06:00 PM
August 12, 2023
Event
In the summer of 1930, a nineteen-year-old Indian boy boarded the steamship SS Pilsna to sail from Bombay to Cambridge. During the sea voyage, he formulated the fundamental equations that govern the fate of the stars in our Universe. To his surprise, the calculations showed that contrary to accepted belief, certain stars were destined to meet a violent end, collapsing into nothing to become those mysterious objects that we now call black holes.
The boy’s name was Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, the brilliant Indian American astrophysicist who continues to remain relatively unknown in India in spite of winning the Nobel Prize in 1983. Chandra’s discovery of black holes and vanishing stars opened the gateway to the strange new science of black holes which flourished in the 1960’s and 70’s under the likes of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.
But Chandra himself had to wait for over 40 years for his work to be given the recognition that it deserved – because his extraordinary discovery of black holes had been suppressed almost as soon it had been made in 1930. And the person responsible for this was Chandra’s own guru and mentor – Sir Arthur Eddington, the foremost astrophysicist of the age.
Why did Eddington try to destroy Chandra? For a man renowned for his dispassionate commitment to the cause of science, Eddington’s actions have been a long-standing mystery in the annals of science. Was it because of his deeply religious beliefs, professional rivalries or deep-rooted racial prejudice? Or were there other forces at work? “The Square Root of a Sonnet” is an attempt to answer these questions by exploring the intriguing and complex relationship between two giants of modern astrophysics – Chandra and Eddington.
It is a story of ambition, friendship and betrayal set against the backdrop of the epoch-making events events of the twentieth century – the two great world wars, the Indian freedom struggle and above all, the birth of the strange new sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Co-host
