422 Bibliographie critique 
KAMEsHwAR C. WAll: Chandra. A Biography 0/ S. Chandrasekhar. Chicago, London: The 
University of Chicago Press, 1991. x, 341 pp. 
This is not a scientific biography in the style of, e.g., Pais's cdebrated book on Einstein, 
but rather a personal portrait of one of the most famous Indian scientists: Subrahmanyan 
Chandrasekhar, born in 1910, Nobd laureate of 1983 and famous among astronomers, as-
trophysicists and physicists for his pathfinding contributions to various fidds of applied 
mathematics, physics and astrophysics. The author, also an Indian, has written a thoroughly 
non-technical book about a scientist, whose contributions can hardly been understood and 
appreciated to their full value and beauty by someone outside these fidds. But, indeed, Wall 
has achieved his aim of portraying 'Chandra', as colleagues, friends, students and family mem-
bers use to call him, without the use of a single formula throughout the entire book. For 
Bibliographie critique 423 
all those who want to learn more about technical details of Chandrasckhar's work, Wall simply 
refers to the six volumes of Chandra's Selected Papers also published by the University of 
Chicago Press (see p. 11 and p. 309, £tn. 9). 
At first, the reviewer was very sceptical of this endeavor - can a scientist whose contri-
butions center on highly specialized fields of high math be understood without speaking in 
this same language - can his aims, which in Chandra's case very much focus around the 
elegance of the presentation, be made plausible without a draft of the technical content of 
at least some of his monographs or textbooks, be it on the Study of Stellar Structure, on Stel-
lar Dynamics or on Radiative Transfer, each of which initiated a new field of research? This 
book demonstrates how it can be done: in his introductory chapter, for instance, Wall quotes 
some of Chandra's colleagues, all of whom somehow emphasize the importance of Chandra's 
characteristic style of -thoroughness, lucidity and accuracy", his "wonderful feeling for the 
essential, and a feeling for beauty". These remarks about Chandra's personal style and other 
contemporary statements about the "rewarding aesthetic experience to listen to Chandra's 
lectures· are then corroborated by some quotes from conversations the author had with Chan-
dra about his 'style' as well as some observations about the actual composition of some of 
his textbooks (p. 25 f.). 
In some cases though, the reviewer would have liked the inclusion of a key formula as 
for instance the one describing the famous Chandrasekhar limit that led to the later discov-
ery of neutron stars and black holes. But instead of citing the formula, Wall gives a very 
detailed account of the dramatic history 1 of why it took the community so long to accept 
this surprising but straightforward result of a deduction which Chandra made at the age 
of nineteen on a steam boat from Bombay to Venice, on his way to Cambridge, England, 
where he would study as a student from 1930 on and as a Fellow of Trinity College in 1933/34. 
A straightforward combination of Einstein's relativity theory and Sommerfeld's quantum theory 
lead him to the result that there was a limit to the mass of a star which would evolve into 
a white dwarf as Eddington had described it in his Internal Constitution of the Stan (1926). 
Although he was quite sure about his result and although many physicists (such as Paull, 
Dirac and Rosenfeld) and astrophysicists privately responded positively to the claims of this 
foreign newcomer, his result was not accepted by the community for many decades because 
of a surprizing and unfair reaction by Eddington, who ridiculed Chandra's claims by claim-
ing that ·there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd 
way· (p. 125). After giving us this detailed account of how Eddington became such a victim 
of ·cocksureness" (p. 142), Wall adds some quotes from conversations with Chandra about 
this event: it is amazing to see how unemotional Chandra comments upon this harmful epi-
sode of his life (p. 142 f.), regretting that it took nearly thirty years before the £ull sig-
nificance of Chandra's formula was realized and that Eddington had missed the discovery 
of black holes which he, because of his mastery of general relativity, could have made in 
the mid-30s, according to Chandra 2. It is incredible to hear that the personal relations be-
tween Eddington and Chandra apparently were not hampered by this incident and that they 
1 Cf. a brief account given by Chandrasekhar himself in his "Richtmyer Memorial Lectures", 
AJP, 37 (1969), 577-584. 
2 See p. 143. When Chandra then continues by saying: "if Eddington had done that, he 
would stand today as the greatest theoretical astronomer of this century", this is a very 
delicate comment on why he chose to call his own book on him, Eddington: The Most Dis-
tinguished Astrophysicist of his Time! 
424 Bibliographie critique 
continued to have common biking tours and private conversations (138, 142 ff.) in spite of 
their open conflicts at the meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society. 
Apart from this dramatic and for Chandra nothing less than traumatic incident of his very 
early career, Wali reports about many other interesting periods in Chandrasekhar's life: be 
it his experiences at school in Madras (chapter 3: -Determined to Pursue Science"), or his 
student years at Cambridge giving a quite unusual perspective on the English university sys· 
tem as seen by a member of the poor Commonwealth states 3 or his observations at a brief 
stay in Copenhagen, revealing quite a different side of Bohr 4. He also has a chapter on 
Chandra as editor of the Astrophysic41 JoumaI1952.1971: -The Autocrat of the Editor's Desk", 
pp. 206 ff. giving nice samples from his editorial correspondence and making quite clear 
why in retrospect Chandrasekhar considered this job as a -mistake" and as a -distortion" 
of his personal life, isolating him from his colleagues (208, 228). 
We also find quite unexpected details of great interest for history of science in different 
areas. To give only one example, Chandra tells us about his impressions during the Nobel 
prize ceremony for Dirac and Heisenberg in 1932: -I was sitting in the last row of the lec-
ture hall. Max Born was next to me. The hall was packed full, and, as the great luminaries 
- Rutherford, Aston, Chadwick, Dirac, Heisenberg and others - walked in, everyone stood 
up and applauded. Born was in tears; he said: 'I should be there, I should be there'· (p. 
295). So this Hintnbankln perspective sheds quite a different light on the prestigious event 
and on the way some people -eat their hearts out" over getting it. Since Chandra's arenas 
of work are not in the -limelight of science", he never expected the prize which he finally 
got in 1983 (with some 40 years delay). And more than that: -I never expected it, and in 
many ways, I would have much preferred not to have received it [ ... ]. I find it a distortion 
of my life" (p. 297). 
But this book contains much more than mere science: for instance, Wall gives a very detailed 
report about Chandra's and his wife Lalitha's family traits (chapters 2 and 8), very interest-
ing from the point of view of a social historian as well as for the historian of science, since 
one of Chandra's uncles is C.V. Raman, Nobel laureate of 1930 who served as a kind of 
challenge for the young Subrahmanyan to meet. We also learn a lot about the late British 
ruled India, about patterns of upbringing, education and living, marriage and grieving. Wali 
also tells us about the occasional racial discrimination which Chandra suffered as a dark-
skinned Indian, e.g., during his time at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where Chandra, 
research associate at the Yerkes Observatory, at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, from 1937 on, 
helped to solve ballistic problems after the USA had entered the war in December 1941 
(see pp. 194 f.). Because at that time he was not yet a naturalized citizen of the United 
States s, he was excluded from classified research as in the Manhattan project. 
Wali's book is a biography about a scientist who is still alive - some interesting facets 
of this book are connected to this: first of all, Wali gives the transcripts of some of the 
interviews he had with Chandra as an appendix, both as a complementary addition to his 
own text and as a chance for the reader to check some of the conclusions and assertions 
3 See e.g., the remarks about Chandra's humiliating experiences at the High Commission-
er's Office, p. 77. 
4 Bohr frankly told Chandrasekhar that he -cannot be really sympathetic to work in astrophys-
ics· and excluded him from his after-tea conversations with favorite physics students such 
as Placzek, Weisskopf or Rosenfeld in his upstairs study (see p. 102 f.). 
5 But only until 1952. Cf. pp. 231 ff. for the negative repercussions of this naturalization 
at his family and friends in India. 
Bibliographie critique 425 
made in the main text '. Second of all and more interesting still, Chandra himself actually 
asked the author to add a few footnotes to clarify certain points, e.g., the importance of 
the contributions of R. Lebovitz for his own work On EI/ipsoid41 Figures of EtJuilibrium (see 
p. 26). 
Only occasionally is the information about many persons mentioned in the book really 
insufficient, such as in the case of the director of the Kodaikanal Observatory "one Mr. 
Royds, an Englishman- (p. 153) - at least the first name (Thomas) would have been at place 
here, or incorrect as on p. 94, where not only one but several German scientists are mis-
spelled, the correct spelling being: BonhacHer (without an additionnal 'h'), Harteck (with 
a 'c') and where the "death blow to Eddington's theory- is erroneously retranslated into 
German as "Tod-Stop zu den Eddingtonsche Theorie-. In general, Wali's biography of Chan-
drasekhar will serve to be a very useful source for historians of physics and astrophysics 
as well as an interesting book for a much wider audience. 
KLAus HENTSCHEL 
, In the footnotes, he also mentions an unpublished manuscript by Chandrasekhar, "A Scien-
tific Autobiography, 1943-1983", which might have been worth adding as another appen-
dix, complementary to Wali's text.