Empire of the Stars

"I think there are three things about this book that make it particularly interesting. First of all there’s the iconic event in Chandrasekhar’s early life which we’d all like to emulate as theoretical physicists. It happened when he was only 19 and on the boat from India to England, and this was around the beginning of quantum mechanics. Using some paper that he had to hand, he tried to work out what would happen at the centre of stars and arrived at this idea called the Chandrasekhar mass, which is: if a star is heavier than the Chandrasekhar mass then it may collapse into a black hole. Now he had had some pretty good formal training in India, but no high-level training. To me that is sheer brilliance: to get hold of simple concepts and come out with something groundbreaking. That’s the first reason I think he’s interesting. Secondly, the context of the story is Empire and colonialism. The relationship is between this guy who comes from India to Cambridge and the grand figure of Eddington, and the denouement – why Chandrasekhar is not taken seriously – is completely tainted by colonial strategies. I think that’s interesting as a picture of the world at the time. And the third thing is, I’ve just spent the last year pretty obsessed with Eddington, who went to an island in West Africa to test Einstein’s theory. While I was there for the 90th anniversary of this event I ended up reading quite a lot about Eddington, who seemed like a pretty awful character but did quite brilliant things. Yes. Chandrasekhar’s ideas about the formation of black holes were absolutely right but he was crushed by Eddington. Completely stamped on."