Nobel Laureate. Chandra, with his British-Indian heritage and Fermi, with his Italian hospitality and American vitality, had different approaches to the same Physics. While Fermi preferred words, most of Chandra’s papers were equation intensive. In the early fifties, they co-authored two papers. The one by Fermi and Chandrashekhar had very few equations, while the other by Chandrashekhar and Fermi was mostly equations.

In spite of Chandra’s move from Cambridge to Chicago, the personal friendship of Chandra and Eddington did not suffer. When Eddington died in 1944, Chandra gave the most elegant eulogy for the old master.

But Chandra had gained an immense reputation and he kept up a distinguished career. As the sole editor of the “Astrophysical Journal,” he took it from oblivion to make it the world’s foremost journal on Astrophysics.

As can easily be seen from reading his works, Chandra was a man of great aesthetic concerns. His scientific papers were veritable masterpieces which he turned into a book when he had enough knowledge of the subject.

Even in his personal life, he maintained the same integrity. He was always immaculately dressed and had read most classics of literature. He had married an Indian woman who, like himself, had studies Physics at Presidency College, Madras. They never had any children. Fifty three years after the bored 19 year old graduate discovered the Chandrashekhar limit, he was awarded the highest distinction that could be bestowed on anyone – the Nobel Prize. In 1983, Chandra was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with William Fowler of Caltech for their investigations of the aging and collapse of stars.

But that was not the end of a brilliant career. He retired from teaching, but continued to do research as Professor emeritus. At the age of 80 he started writing a book on the works of the great Newton, whom he held as a hero. Perhaps he realized that hundreds of young physicists want-to-be’s have put him on a similar pedestal – the well deserved pedestal of a scientific hero.

By Hasan R. Haq, doctoral student of Physics, University of Oregon